Nike 10k

Ran the Nike 10k around London on Sunday night. Turned up in the freezing cold slightly against my better judgment, because I had’t gotten around to training for it, I’d not been feeling the best during the week and I’d been at work for much of the day on Sunday. But in the end I decided to turn out anyway in order to display mental toughness and just treat it like a training run without killing myself. The official times are out today — 42mins 02secs. Not a bad benchmark for my first 10k race, in all the circumstances. As I would have expected, that’s a bit down on a prediction based upon my half–marathon time of 1hr 34mins 19secs, but not by very much at all, really. I guess a brisk 10k is always going to be more doable without much training than a half–marathon.

Anyway, that’s a benchmark set for first races at each distance. I’ve stuck them on here for posterity. The target is now to get under 90mins for the half and under 40 for the 10k. I think this is within my capabilities with hardcore training, but bloody tough (because to be honest, I believe that my half–marathon training regime was as hard as was compatible as with a fulltime job and really went as well as it possibly could have been expected to have gone).

Web thing

Note to self: must read and get to grips with this cunning technique for making a website customizable by the user.

Mass exodus

This is worrying. If all the liberals leave America, only the right wingers will be left. ‘Selective’ may or may not be better than ‘comprehensive’ in secondary education, but I think a mix is certainly good for the politics of a nation.

Middle Class My Ass

Saw an article about this in the paper a while ago, but someone just sent this to me and I actually took the what middle class are you? test. Didn’t have much of a view on many of the questions and all the possible classes sound like complete arseholes to me. Maybe I’m actually an aristocrat but didn’t realise it.

Have you guys seen the translation of Bin Laden’s latest video on Al Jazeera?