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2024
February's Journal
April's Journal
31/03/2024
So I didn't get around to doing March's entry until the middle of April, and I
did February's entry on the first day of the month so I've got two months to
catch you up on in this entry. Sorry about that. Lots went on, so let me tell
you all about it.
Rel had a race in the dark the first weekend of February with some friends. It
went well as far as I remember. Good head torches were advisable. The
following week was full of OS patching for me before we took trains (separately)
to Harrogate to run different versions of the Harrogate Hustle. As I'm mainly
racing half marathons this year I did that distance and Rel went for the full
fat 35 miler. This allowed me to be clean and changed in good time to welcome
her over the line, despite it being one of my slowest ever HM distances. This
was mainly due to the course being pretty hilly in places. Also navigation was
difficult due to the paucity of signage. It was also pretty boggy in places.
We moved from an AirBnB place to the Hotel du Vin after the race, which was
pretty awesome. The food was a bit of a step up, too.
There then followed two weeks of me training madly to try and be in better
shape for my first proper road half marathon of the year; Brighton. I also
squeezed in a mid-week few days with my parents in Manchester given how busy I
was the rest of the month. However, eventually it was time for me to get
trains to Brighton, and the hotel I'd booked for one night without reading
reviews for, which seemed like it would be a horror show. In the end it turned
out not to be, but it's not somewhere I'd stay again. The race itself was
pretty tough, with my going out a bit too hard at the beginning, and then the
last 5km being directly into a strong headwind. I'd like to think that's why
I didn't manage to break 1h30m. I'd another bite at the cherry in March.
The remainder of the month was spent LEAPPing some of the RHEL 7 traffic manager
hosts we have, and generally trying to keep things running.
And then it was March! More OS patching to start with, and then the second
weekend of the month was the Retford Half Marathon. Possibly somewhere you've
not heard of before, but somewhere I could get to by train and still stay with
Rel. All road, and with only a few gentle climbs it was another chance to see
if I could get under 1h30m again. Alas, although I think I paced it better, I
still didn't manage it. I definitely gave it everything though and was pretty
shattered afterwards.
The following weekend it was back to see my parents in Manchester. This time
whilest Rel was running the Hundred Hills 50K at which she did very well indeed!
I'm extremely proud of her performance, and wish I'd been there to congratulate
her. As it was, the following weekend we both headed separately to Weymouth so
we could run the three day Jurassic Coast Challenge. Now that was an
experience! From staying in accommodation that'd been used for the London
Olympics (shared house with owners), to three days of running more than a
marathon each day, to day one being a full-on slog-fest through ankle deep mud,
shingle beaches, and some extremely steep ascents and descents. And then two
more days of increasingly better weather (aside from a hail storm), and
increasingly steep climbs and drop (with matching improvements in the views).
It was a tremendous experience that I'm certainly very glad we did (my entry
was a Christmas present from Rel), and enjoyed immensely (after the fact).
Without waterproof socks it would have been a very different story though, I
think!
Anyway, we both tooks trains back to our respective homes on the Monday and
were back at work on the Tuesday morning doing our things. Mostly for me that
consisted of prep work for the migration of the finance system to new servers
on a new SAN, reconfiguring more hosts to access the new SAN rather than the
old one, and prep work for our internal DNS management system upgrade.
Then that week was over, it was Easter, and another train journey to Rel so we
could spend the last day of March getting trains to Rel so we could then drive
to Skipton. More on why in the April journal!