Friday the Thirteenth

The week holds very little time for training. Work is busy enough to quash notions of doing something during lunchtimes, social events put paid to doing anything in the evenings, and if you think I'm getting out of bed early to run around, you're sorely mistaken. The highlight of the week is Em and friends raising over £6000 in under 7 days, getting their hair shaved off in support of Hayley - undergoing chemo less than a year after this post was published.

Friday the 13th arrives. It's foreshadowed very last thing on Thursday, with the receipt of an email at work that requires me to put aside any plans I had for Friday in order to deal with an urgent matter. It needs to be done by Tuesday, but as I'm out on holiday the following week, it has to be dealt with in one day. By the end of Friday, I'm more than ready for a drink, so I jump at Emma's suggestion that she and Ella (Alex being on a sleepover at his Grandma's) meet me at a bar next to the railway station for dinner.

Pokesdown Station, that most unpromising of railway stations, is largely deserted as I lock up my bike on the bike rack. Security conscious, I remove the mildly expensive front light before I leave. Ninety minutes later, it's the only bit of my trusty bike that I still possess. 

I'm not even surprised. There's a painful inevitability about returning to find an empty bike rack and my cable lock (an admittedly cheap backup) severed on the floor. I simply swear under my breath and turn around to go back and find Emma and Ella, who are waiting at the bar for a taxi as the rains pours down outside. I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed at the bike disappearing, or that I blame myself for being so stupid as to assume I could leave my property in a public place for just over an hour without some little bollocks stealing it.

It is, at least, covered by insurance, so by Monday morning a replacement - the 2015 version of the same bike - is arranged for delivery on Friday. Who knows, might take a couple of minutes off my time.

Maybe it's the pent-up rage, or maybe it's the carbs from the booze I ingest to take away the pain of having the bike nicked, but Saturday morning rolls around and I post a parkrun PB of 23:44. My first sub-24 minute 5k, by a healthy margin, although it's far from easy. It's a helpful reminder that I can and should be thinking about training to get faster, not just doing rote 5k/10k runs at the same pace.