See that Tattie run!: February 2010

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Mon the Irish

Half day tomorrow!!! Will be in the pub by 2, down at the rugby for about 6 or 7, and stumbling around south London by about 10-ish, I imagine.

Peter "The Claw" Clohessy heads up our motely crew of Irish Legends, journeymen and never-quites against Martin Corry's rag-tag bunch of coppers, bankers and estate agents at the Stoop, home of Harlequins, tomorrow night.

A perfect build up to the main ...

Bruges?!

One other "minor" point - I'm off to feckin' Bruges at some point in the next few months!

Directly inspired by the film, and aided by J winning two free tickets on Eurostar at the Adventure Travel Live show a few weeks back, we're off to Belgium! Woot!

Quick update

As it's Sunday and I am taking a break at my mum's between red wine and post-dinner g&t, I felt the time was right to give a quick update on where things are in general.

Half marathon - ran 17.25km on Friday night, largely unintentionally but was aiming for 15 and mapmyrun.com is apparently not overly concerned with accuracy. Pretty chuffed, and barring any major mishaps or attacks of ...

brain freeze

Cripes. Finally got down 'n' dirty with a bit of rally organising admin this evening. I have constructed a highly professional looking spreadsheet with columns and numbers and lists.

So far have discovered that we shouldn't need any jabs, as long as we have diphtheria and hepatitis A vaccinations... Do we? Who knows. Sounds easy enough to sort at any rate.

Visas, on the other hand....

...

Rain stops pain

I've been pretty committed to training for the half marathon since the New Year - which seems like an eternity ago even though it's probably only been about 6 weeks.

Not tonight, however. For verily London doth splutter and bubble under a downpour of biblical / Glaswegian proportions. It was chucking it down on my way to work, continued all day, and is still pishing now. Every pavement is flooded, it's pitch dark and I am soaked through. Not even my free London Marathon reject jacket can save me this evening.

So I'm taking a, err, rain-check. Feel guilty, which is a bit pathetic, but instead will use the time to try and get some more rally sorted.... Every cloud....

Monday, February 15, 2010

A journey of a thousand miles....

...begins with the first step. Or "Steppe" (sorry). Or - two quid.

We have our first donation to the rally charity!!

Ok, so it was from one of the organisers, kick starting our efforts with some 'seed money' - but out of tiny acorns, etc...

Was really nice of him, and great to get the fundraising underway after what seems like an interminable amount of time spent thinking "we need to get the ...

Ever wondered what pain looked like when plotted on a graph?

Allow me to demonstrate.....

I have drawn blood through thigh chafe. Blood!

I've had to lather Sudocrem on it to soothe the pain. Sudocrem!

I had to pretend I was a babyfather when buying the creme in Tesco, just to hide the embarrassment. But then I had to hobble out like an 80 year old John Wayne and they knew. They knew.

It'd better be worth it. As had the £22 I'm about to invest in a pair of Nike lycra running shorts.

See That Tattie Prance

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Going nowhere fast

cripes, things are moving at a snail's pace on the organisation front. It suddenly doesn't seem like such a good idea to be doing a half marathon whilst simultaneously trying to make time to get rally goodness sorted.

For the record, I'm now up to 8-10km runs without too much bother, with 5 weeks to go until the race. What that means in reality is that during the week, it's pushing 9.30pm by ...

Our actual theme tune....

Take a bow, Mr Jesse Winchester

No apologies if you haven't yet seen the first season of The Wire. Your fault, not mine.

all in the game, y'all

One small Steppe

Yep, that pun will be done to death over the next few months....

I sent my first begging email today - well, discounting the few that we fired off as a threesome to several disinterested vehicle manufacturers in the run up to Christmas. Pretty good going that it's only take us a further month and a bit to get round to following it up.

I got in touch with our Asset Finance division this ...

All the good ones are taken

phooey. Turns out there're a couple of Aussies doing an even more epic trip than us, who have adopted the Steppe by Steppe moniker and are already out there, pedalling round Central Asia on a 4 wheeled trike. But, it being our 4th attempt at coming up with a team name, we're not changing now. We've already ditched "One Steppe Beyond" - my personal favourite (well, after Ulaan Book Tour, which ...

We have a ready made theme tune

hmmm. Maybe the team name is more naff than I thought on Friday night...

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Steppe by Steppe

Right. After much deliberation, confusion, soul-searching and general faffing, we've finally done it. We've decided on a team name.

This is our fourth and final name choice. Our original two were based on unrealistic ideas of what vehicle we might take, and our third - borrowing heavily from a classic Madness tune - was ditched following a Google search which revealed another team making the ...

Adventure! Travel! Live!

Last Saturday saw my team mate and me get, err, lost in central London. I say "we" got lost, what I mean is "I" got us lost by misreading a map. Of Victoria. A familiar part of a city I've lived in for the past 7 years.

Bodes well for our trip of 10,000 km across 2 continents and about 7 time zones, doesn't it?

More encouragingly, the "Adventure Travel Live" show proved to be really useful as ...

See that Tattie run!