Category: Themes

Six Goals… three disallowed goals, two post hits and a saved penalty

I had a most enjoyable evening this evening watching my football team, Plymouth Argyle, beat AFC Wimbledon 4-2. After a terrible start to the season which brought just one win and two draws in the first twelve or so games Argyle’s form since October has been nothing short of remarkable. At first, the improvement was built on grit and determination – it was hard to watch but reassuringly effective. Now they are playing with attacking flair and swagger on a scale that I have hardly seen in the 25+ years I have been a regular at Home Park. Tonight, especially in the first half they looked like they could score every time they attacked with slick, fast and skillful play carving open the Wimbledon defence. But, it takes two teams to make a good game and Wimbledon had certainly not come to sit back and admire Argyle’s play, throwing men forward quickly and causing Argyle’s unusually hesitant defence a lot of problems. In particular, they made good use of the fact that their goalkeeper had what was probably the longest kick that I have seen from a ‘keeper.

Argyle scored first. Wimbledon equalized, but then Argyle took the lead again almost instantly with an absolute screamer of a goal from the edge of the area after a corner was headed clear. A third goal for Argyle just before half-time gave them a comfortable lead that was deserved on attacking quality if not entirely convincing. The second half was a more scrappy affair and Wimbledon scored a second, although the goal was really a complete gift after a monumental cock-up between an Argyle defender and goalkeeper. At that point the game looked like it might be in the balance. Argyle then scored a cracking fourth goal which ought to have been game over but then gave away a penalty, which, fortunately, was saved, sparing us a very dodgy end to the game. As well as the six goals and the saved penalty, there were three ‘goals’ disallowed for offside (2-1 to Argyle) and both teams hit the post in the first 5 minutes of the game. Overall, then, it was a thoroughly entertaining spectacle and the night ended with Argyle up to 8th place in the league and only 3 points off the play-off places.

I always like evening games but there haven’t been so many of them this season. Tonight’s game was billed as the last evening game before the renovation of the old Grandstand and so I thought I would capture that little piece of ‘history’ with a photo, taken before the game as the two teams lined up…

Snow in Plymouth

Situated as it is in the southwest corner of the UK, in the path of relatively warm ocean currents (Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Drift), Plymouth experiences a generally mild and wet climate. We do get freezing conditions at times but you can probably count the number of days of heavy frost, icy pavements etc. each year on the fingers of one hand. This means that when it snows in Plymouth it is an occasion of great excitement. In fact, the local newspaper website goes apoplectic at the prospect of a few flakes of the white stuff as if this will be the start of a ‘The Day After Tomorrow’-like big freeze bringing everything to a halt and catastrophe at every turn. But the fact of the matter is that it simply doesn’t snow in Plymouth, ever, at least not such that you would ever notice…

…so imagine my surprise when I woke up late this morning (my cold has really taken hold now and I am off work) and looked out of the window to see the ground covered in the white stuff. Actually, ‘surprise’ isn’t quite the right word (neither is ‘covered’ now I come to re-read that last phrase) – ‘amusement’ would be a better one, because the local paper had finally got its wish and it HAD finally snowed in Plymouth. Look, here’s the (albeit slightly melted) proof:

Running Through a Cold

Since last Tuesday I have been feeling decidedly like I am fighting off some kind of cold. It started with an irritating cough and rapidly became a general overall achey body feeling and tiredness. What I didn’t know was whether, how and/or when these symptoms would mutate into something more serious, but I certainly didn’t want to let them cause a break in my streak of running 25+ miles each week, a streak that I had managed to maintain for the first five weeks of 2018. The problem was that I had only run 4.1 miles on Tuesday leaving me with about 21 still to do – if I ended up out of action for a few days that would be curtains for the streak. So I was worried (and also not particularly wanting to feel worse than I already did). So…

On Thursday evening, despite the fact that I had had a busy day at work and it was dark and raining by the time I got home, I bit the bullet, grabbed my running kit and pushed myself out for a run, hoping to do 7-8 miles but realising that my body might protest and I might only manage 3 or 4. If I hit my target then I’d hopefully be well enough to get to 25 in one go over the weekend and if I only managed the latter then I’d have to consider running little bits on Friday, Saturday and Sunday if I could manage it. The nightmare scenario was that I’d make myself worse and be out of action completely.

Fortunately, things went pretty well. I completed my 7.8 mile circuit and although it loosened my cold up a bit and the coughing and spluttering increased somewhat I didn’t tire especially quickly on the run itself and I didn’t seem to have made myself much worse. My gamble had paid off and my weekly target was still in reach.

Then, this morning (Saturday), not feeling any better and with pretty foul weather (wet and blustery), I decided to chance my luck again. I need to complete just over 13 miles and figured that I was better going for it on one run such that if the effort knocked me out for a few days at least I would have my completed target to comfort me. I also felt that there was an outside chance that keeping active might actually make me stronger and keep the cold at bay. I planned my route so that if I got to 6-7 miles and felt to rough to continue I could cut back towards home for a total of around 9 miles but if I was still going okay I would press on. It was quite a tough run. As I headed west along Plymouth’s waterfront at around the 8 mile mark I found myself battling a strong headwind and squally rain. I nearly lost my cap a couple of times and ended up running bent forwards to reduce the impact of the wind and with one hand on the brim of my cap to ward off the wind gusts. Fortunately, the later part of the run saw me in more sheltered streets and the rain eased off a bit. But the problem with most of my runs is that the last couple of miles are invariably uphill because, you’ve guessed it, I live on a hill… The result of this today was that I rather plodded my way home and once I was about a mile from the end my brain started to shut me down a bit in an attempt to persuade my body that it was done. Still, I made it, 13.5 miles at an average pace of 10:10 per mile which isn’t too shabby all things considered.

I’ve been tired today since I got in and I think my cold has developed a bit. My throat is more sore and there have been a few spectacular sneezes but I suspect this development might have happened anyway; hopefully my gamble hasn’t made things worse. So far, I feel like my decision to keep going has been a good one and, best of all, my 25 miles per week streak has made it to six weeks. I’ve got a couple of days rest now and then hopefully I’ll be back out on the pavements on Tuesday, looking to push in towards seven weeks in a row, cold permitting of course.

Big Little Lies… and a Banging Soundtrack

Over the last week or so we have watched the HBO drama Big Little Lies on TV. My wife had already read the book that the series of based on (by Lianne Moriarty) so she was watching it with the benefit of knowing what happened in the end whereas I was able to enjoy trying to second guess the plot (which I have to say I pretty much did after 2-3 of the 7 episodes). Anyway, it was an enjoyable series to watch but the best part about it was the soundtrack which, to use a phrase that my younger daughter would use, was packed with absolute bangers (i.e. great tracks), almost all of which were by artists that I didn’t know (apart from a couple of really excellent covers of Elvis songs). The result has been that I am now exploring some of these artists further, starting with Leon Bridges, then moving on to Agnes Obel (who I had heard of but had not listened to her hauntingly beautiful album Aventine). Now I am listening to Michael Kiwanuka (who provides the track that opens each episode). Next on the list will be the Villagers.

So far I have been really enjoying the music, particularly the Agnes Obel album which is one I think I might listen to a lot. There is obviously something about the laid back vibe of the music chosen to accompany the coastal California locations and lifestyles in the series that I like. What I find interesting is that whilst the music all seems to resonate with me, it comes from all over the place – Bridges is American, Obel is Danish, Kiwanuka English and the Villagers are from Ireland – and the styles are quite different. Someone did a really smart job putting together the music for the series.

50 Again? Conquest of Avalon

A few weeks ago I had a big mental struggle trying to decide what races to run this year and whether to go long again and do another ultramarathon. I resolved this by doing nothing, abandoning the tentative plans that had been forming in my head, entering no races and just getting on with trying to run regularly.

Then, in the last few days, I have even found myself wondering whether I want to run another marathon at all or whether I might be happier sticking to half-marathons with the occasional 15-20 mile race thrown in (like The Grizzly in March or the Seaview 17 in July). But suddenly, today, after I saw a Facebook post promoting the run, I find myself strangely drawn to a race that is taking place in June called the Conquest of Avalon. The route takes in some beautiful Somerset scenery (the county of my upbringing), ends at Glastonbury and includes running up and down the famous Glastonbury Tor. There are 30 mile and 50 mile distances. Doing the 30 mile event would be the sensible thing for me to do, but out of the blue I find I am hugely drawn to the 50 mile version. The first 20 miles or so of the route, which is the part that differs from the 30 miler, look to me like the most interesting part, taking in Ham Hill and Cadbury Camp. It’d be a shame to miss out on those landmarks.

Part of the reason I am drawn to this event is that on my wall at home I have a painting that my father did in the 1950s from my parents’ then home near Castle Cary, looking west towards Glastonbury Tor (which you can see in the distance of the picture). I look at this picture every day – it beautifully shows the type of countryside that the run covers. How could I not want to run in that picture? How could anyone not want to run in THIS picture…?

Marking and Running

I spent today at home marking student courseworks from my second year Meteorology module. Regular readers of this blog (yes, I know, there’s no such thing really) might recall at least one previous post that I have written moaning about how much I hate marking and mostly I just want to say it again – I hate marking. In fact, I really, really, really detest marking. Of course the completely ironic thing about this feeling is that most of the students who produced the work that I am marking hated having to produce that work. Some of them probably really, really, really detested having to produce it. Which makes us kind of even I suppose, although it seems a bit unfair that they each only have to suffer once whereas I have to suffer as many times as there are students. Sometimes I think we should enter into a pact. I’ll not set them any work to do, they won’t have to do it, I won’t have to mark it and we’d all be happy. Sadly, of course, such a beautifully simple and elegant solution is not allowed. Marks there must be and, in truth, it is through having to do assessed pieces of work that most of the learning happens which is, after all, the whole point of studying a subject at University.

As I get older I try to see the positive side of things and so I have to ask myself what the positive side of a day spent at home marking might be. The answer is actually rather simple. On a day when I go to work I spend approximately 40 minutes getting to work in the morning and another 40 minutes getting home again at the end of the day. I have a two mile walk (usually – tomorrow it is three because I am starting at the Marine Station) which takes me between 30 and 35 minutes but there is always some time lost at either end going through doors, taking off my coat etc. All of which means that by staying at home to mark I get back 80 minutes of my time, and what can I do with 80 minutes? I can run 8 miles. Which is exactly what I did at the end of this afternoon – 8 miles down and around Mannamead (Thorn Park, Mutley Park) across Mannamead Road along Seymour Road and up and down a few hills, back across to Mutley Plain, down into Hyde Park and Central Park, past Argyle’s ground and home after a few twists and turns along the way – a route that seems to have become my go-to route over the last few weeks – 8 joyous miles in the misty, drizzly half-dark which more or less cleansed my mind of the horror that it had been through for most of the rest of the day (I exaggerate a little).

Marking and running. Without one I wouldn’t quite have had the opportunity for the other and probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much either. In the end then, it was not such a bad way to spend a day after all.

‘Our Ocean Planet’ gets underway

Today is the first day of a module that I help to teach called ‘Our Ocean Planet’. It is completely different from other modules I work on because 1) it only lasts 4 weeks and is the only thing that the students who are taking it do for those weeks and 2) it has very little technical content. The idea of the module is for small groups of students to pick an issue relating to the oceans and develop some kind of ‘product’ designed to communicate the issue to a wide audience. In the past we have had groups produce talks, books (for various age groups), websites and quite a few games. It’s quite a fun and interesting module to be involved with because no two groups are the same and at the outset there is no knowing what direction any particular group will take both in terms of the topic/issue that they cover and the vehicle through which they choose to communicate it.

This year I am involved in two ways. First I will be ‘looking after’ four of the working groups (each with four students), although this going to be a somewhat lighter touch than in the last couple of years as there is only one formal meeting with each group each week. Secondly, I volunteered to give a few lectures to provide some background information on the oceans, aimed mostly at the students on the module who are not covering any marine science in the rest of their course. On the module we have students from various marine science and marine biology degrees but also some from geography, geology and environmental science and also some from English and creative writing. I gave the first of my lectures this morning, titled ‘Geography of the Oceans’, and covered the general distribution of the oceans on the planet, the shape and form of the seabed in different domains (continental margins, deep ocean floor, ocean trenches and mid-ocean ridges) and talked a little about the dynamic nature of the seabed and the Earth’s crust more generally (plate tectonics, seafloor spreading). The session seemed to go okay and I was pleased that I got the timing about right (this is always tricky when giving a session for the first time despite years of experience – partly because the more teaching you do the more comfortable you become just talking around a topic and this can mean that you take more time on topics than planned).

This afternoon the students have been out on and around Plymouth Sound taking photographs of the water and, in particular, litter and pollution in the water, and tweeting their pictures and thoughts about what they see. Later on they will be analysing this data to get a look at the bigger picture.

The real fun starts in a couple of days time when the groups start to properly form and, panicked by the short timescale available to them (3 weeks), start to decide on their topics and how they are going to communicate them. It would be nice to see some novel topics this year and some creative approaches to the communication side of things. We shall see.

Awayday to St Mary’s

Today I had the slightly weird experience of watching a live football match between two teams that meant nothing to me. The occasion was the 4th round FA Cup tie between Southampton and Watford at St Mary’s which happened to coincide with there being no Plymouth Argyle home game to watch and a younger daughter who needed to be taken back to university in Southampton after a quick trip home for my elder daughter’s birthday.

The game ought to have been significantly better quality than the usual League 1 fare I get to see, what with both teams being Premiership outfits but, in truth, it was a scrappy game and remarkably like watching an Argyle match. Southampton took the lead in the first couple of minutes, through an ex-Argyle player no less, and then despite being the better team, managed to sit back and allow Watford time to gradually build pressure, helped by somewhat bizarre, defensively minded, substitutions. I felt an equaliser was inevitable but Southampton held on. The home fans grumbled just like Argyle fans, well perhaps not quite that much, so I felt pretty much at home!

Putting Miles Into My Legs

I ran just over 1200 miles last year which obviously averages out at 100 miles per month. In fact, my miles were heavily biased towards the first five months of the year as I prepared for and completed my first 50 mile event. At the turn of the year I decided that I’d like to try to spread my effort more evenly across the year and so I started this year with the target of completing at least 100 miles each calendar month.

25 days into the year things are going well and I seem to have acquired an additional mileage target along the way. Having run 25 miles in the first two weeks of the year it occurred to me that as well as evening my miles out across the months I could also even them out across the weeks and aim for 25 miles EVERY week. Now I am sure that at some point I will fail with this challenge; I am bound to succumb to a cold or have to miss runs if I am away or something. But for as long as I can the target now is 25 miles each week and I have already achieved this for four consecutive weeks bringing up the 100 miles for January also.

My legs have felt tired this week, which surprised me a bit as 25 miles is not an exceptional mileage but when I thought about it I realised that, although my current mileage is a lot less than my peak weekly mileage last year, it is a LOT more than I managed through the autumn months of 2017. This is nicely highlighted by the plot below which shows my monthly totals for the last 12 months (so February 2017 – January 2018). January 2018’s total is not at all remarkable when compared with February, March, April and May 2017 but it is SIGNIFICANTLY up on the preceding four months and is, in fact, my highest monthly total since last May (when I ran the 50 miler).

Putting all of these miles into my legs feels really great. It is like putting petrol in the tank. To run a long way there is no substitute for putting miles in the legs (although it is obviously important to put them in in a sustainable manner and not to build up too quickly). I will probably ramp things up a bit over the next few months as I build towards the Southampton marathon in mid-April and then after that my aim will be to maintain at least my current effort. This plan might get blown out of the water by illness or injury or if I do some crazy long event again and need more rest afterwards, but for now it’s just a case of keeping things ticking along.

Listening to Music

I have a problem. I pay out money every month (to the music-streaming service Spotify) so that I can listen to (more or less) whatever music I want whenever I want because I love the idea of listening to music but when it comes to it, I almost never do so. Consequently, not only am I not doing something that I think I want to do but I am paying money (approximately £120 per year) for the pleasure of not doing it! Why? And what is the solution?

The obvious thing for me to do is to cancel my Spotify subscription and save myself some money. I could still listen to a wide range of music (CDs, CDs saved as mp3 files, online radio, free Spotify with adverts etc.) but obviously I wouldn’t be able to listen to almost anything at anytime (assuming I had downloaded tracks to my phone say). This latter point makes me resist cancelling because I feel that it reduces the chance that I will listen to music. But that is crazy: I already listen to music approximately 0% of the time so I cannot really reduce that even further. What I really mean is that if I cancel my Spotify subscription I feel that it will reduce the chance that I will somehow change my behaviour and start listening to music. This means that I am paying for the privilege of being able to dump on myself more effectively for not doing something I supposedly want to do.

All of which leaves me looking towards other resolutions which, clearly, have to involve me listening to music. It really is simple – I have to answer one question: Do I want to listen to music? And if my answer to that question is ‘yes’, and I think it is, then I have to make some decisions about when and where and how I will do this. I could listen on my way to and from work – but I already use that time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and I don’t want to lose that. I could listen to music at home – but I think the opportunities to do this are pretty limited because i) other people are around and would probably not want to listen to the same things that I would, ii) I would probably be doing other stuff and moving around at the same time and so wouldn’t really be able to listen properly and iii) I don’t want to be hooked up to headphones all the time. I could listen to music at work in my office – but I think that maybe I would find it hard to concentrate properly if I was actively trying to listen to music at the same time. Added to this, I find I struggle a bit to decide what I want to listen. All of which means I am a bit stuck.

To try to resolve all of this (and if you are reading this you are probably really struggling to get your head around how someone can turn something so simple into something so utterly complicated) I am going to experiment a bit. I am going to try putting on Classic FM at work just to get used to the idea of having ‘noise’ going on as I work. Initially, I will probably only do this when I am not engaged in deeper work that requires high levels of focus. By choosing online radio I remove the need to decide what to listen to (apart from choosing the station of course) which helps to solve one of the associated issues.

The curious thing is that I used to listen to music all of the time, but I suppose back then all of my ‘space’ was my own and although I thought I was busy all the time probably I wasn’t and music was something that helped to fill the world around me. I’ve had Classic FM on as I have been typing this and quite enjoyed having a layer of sound there in the background although I could hardly tell you what pieces have been played (Rossini’s ‘The Silken Ladder’ Overture [?] was one and some music from Jurassic Park films was also on earlier I think, music from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ is on now). So far so good. I will try to remember to report back on my progress at some point in the not too distant future, and for now Spotify will continue to receive my money, just in case this flicker of aural inspiration catches light into a full-blown fire again.