Odd Thomas Odd Blog

Unbelievably, I completed the Great North Run! Not only that, but in roughly the same time that it took me to do it nearly 5 years ago. And with less training! Officially, my time was : 2 hours 17 minutes 7 seconds. The time on my watch was 2 hours 15 minutes 40+ seconds, but thats because I didn't see why I should time myself having a pee at the 5 mile mark! When the positions were first posted, I was in at a respectable 20,532, and then they changed the website and I could only get my position within the 'Others' category that I was a part of: 14,749. Not bad. I'm happy :-) Will have to do a lot better next year, though!! Big thanks to my cousin Damo, who did all the driving for the weekend, and was there at the end of the race to greet me. He is considering running himself next year since it took him the same time that I ran the course for him to use the metro system to get to the end! Despite the personal good news though, my thoughts and wishes go out to the ...

Three days to go before the run and yesterday I finally managed to book a hotel ... in Carlisle! There was hotel in Gateshead, Newcastle, the Bowes Incline Hotel, that was advertised at £80 per night on laterooms.com , but when they tried to book it for me, the hotel wouldn't accept the booking unless I paid an extra £25 per night! Thieving bastards! The girl at laterooms.com tried her best to negotiate for me, but the hotel wouldn't budge. They were apparently about to put the prices up because of the Great North Run ... blatant profiteering from a charity event. Its disgusting. As I needed a room, I asked about taking just one night. Nope, I had to book both nights, and as the girl at laterooms pointed out, the hotel has nothing in their details about minimum stay restrictions so they should not be doing that. Needless to say I sent the hotel a rather stroppy email - which I am sure will go straight into the trash - and ended up finding an available hotel in Carlisle. Now...

I am shattered. Totally and utterly shattered. The saying goes, "Women! You can't live with them and you can't live without them." I think this needs updating to reference work instead, cos I've managed perfectly fine without the former so far; though that could be down to not having the time to think, let alone think about someone else. For the past couple of months, I have been working on an asp.net application - after having 4 days 'training' - which was due to go live yesterday. For the past 4 to 5 weeks, I have been working 12 to 15 hours a day, and the last 4 weekends, in an effort to make up for my lack of asp.net and windows active directory knowledge and experience, in order to meet the deadline. I missed it. I didn't think I would as everything worked well on deployment to test, but deployment to production at the customer site was a totally different affair. Finally got it to work about 40 minutes ago - at least, I hope I got it to work...

On Friday nights, at 10pm, LBC 97.3 have an interesting show on called The Phsychic Show. Often, they seem to have visitors that come in to talk about something with a psychic link which really ends up being someone's spiritual interpretation of common sense. So it can be quite entertaining. However, last Friday, they had an interesting speaker talk about Cosmic Ordering. I've heard this phrase before and admittedly thought it was about the cosmic order of things. Turns out, its actually about placing orders with the universe, like you might with a mail order catalogue - sorry about the analogy, but its the best I can come up with! I have to confess that I started to get pulled in by it the more stories I heard. Basically, it goes on the premise that if you expect bad things, then bad things will happen, and if you expect good things, then good things will happen. So, if you ask the universe for something but don't expect to get it, then you won't because you don...

I think the 2 hour feeding rule before training is a myth! I ate last night about 6.45pm - just a salad with sour cream and chives from Sainsburys - and started running about 10pm (distracted watching a poignant episode of Spooks), but the whole time feeling like I had eaten less than an hour before, so once again, I was belching and farting my way round Watford! Still, I managed to knock a minute off last Thursday's time - not sure how though cos I hurt like hell by the time I had reached 4 miles.

The whole purpose of this blog is to keep you up-to-date with training for the Great North Run! Last night, I managed an 8.2 mile run in 1:22 - not particularly speedy, and it hurt by the end, but if I can keep this up for the next few weeks, then 13 miles should come easier ... I hope!

After looking at the definition for paranoia, maybe people are right...