by Kevin | May 29, 2016
Friday Night
Our now annual trip (apparently) to Liverpool for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half started, as such things often do, with a frantic Friday afternoon and then a busy drive up a motorway. Aside from the fact that it was a fairly typical Friday night on the M6 and we had tea at Norton Canes there’s not a lot to say about the journey.
It was getting a bit late when we arrived at our hotel, the Premier Inn on Albert Dock, and we were ready for getting ourselves sorted. As we checked in we had a bit of a scare as the receptionist commented we’d booked for 4 nights. “No we didn’t. We booked for 3” we said. Then we thought about it for a bit and looked at our confirmation. When we’d booked it, about 9 months previously, it was a speculative booking made with the intention of finding somewhere cheaper at a later date, and we sort of assumed we’d stay until Tuesday rather than rush home, so that we could spend a bit of time in Liverpool. Subsequently we’d obviously booked our holiday in the Lake District (see Up the Lakes) and had evidently forgotten about the Liverpool booking. Not to worry though. We’d booked it on the flexible rate, so we were allowed to just cancel the one night.
I had to drive miles and then walk all the way back to park the car, because the hotels on Albert Dock don’t have their own car parks, and by the time I got back we were ready for a drink, and then bed. Alcohol seemed in order. The bar was open.
Saturday, 5k
Saturday greeted us with a smile a wander over into the Echo Arena to get all our race numbers for the weekend. There were quite a lot of these, as Kas and me were running the half, Ami and me were running the 5k, and all four of us were running the Sunday Extra Mile. That’s a lot of numbers. It was enough to make us ready for breakfast. A Premier Inn breakfast. Mmmmm! Not too much, though. We’ve got running to do.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll series this year decided to add a 5k event into their weekend, and put it on Saturday morning. We would all have run it was it not for the fact that they put an age limit which Izzy was sadly below. We thought that’d be fine, no bother, I can understand, and all that, until we got into running the race itself, and we saw the considerable number of runners who were shorter than Ami. Now I know that’s not always a good marker, but Ami is quite small for a 12-year-old, and the race’s age limit for the race was 11. Some of the runners were a full head shorter in height than Ami. It’s unlikely they were 11.
On the way to the start line we met a bunch of ladies dressed as Minions, with a token Gru thrown in for good measure.
Still, what do we care, huh? Except that Izzy being unable to race meant that someone had to stay with her. Ami and me both did quite well though. Ami shot round in about 28 minutes, which is the fastest she’d run a 5km distance in ages. She obviously enjoyed the sea air and the flat course. And the smell of a medal at the end. It was quite impressive to finish inside the Arena, with the lights down and loud music playing, but I’m not sure it made us run faster, as we’d finished by then, as it were.
The rest of the day disappeared in a fit of not really being bothered. I think we had lunch in Costa right next to the hotel, and then we mooched about a bit whilst being generally not bothered. I had sort of planned to do a bit of caching, but was unable to persuade either child to come with me, so I left all three girls in the hotel room on the strict instruction that mummy was to be left alone for a snooze. Yeah, like that’ll happen.
From the hotel I walked along the side of the Mersey in the upstream direction until I reached the Chung Ku restaurant. I was finding most of the caches I tried on this stretch, albeit there were many anyway. At the restaurant I had my first failure, and also noticed the time. As it happens, I was getting rather hot and thirsty too. So I turned and started walking back towards the docks along Sefton Road. This isn’t the most inspiring of walks, but I did find a couple more caches on the way, and it is a proverbially straight route into the heart of town.
In the evening Kas had arranged for us to meet up with a largish group from the various running clubs we’re in at a Pizza Express in Liverpool One. It was a pizza. As we had the kids with us, they were kind enough to serve us in advance of everyone else and bill us separately, which was good, because the rest of the party was still just finishing their starters by the time we left, and as it was well gone nine o’clock, we really needed to get off and get the kids to bed.
A Swift Half, with a Chaser
Sunday morning started warmer than Saturday, and it stayed that way. Not ideal conditions for running, but ho hum, we’re here now.
We had a swift Premier Inn breakfast again and then got ourselves prepped up and out of the door ready to find the McGreals, who had kindly volunteered to look after the girls for us while we were running. By the time we’d all met up and handed over control of the daughters it was pretty much time to get into the starting pens.
And then we had to run a half marathon. Kas did well. I didn’t. I got round, but it wasn’t pleasant, and it did some damage to my already heavily battered running mojo. I hadn’t really been training and I didn’t really enjoy the MK Half I’d done at the start of May. So whilst I enjoyed the experience of visiting the city, and I love the event, this particular race has to get filed under “experiences to be forgotten” – Move along now, nothing to talk about here.
By the time I got back, Kas had managed to find time to put the kids through a couple of years of schooling. I felt like death warmed up, so I’m afraid I excused myself for a while and went for a lie down on the bed in our hotel while the girls enjoyed some sunshine. I couldn’t manage, and anyway I’d still got to get myself up and about to run a further mile in the afternoon. Why oh why oh why ?
When I got to the start of the extra mile, having met up with the girls again, I have to say that I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. When I started the race it would be generous to describe me as “running” – everything hurt and I was right stiff after the race in the morning. I thought I’d end up walking, and I told the girls to just get a move on and leave me behind. They did. Ami shot off like a greyhound and Kas and Izzy got well in front of me quite quickly too. As we were running along the main road though, I started to loosen up a bit and ended up running a decent speed, despite having finished the half marathon at walking pace and with frequent cramps (yes, I’m that unfit). In the end I finished the extra mile in less than 10 minutes, which is faster than all but 2 of the 13 I’d done in the morning, and I felt quite pleased with myself. I also got another medal to add to the collection.
The end of the extra mile signalled the end of the running for the weekend, and therefore officially the start of “holiday rules” – as a family we have a set of ethical and behavioural guidelines (1) that apply on any day that is arbitrarily nominated as a holiday. We’d nominated the rest of the week, what with us going up to the Lake District and everything, so the start of holiday rules for a whole six days was most welcome.
(1) OK, so there’s only one mandatory rule (about having ice cream every day), and the others get made up as we go along. I think there’s one about adults having beer or wine, and another about the kids staying up late.
It was getting late enough for us to go partake of the things that the Rock ‘n’ Roll events are most famous for – live music and free beer, and in the case of every trip we’ve made to Liverpool, sunshine. We walked (hobbled/shuffled – take your pick) over to the Arena, where they set up a big stage and get various live bands to play over the course of the afternoon.
We were around at the stage through most of The Velveteins and all of Cast, and I made my way through more than one of the beers. Izzy seemed to enjoy it too. Ami got a bit bored, tired and sun-stroked though, so she wandered back to the hotel on her own and had a lie down in the bed. Wimp ! I would never do that. Oh, wait….
There was a point where all three of us sort of fizzled a bit and decided to give up, especially as we’d got an evening meal date somewhere and we all needed to get cleaned up. So we jacked it in and went to reunite with Ami. She was there, in the room, where she’d promised. Good.
For dinner we met up with a substantial group of others from Redway Runners at a small Italian restaurant in the centre of town. It was basic but pleasant and the food was good. I was rather tired though. Ami was still suffering and kept going outside for fresh air.
We didn’t stay too long into the evening, because to be honest, more than one of us had had enough by about 9 pm, and just wanted to be asleep.
It had been a busy old weekend, and we’d got some driving to do the following day to get ourselves up north.
Caches found over the weekend were :
by Kevin | Oct 5, 2014
Kas booked herself into the Chester marathon earlier in the year and we decided to all go up, on the basis that we were able to persuade my brother to allow us to use his flat near Wrexham over the weekend – he’s back home in Southwell at the weekends.
So off we headed up the M40 with a carload of stuff on Friday night for what proved to be a busy weekend. We made the mistake of thinking that the more direct looking route around Brackley would be quicker. It wasn’t. We then needed to stop for something to eat, so we ducked into Warwick Services for a healthy repast. That wasn’t either. It was burgers, chips, sandwiches and fizzy drinks.
By this time it was totally dark so the rest of the journey was going to have to be done in “darkness” mode. It was probably time the kids went to sleep anyway. They didn’t.
We drove up around the south side of Birmingham, then onto the M54 and along the A41 towards Whitchurch – this looked the best route for a Friday night. It wasn’t too bad, just a little slow once off the motorway due to there being plenty of lorries and not really enough long straight parts to pass them. We found the flat (near to Holt) fairly quickly and were able to get out and upstairs pretty quickly. Once we’d found where Phil kept all the bedding we were well away.
No running weekend away would be complete without a bit of geocaching. After all, why go for two days when the running only takes one? Anyway, there didn’t seem to be any parkruns around here so there was no opportunity to go do that.
You can read about my day’s geocaching at Bike or Hike.
Sunday morning started fairly early for Kas, and not quite so early for the rest of us. We had to get into Chester before they started closing the roads, which was about 90 minutes before the race started. Thankfully though the traffic wasn’t too bad and they were using big portions of the racecourse’s infield for parking, which meant we were fairly close to everything. It also meant that when we got there we’d still got something like 2 hours to kill before Kas’s race started. It was a cold morning and the various attractions at the race HQ didn’t keep us occupied for long – just a coffee van and the usual running clothes stands. So by the time we’d finished this and made the first of a number of trips to the “facilities” in the field we were starting to get a bit bored and a lot cold. None of us had taken our hats or gloves (after all, it hadn’t been at all cold so far this autumn) so the early morning chill was taking its toll a little bit. We ended up sitting inside for a while in the big marquee just to keep the cold away.
Eventually it was time for Kas to set off, so we walked out onto the racecourse, via the “facilities” again, and Kas started running around the grass field to get warmed up, closely followed by the kids, who obviously needed to warm up too for their 1 mile race that was starting over an hour after Kas left us.
In that time after Kas left we went off the racecourse slightly to grab a geocache up on the perimeter road, just to “fill in” a new county for the kids, and then we came back down and mooched about near the race HQ again until we received the call to go and get lined up.
The kids race was a straightforward 1 mile which involved running a few furlongs out around the racecourse and then a 180 degree turn before running all the way back through the start gate and then a few hundred yards further on to the finish. Ami said she’d run all the way with Izzy to make sure she as OK, but in the event she left Izzy at the turn and just sprinted in. To be fair to Izzy though, she seemed fine with it and was positively tanking it when she came into the finish straight, so I was quite proud of them both. It was also quite funny that despite all the announcements about having to run through the start gate on the way back and keep going for another 300 yards there were still several children (and their accompanying adults) who sprinted through the start gate and then simply stopped. Most then had a moment of dawning as they realised others were still sprinting past them…….
After the kids had finished and got their medals (which are very nice medals) we took a few photos and got their jumpers back on before noticing that we really didn’t have time for much else before Kas was due back. We just about had time to go to the car and make another trip to the “facilities” and then we went down to the marathon start point to wait for Kas.
She made her grand entrance into the racecourse in a very quick time and was spurred on a little by us three cheering her into the final few yards, and she finished in a stonkingly fast new PB time of 3:53.41 – Fan-dabby-tastic ! – Try reading about the Chester Marathon on Kas’s blog.
After all that exertion Kas needed a bit of a rest, so we sat at the outside coffee bar (it was now quite warm outside) and then took the kids into the play-area tent before heading off back to Wrexham.
We didn’t have much of a plan here except to get gone as soon as we could, but after a day and a half there wasn’t a great deal of packing to be done, so I was comfortable to leave the girls in the flat while I shot out to collect 7 of the easiest drive-by caches I’ve ever done in a mere 40 minutes.
The drive back was a predictably slow Sunday afternoon crawl stuck behind slow moving lorries and cars. All the way down I was looking out for a convenient place in Shropshire to stop and do a single geocache (again, to “fill in” a new county). After driving through quite a lot of Shropshire we ended up at Newport, where we thought we’d stop for a random cache and then get something for dinner before finishing the drive. The cache proved easy but then finding somewhere to eat seemed rather harder. We had Googled a couple of pubs but when we got there one of them looked rubbish and the other didn’t seem to exist, so somewhat disappointed we jumped back in the car and decided to go look in the next town, whatever that would be. Thankfully, as we were pulling out of Newport back onto the main road we found the missing pub – it was simply marked into totally the wrong place on Google Maps, as is often the case. It was a chain restaurant attached to a Premier Inn hotel, so nothing special, but it did do a decent Sunday carvery for the kids.
By the time we finished here it was straying into darkness again but thankfully not long after here we were on motorways with street lights, so it wasn’t too painful. The traffic also seemed to have died down a bit, so the drive went quite quickly, especially once the girls made me put Madness on the iPod. After a bit of that it was my turn to choose and I went for a bit of Beatles. It was surprising how many of their hits that the kids had heard of.
And that was it. When we got home everything was pretty much as we left it, except Kas and the girls each had a new medal to hang up somewhere.
by Kevin | Aug 25, 2014
Oooh ! A new running event.
I can’t remember how I found out about this one but as soon as I saw it I have to say it was a must-do. Who could refuse a start-up event that starts and ends in Wales and involves running over the Severn Bridge ? I couldn’t.
Well, it would also involve an excuse for visiting MyGeocachingProfile.com’s trickiest English county – the not-really-a-county-or-is-it City of Bristol. Another reason for going then.
We decided to stump up a few of our air miles to get a room in the Mercure Holland House in central Bristol for a couple of nights (it was a Bank Holiday weekend after all). The race was scheduled for Sunday so we were fine with spending the whole day there and coming back on Monday.
We drove down in Kas’s car on Saturday lunchtime, Kas having run parkrun in the morning. We stopped at a random service station for some lunch on the way – Membury or Leigh Delamere – and got to Bristol in good time for a bit of a chill in the hotel before going out for dinner. We had a bit of a stroll around before getting thoroughly lost trying to find our way into Cabot Circus to the local Zizzi’s. We should have looked at the photo on Wikipedia then. It’s clearly in shot. We had our usual collection of spaghetti bolognese and pizza, and then we walked back home for a relatively early night. After all, I had to be over the other side of the Severn Bridge at some awful time of the morning and there was some breakfast to be eaten beforehand.
We began race day with as hearty a breakfast as I could manage in the time allowed and we jumped into the car to make our way (surprisingly quickly) up to the Severn Bridge before it was closed for the event.
We parked up in an industrial estate to the west of the bridge and made our way up a steep grass bank onto the event area. There were a couple of other Redway Runners there, but not many.
As it was a first event, they suffered the usual problem of not having enough toilets, but thankfully I managed to time my bicycle rotation to suit and I was ready in time to get up to the start point. This proved to be halfway along the bridge, nearly under the western tower of the main bridge.
One thing you don’t notice when you’re driving over suspension bridges is the slope. When you’re running, you do notice it. The first stretch was uphill, followed by a mile of quite sharp downhill running off the bridge into England.
Once on dry land the route went north of the motorway around Elberton and thereabouts over roads which were narrow and generally “agricultural” in nature. We were warned at the start that there was a hill at about halfway, and we ran up a big one at about 5.5 miles so I assumed that had been it, until, that is, I got to the bottom of the “proper” hill. It was one of thse where I immediately stopped running and started walking. No way I was going to be getting up there at running speed. After a busy August I was feeling rather unfit anyway and was starting to struggle.
By the time we got back out onto main roads I was having problems. I was still going at a decent speed but starting to tire, and by the time I got to the end of the bridge I’d had enough. The mile up the English side of the bridge was more than my legs could manage and I ended up having to slow to a run-walk strategy. All of this meant a rather disappointingly slow 2:03 finish. I’m not sure what I was expecting but after a run of sub 2 hour halves I certainly had that in mind. It was getting painful towards the end though.
After finishing I devoured all edible contents of the goody bag and got a bad neck carrying the rather substantial medal before jumping into the car and doing a cache in my first new county of the day, Zetec, in Gwent.
Back to Bristol then for a quick wash and brush up followed by a walk over to the Floating Harbour, where we failed to find a cache (as it was inaccessible due to some re-paving) but then found a decent looking waterside pub, where we sat outside (with jumpers on) whilst eating some well-earned sandwiches and crisps and beer.
So what to do from here?
We’re always up for a bit of “active” history or geography at Gardner Towers, so we decided to walk along to the SS Great Britain to see what was up. It was really quite interesting. The kids marvelled at the (small) size of the cabins and beds and we also got to meet the real Mr Brunel, or at least that’s what he told us, and he did have the big hat and everything.
Once we’d finished upstairs we descended into the room beneath the boat, where the temperature and humidity are somewhat akin to a sauna, because apparently it’s good for the hull. Down here there was a great view of the business end of the ship. Or, at least, a restored and replaced business end.
All of this was very interesting but it wasn’t, to be honest, ice cream. The weekend had officially been designated as “holiday rules”, and hence at least one ice cream a day was on the cards.
We walked halfway back along the quayside and grabbed some from a kiosk before continuing our way back to the hotel.
When we got back to the hotel it wasn’t quite late enough to give up, so we jumped in the car and drove up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge for a nosey. There’s not much parking and in trying to find somewhere we ended up taking the car over the bridge. We walked back and did the earthcache at the bridge and then crossed it on foot to do another cache and have a quick walk up to the observatory building.
As we were walking back to the car we saw a sign announcing that we were crossing into North Somerset. So I checked for a nearby cache and there was one on a sign about 30 yards further on. Cha-ching ! That’ll be another county done then. That made three new counties done in a single day.
After this we headed back to the hotel and got tidied up (again) to go out looking for dinner. We couldn’t be bothered to walk far that evening (or, technically, I wasn’t able to walk far) and anyway we’d promised the girls we’d try to find a Sunday roast, so we mooched around the harbour area until we found a reasonable looking pub diner. We found one after walking probably three-quarters of the way around a loop. It was a decent pub though, and they had beer. And they had roast dinners. Several of those then.
After dinner we retired for another fairly early night and then got up in the morning to have a somewhat longer and more filling breakfast than we’d had the previous morning. And that was more or less it for the weekend, aside from having to drive home to Milton Keynes, which we did both quickly and uneventfully. It was just as well we did, because when we got home we had to pack up the car again for a week and head up to my folks house in Measham, where we were spending the final week of the kid’s summer holiday. Kas stayed at home to get some proper work done. I took mine with me.
