Bricking it....

No, that's not rude, really it isn't... It's a technical term us triathletes (yeah, right) use for a Bike/Run combination - one after the other.  The idea being that if you practise, you get used to the rubbery legs feeling when you get off the bike and have to start running.

Mine was a bit gentle...

I cycled to the local village for the papers, stuffed them and half a dozen eggs and a lottery ticket into my rucksack and cycled home again.  Then I took time out to take the Melodeon Master the papers and a cup of tea so that he could have a relatively lazy morning, and after that I met up with Wee Gill for a gentle 5k run.

Probably what I should have done was get off the bike and start running...  And skip the tea-making which, as far as I know, has not yet made it into the Olympic Triathlon schedule...

However, it was all very civilised and may yet be repeated...  I'm still steering clear of swimming as the ghastly ginger hair is very brittle and is still ginger but is now Very Short In Places.  Sort of punk, really.  It's breaking...  Somehow I don't think chlorine will help at all, and shoving a swimming hat over the top always breaks it anyway.  I really, really, want to shave my head but whilst it looked great on Sinead O'Connor, I think I would just look like Uncle Fester... Sigh.

My run with Wee Gill was lovely - a very gentle relatively flat (for Caerphilly) 5k to nurse her knee twinge.  Sadly still not right so we did go slowly.  However, we have found that if she runs like a haggis (round the side of a hill because they're bred with one leg shorter than the other) it doesn't hurt at all.  Quite apt, considering her Scots roots.  And there are plenty of hills to run sideways round near here...  We nattered and ran gently - lovely.

So I might need to step up my training somewhat for it to really be called 'training'.  And watching the Tour de France is making me realise just how inadequate I am on the bike - what I would call a 'hill' barely counts as an undulation for those guys.  Amazing...

And I found another ace photo this week - on Tuesday night the Melodeon Master and I were listening to TMS (Test Match Special - if you've never listened, try it out, it's fabulous) and after a particularly dismal drop by Samit Patel there was some guffawing in the background of the studio.... This was Aggers (Jonathan Agnew) who had just found this photo, which he then tweeted:

I don't think Mr Patel is EVER going to live that one down - a different illustration of 'bricking it'!