JonM

Google seems to turn up plenty of activity - http://www.fijibati.com/ is full of details about secondary school competitions and under-19 national finals this week.

Well worth a visit - a real marvel of engineering. Falkirk itself is like a Scottish Widnes, but the wheel and the Kelpies are definitely worth a stopover.

Several thousand books in the house, which I've decided is too many, so I'm slowly working my way through the shelves trying to decide which books will never be read again. Quite a bit of science fiction & fantasy that I haven't looked at since I was a teenager, and I've been re-reading before they go to the charity shop, post-lockdown. Asimov & Heinlein era stuff has held up better than I expected, couple of Simak books coming up soon.

Ooh, I could talk about this stuff for hours... I had the very great pleasure of meeting John Chibadura (sadly, he died in the late 90s) and occasionally still listen to tapes of his. Although Peel (& Andy Kershaw) would correctly refer to this as Zimbabwean music, he was actually more popular in Mozambique. The Sungura style (e.g. the below) is copying music from Zaire to which John added a reggae influence. Pretty much impossible for most African musicians to get visas to play concerts in the UK any more.

A weigh-in of 72kg here, but I'm not tracking it, so no need to add to the chart. Having discovered that I could only just do a pull-up, I've started a program of bodyweight exercises 4 times a week. Serious DOMS in the arms and shoulders after the first couple of days. I typically run 4-5 times a week, not sure how combining a bit of weight training with the running is going to work, but with no races on the cards any time soon, probably doesn't matter.

If you think Orkney is stunning, you really should get over to Harris & Lewis, and check out Callanish.

Oddly enough, I found a copy of that on the bookcase earlier in the week, didn't remember ever having read it, so moved it to the pile of books waiting to be read.

Interesting how these things work out. My wife has lost about a stone this year, she's now thinner than when we got married 20+ years ago and her wedding ring is slightly too big. My weight has stayed the same. I'm over 2000km running for the year so far, definitely going to be less than last year.

There's some history/context around colours here - it was a real point of conflict with RU and by 1963 they had copyrighted the colours and badge to prevent RL trying to copy it. Not sure it explains why they played these games in a black kit though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springbok_colours

Of those places, the Calder Valley never really became a rugby league area - Hebden Bridge, Todmorden etc. probably didn't have the population to support professional sport. Other than that, you have Leeds, Bradford (Harry Garnett), Wakefield, Halifax, Huddersfield represented. M Newsome (of Dewsbury?) was the representative who proposed broken time payment to the RFU in 1893, so certainly not all of the committee were in agreement with the Rev Marshall. Can't see the "elephant in the room" though.

It's a different ex-Widnes player called Eric Hughes, who played for Leigh & St. Helens after leaving Widnes. https://widnesvikings.co.uk/a-tribute-to-eric-hughes/

I see Leeds United's new sponsor came several years too late to twitter, and the obvious handle for them had already been taken by somebody else. So, Leeds Utd fans, make sure you look at @sbotop_uk (Link removed by CKN)

Bal Numapo, the PNG RL international, who scored one of the winning drop goals in PNG's 20-18 win over GB in 1990, passed away yesterday.

I read it not long after it came out (in my early teens) and loved it. I've got a lot out of his books since then too. He's been hugely influential. Haven't re-read it in ~30 years though, I wonder how well it has survived the passage of time. You've reminded me that I need to get his latest one, Agency.

Prefer the Dan Tyminski one to all of those, doc. I guess any recording of this song is a cover version.

Bill Ramsey, the former Hunslet, Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Widnes and GB player, passed away today, it's being reported.

The route takes you past a lot of the tourist sights (and is reasonably flat) and there's a lot of crowd support. I particularly remember the bands that were playing at various points. It's also relatively shaded, apart from a couple of miles along the coast. Also remember that my cheapo hotel had put on a special marathon runners breakfast at 5am Sunday morning, which they hadn't mentioned when booking - a nice touch. Definitely recommend it.

I did Barcelona a few years ago and loved it. It was the same weekend as Manchester, and it was (much) cheaper to enter, the hotel was cheaper and the flight was cheaper than train or driving to Manchester. The more carbon emission aware me of today would probably avoid the flight. What I particularly liked was going to the Nou Camp the next day, and seeing hundreds of fit blokes hobbling up the multiple flights of stairs to the top of the stand.

Plenty of time to train for one - can't see many mass events taking place this year. I was supposed to be doing Boston (Lincs) in April, which is postponed to October, with a possible plan of setting everybody off in small groups, at intervals. Largely rural/empty route though, so not much chance of encountering people.

For many years, frying onions was banned in Cambridge city centre, allegedly because Norman St.John Stevas, who was master of Emmanuel college (where he was nicknamed Mein Camp) didn't approve of the smell. So the burger and hot dog vans couldn't do onions with the food.

I reckon you'd probably want to follow the NHS advice and do the recommended stretches and exercises for a while before progressing to swinging weights about. I very much agree that they'd help once someone can move properly. (One of the best runners of my age that I know quit his job a few years ago to set up a kettlebell gym. Twice, he's taken two all-women groups of his kettlebell clients from never having rowed, to rowing across the channel. Quite impressive when you saw some of them go from pushing a buggy slowly round parkrun to being able to row for hours.) I just worry about people recommending a particular kind of exercise and dissing others without knowing about their age, health, current condition etc. I know someone who lost six stone after taking up running, but I guess weight is predominantly to do with what and when you eat, with exercise (& sleep) mainly in a supporting role. As Niels is about 70kg, weight probably isn't an issue.

Like anything, it depends on where you're starting from. If you're in your twenties or thirties and in decent shape, sure, kettlebells are great. Probably not so much if you're an overweight middle aged man with back problems. I run about 1500 miles a year, plenty of people in my running club in their sixties and seventies who're in great health. Loads of studies showing that running is good for you long-term. I think if you have an existing problem with ankles, knees etc. from some other sport, then it might not be so good. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of people who run 5k at parkrun on Saturday mornings, only a small minority are "good at running". Burpees , on the other hand, would injure me very quickly I suspect. In Niels's case, I'd do the exercises saint1 suggests. Achilles tendinosis is one of those things that definitely responds to eccentric heel drops and so on and it only takes a few weeks. There's been several sports science studies showing they work, Hakan Alfredsen is the guy who originally showed this. I would be a bit wary about doing much running until any pre-existing condition definitely sorted out. Obviously you need to keep doing the exercises even when it feels better. If it was a sprained ankle rather than achilles, I'd be doing exercises for that as well. Once you've sprained your ankle once, you're at a higher risk of doing it again.

I normally run in the daytime, in the local countryside, anywhere between 10k and 20k, four times a week. I rarely see anybody else while out running - more chance of seeing deer or a fox than a person. In the past week, I've seen at least three people out walking, running or cycling on every one of my runs and on Sunday, more than a dozen.

I suspect the average prison inmate is a good bit younger than me, and probably a good bit faster tbh. My new local parkrun is often fewer than 50 people, so I've had a few top 5 finishes, but no higher than 2nd.

Got the stopwatch bingo a day before finding out that there was such a thing - would have been somewhere around 280 runs at the time. I'd like to have ticked off all of the finish positions between 1 and 99, still missing about a dozen of them (and I suspect #1 might be quite tricky to get.)