February March 2024

 The beginning of February means Rombalds Stride for me now.

The weather was pretty much uneventful. There was quite a strong wind from the West which made it hard going in parts, but it was dry and quite warm. I really suffered from about Burley Woodhead (90 minutes from the finish), and also got a weird back spasm over Chevin. Slightly concerning as for a seconnd I thought I wasn't able to continue. A bit of a shame because I thought I had trained fairly well for it. Perhaps next year I need to do some longer runs.

The 1st Sunday of the month is the village litter pick. I was finally able to make it this time, and it was a good way to try and loosen up after the run on Saturday.

Tuesday I went to a terrible football match at Netherfield. It was my first midweek game. Guiseley were playing a team in the league below in the cup. Ossett United I think. It was awful and a 1-0 lead into the later stages ended up being a 1-1. Thankfully an entertaining penalty shootout at the end made up for being out in the cold all evening.

The following Saturday I had a very exciting trip out to Hebden Bridge with the Neonatal Swimming crew. We went to Gaddings Damn to swim and then later on we watched a documentary film about it at the local cinema.

The next day I was back at Winter League. Kathryn has kindly been giving me lifts to the events and this race was quite a lot of fun and just so so muddy!

I think the next week was just the next Winter League fixture at Pudsey.

Then during the week we went for a work social event on Tuesday. I managed to sneak off for some yummy pasta before we met at 6pm for some shuffle board games.

This is a random photo of the hire bicycle stand outside the university.

This was a random run I did over to Ilkley one Saturday.

At the end of the month, I went to see Pest Control in London with Simon. I had a bit of time to wait for my train to London. I got a coffee at La Bottega and watched some filming that was going on.

We went to the Tate Britain to see an exhibit about Feminist protest art. It was really informative and interesting to look at.

We had pizza for dinner.

The show was at a venue called the Black Heart, just in Camden. For a Sunday it was a pretty good show. Demonstration of Power we really good, and they complimented Pest Control very well.

I bounced pretty early on Monday morning back to Leeds.

I quickly picked up a cake from Hummingbird Bakery before heading back to Kings Cross.

Sadly our train was cancelled, but there was another one 30 minutes later so it wasn't too disruptive in the end. I got a full refund on my ticket, so that can pay for the next trip.

This is probably a run to parkrun on a Saturday morning. Can't remember why, I think they needed a barcode scanner so I parked in Otley and ran up to the start.

I went for a coffee at the office style La Bottega one morning, I think a Monday when I also went to a PhD meeting.

Tuesday is swimming day.

For some reason I popped over to the bakery on Thursday morning to get some bread. I think it was because we went to Jan and Eddies on the Friday and stayed overnight; coming back Saturday morning.

Sunday was the final WYWL fixture at Crossgates. Again, it rained so much, but somehow didn't rain whilst we were actually running. I came in about 18th I think, and finished 25th-ish overall.

We've had so much rain that we have needed to change the door on the outhouse as it has gone rotten.

On Wednesday I went to a careers event in Roundhay School. I met up with Gav beforehand to catch up, and he had loads of good advice to tell me about working with young people.

The weekend after I finally got around to volunteering with the Millie Wright charity. I went to help them delivery food to the hospital on the Saturday evening.