Prawn Crackers.

It has been a long week, and a while since I posted. In my defence, my time has been taken up doing a truck load of tech support, partly for my nephew's notebook PC which has been very ill, and more bizarrely for the local convent. Once you've done a favour for a nun, you're more or less in their grasp forever, even though they reimburse you with offers of cash or alcohol. Or both. They do appear to be extremely tax efficient in the dealings though!

The particular incident this week involved a nun of uncertain age (I wouldn't even hazard a guess) having been sold a laptop by a spotty teenager in a local PC World store. Of course, to the teenager, a new notebook running Vista is easy peasy, and installing Office 2007 a trivial matter. To Sister M.M. here, getting past the warranty card for some OCR software with the bundled scanner / printer was already too much. Too much information demanded which she simply didn't know how to answer. We started by ripping that card up.

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing more and more people getting left behind in the rush to "technologize" our lives, mainly because society (and a certain OS manufacturer in particular) has an expectation that everyone knows how to operate a PC.

Of course, in reality, most people don't really have anywhere near the level of knowledge to know how to protect themselves and their IT investment in the way they are expected to, and the elderly have an even tougher time because it is so far removed from the majority of the lives they have led. This isn't their fault. They want stuff which just works. You don't have to patch your dishwasher every week in case someone modifies the water in some nasty way which will turn all your plates pink and melt the cutlery. Really, if we need to use it, why should IT be different.

So, in the knowledge that in 30 years time, I'll be asking my daughter to do the same for me, I try to help out where I can.

Amidst all this, I did manage some running. I was actually aiming for a 5K racing being run this weekend (well, yesterday) as our previous plans for this weekend got altered, leaving an open slot. However, when I rechecked the small print, the "Race for Life - Telford" turned out to be a women only race, and there was nothing else doing within a reasonable distance. Aside from dressing up, I wasn't going to get past the start line. Sunday, also happened to be my birthday, so a busy day in other ways, topped off by a delicious and not-good-for-me Chinese meal. Plenty to run off this morning then.

Recent training has been:
(last week)
Mon: 3.37 miles, 31:14 minutes 9.16 pace. 10C HRAve:X HRMax:X
Wed: 4 miles, 37:00 minutes 9:14 pace. 9C HRAve:151 HRMax:X
Fri: 4.2 miles, 38:14 minutes 9:06 pace. 12C HRAve:X HRMax:X
(this week)
Mon: 4.85 miles, 47:49 minutes 9.52 pace. 8C HRAve:145 HRMax:157

Those prawn crackers really did slow me down this morning, but then again, my target this morning was just to run for 45 minutes and then jog back home. As I'm travelling on Wednesday, I plan a short run tomorrow morning and then to pick it up again on Thursday with a 50 minute run at just under 10 minute pace.

I'm aiming to get up to around 6.5 miles in the next couple of weeks and then work on improving pace to get a 10K practice time under 60 minutes. The race I'm aiming for is this year's Stourbridge Stumble on June 16th. This is a multi-terrain race and not flat, so I expect my pace will be more like 10:30 on the day. We'll see eh!

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.