More Cake Than Running

It has been a long time since my last post and I feel the need for some sort of placeholder just to show that I am still here. It is not that I have given up running or lost my enthusiasm for writing about it, more a case of other things in life getting in the way.

May is an exciting month: It started with the twenty first birthday of my youngest (who was born on the same day of the year as Karl Marx) , which was followed by the arrival from Canada of my sister and her family, in preparation for the wedding of my elder daughter, next week.

I have been out for a few runs but the aim has been to maintain some level of fitness rather than build. It was a pleasure was to manage a couple of runs with my sister and brother in law, and show them my regular routes. But there is not much to say about steady runs where nothing unusual happens. So I won’t.

A matter of far greater concern and mental tension has been the cake. We made it a couple of months ago and have been feeding it with brandy ever since. Last weekend we added the marzipan and today, whilst all sensible people were out racing 10ks, or such like, we were struggling with the icing. I was more nervous than at the start of a marathon! All the time a voice in my head was saying “this cannot be lumpy and amateurish. This must be smooth and precise.” and all the time my eye was trying to make calculations about tolerance levels and what was acceptable. Sports science tell you that this is not the way to approach any task . If you started a race thinking you had to perfect, you would inevitably trip over your laces and land on your face. But I could not think any other way and certainly could not imagine my way into some sort of icing zone (as I think that requires some sort of expertise). Nevertheless, at the moment, it looks OK. I only hope that in future it will stack-up.*

So there will be another gap of a week or so before my next post and then it will be back to normal and soon it will be time for this year’s Juneathon.

(* what a pleasure it is to use a cliche of business-speak but tell the literal truth)