Into the month of showers and fools…

How do folks

Hope you all had a mighty fine Easter.
Another month, another blog and another video (two in fact!)

The clocks have gone forward, it is officially spring, so (for a winter hater like me) we are going in the right direction

So, witout further rambling, here is the latest ladfromtad.com blog.

Super Jasmin!

Jasmin Karina Paris.

Even if you are not into fellrunning, chances are that you will have recently have heard of this 40 year old Vet (animals and over 40, see what I did there!) Mum of two and absolutely bloody amazing athlete.

Former British fellrunning champion (twice), Scottish Hillrunning champion (twice), Skyrunning champion, Wasdale winner (6 times), Lakeland Classics Trophy winner, former Bob Graham Round record holder, one-time overall/outright Ramsay Round record holder, Womens Fellsman record holder, Womens 24hr Munros record holder, and probably best known for her 2019 Spine Race victory in which she set a new outright course record for the 268-mile Pennine Way route, (i.e, She beat all the blokes too!)

The 2019 Spine race caught media attention as Jasmon was expressing milk for her baby daughter at some of the checkpoints (her daughter wasn’t running, nor waiting for milk at the checkpoints), and she still beat everyone and took more than 12 hours off the fastest previous time.

The Spine race is not a jolly, it is the Pennine Way in its entirety. Very fit walkers might walk it in 2-3 weeks. Jasmin ran from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders in 83 hours, 12 minutes and 23 seconds.

She is co-founder of THE GREEN RUNNERS, of which I am a member too 🙂

All of the above is impressive enough, but on Friday 22/03/24 at around 9:18pm UK time, she crossed the line as first ever female finisher of the BARKLEY MARATHON.

No normal marathon and definitely not a normal race, in many ways.

Where to begin?
(From a purely selfish spectator point of view) there is almost no media coverage, there is one cryptic twitter/X feed from one guy, but definitely no ESPN/Sky Sports cameras. It feels like following a race on Ceefax back in 1982.
There is no race website and no livestreaming.

The race itself derives from an attempted prison break!

“Frozen Head State Park, where the annual race is held, once housed the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. This fortress-like facility counted among its inmates James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. 

In 1977, Ray attempted a breakout. However, the dense vegetation and harsh terrain thwarted his efforts, allowing him to traverse a mere 8 miles over 54 grueling hours before authorities caught up with him, sprawled in defeat amidst the wilderness.”

Limited to 35 runners with no details advertised publicly.
Entrants must complete an essay on “Why I Should be Allowed to Run in the Barkley,” and pay a $1.60 application fee, if accepted first timers must bring a registration plate from their locality.

Previous racers have to supply an item such as a white shirt, or a pair of socks, as a donation potential non-finishers (and there are plenty of them).
Past finishers must also bring a packet of Camel ciggies as part of their race fee.
The start time is anytime from midninght to noon, with a conch shell horn being blown one hour before the start and the race begins when the race organiser Gary Lazarus Lake Cantrell (Laz) lights up a cigarette.

There is no course map, you cannot recce the course and GPS watches are not allowed. There are no waymarks, no aid stations. The route changes annually, with checkpoints marked solely by books hidden in obscure locations. Runners must locate these books to tear out a page, proving their adherence to the course.

The race itself is 100 miles.
A 5-lap course of 20 miles (100 miles with 13000ft of climbing or 160km with 15000m-ish of climbing in total, basically up and down Everest twice!)

Loops are run clockwise during the day and ACW during the night. On the 5th and final lap, runners are sent CW and ACW alternately, so in essence you can’t just follow the runner in front.

The loops start and end at camp, which is the only place runners can receive aid, tape up blisters, replenish food supplies, and take a nap — if they have time. Each loop has to be finished within 13 hours and 20 minutes.

Competitors have 60 hours to finish.

Ultrarunner Damian Hall (the other co-founder of the Green Runners, who ran Barkley for the first time last year and made it to loop five this year before dropping out, called it “a Kafka-esque hell.”

In a word, absolutelybonkers.

Jasmin had previously completed 3 laps of the course (entitled the “fun run”) and was one of only 2 women to have started a fourth lap, but this year, with just 99 seconds to spare she became the first ever woman to finish the entire course.

(As a result of the media blackout of the event itself, there are not many photos, but here are the five finishers).

L-R: Greig Hamilton, Jared Campbell, Ihor Verys(winner), Jasmin Paris, and John Kelly.

All of which adds up to a very historic achievement, in my opinion, on a par with the first ever sub 4 minute mile (and a lot longer and harder!)

I don’t have a telly, so I can’t watch Sports Personality of the Year, but if she isn’t at least nominated, there is something deeply wrong with this world!

Bull ROCK!

Last autumn, the Nipper and her school choir did a collaboration with a local York band, called BULL.

Long, long story short.

The lead singer of the band, Tom, invited us both to a VIP sound check when they played a local gig at the Crescent, York.

A brilliant afternoon and one which put a smile on both of our faces 🙂

ESOL/ESL/TEFL/TESOL

• ESL: English as a Second Language
• ESOL: English to Speakers of Other Languages
• TESOL: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
• TEFL: Teaching English as a Foreign Language

People talk about “life changing” experiences and mine was at the Puericultorio A. Pérez Araníbar, in Lima, Peru in 2004.

Cutting a very long story short, after a course in TEFL and very little other prep, I found myself in Lima. Naively hoping that I would somehow learn Español via magic or osmosis.

I went there as a volunteer TEFL teacher, with little idea of what to expect. (I had expected the Andes, llamas and condors to be on my doorstep, but later found out that they were a bumpy 10 hour overnight bus ride up north!)

Working at the Puericultorio (a word translating to “childcare”, but in this instance a sizeable orphanage, a word which I could never pronounce as it contained too many rolled “RRRRRs”) changed my life completely. Another story for another time, but the volunteer organisation who I had gone through, became a place where I worked two years later (yet another notch on my sprawling CV), as Latin American Coordinator.

Working for a volunteer travel placement organisation was a job that was as amazing as it was frustrating as it was impossible.
Day to day work was just a firefighting exercise with an ever expanding to-do list and a logistical nightmare most of the time, but working with some brilliant people, especially a lass called, Emma, who coincidentally left there on the same day as I did (for smiliar reasons).

In my time as an ESOL/TEFL/TESOL/kind of Northern English teacher, I taught in a lot of different places, to lots of different students, the orphanage, in the jungle, in schools, language institutes, mining companies, shipping companies, telecommunication companies and in a community centre in Woodhouse, Leeds. (Emma from the volunteer placement job contacted me and that was how I became a volunteer there).
For me personally, teaching was/is the best job in the world. On a good day I would have done it for free and even on a bad day (of which there were few) nobody died!
(Due to screwing up my A-levels bigtime, I never got to university and therefore never got a degree and therefore never became the Geography Teacher I wanted to be. Therefore I was not a “proper” teacher. i,e. I couldn’t teach in a UK school, without getting a degree, which sadly is not going to happen now).

Anyway, generally as a teacher you have an attendance register and know exactly how many students you are just about to teach and their level of English.

Except at Woodhouse!

The big difference was that you never, ever knew who was going to turn up!

Woodhouse Community Centre was an amazing place, run by volunteers, which offers support to the local communty, as their mission statement states “Oblong aims to develop the capacity and skills of people living in socially and economically disadvantaged areas in such a way that they are better able to identify, and help meet, their needs and to create active flourishing communities, and to run a community centre, primarily for the benefit of the Woodhouse , Little London and Hyde Park areas.“

I was there from 2012-2014, slotted in between night shifts at the Brewery and loved every minute of it.

Classes could consist of 5 students, or 25 students, advanced level, or absolutely zero English beginners level. At times I was teaching 2 classes in 2 rooms, spinning several plates at the same time. It was awesome, exciting and I was very sad to leave, but I went back to Peru, so the commute would have been tricky!

E.O.D. (Enter on the day)

I admit that I am completely stuck in the past, yearning for things “back in the day”, when everything seemed less of a ballache than nowadays!

“Fell races used to cost £1 on the day and you popped 20p in a self addressed envelope, to get your results 6 weeks later! Shoes cost £20 a pop and nutrition involved a choice between a banana or a jam sarnie” you will hear me say again and again…

Nowadays there is the internet, race entries are done in advance online, results are available pretty much instantly, shoes are £100+ and I won’t even go down the nutrition route.

Was the past a simpler (cheaper) time, with less complications (or reponsibilities?) Who knows!

However, nowadays fell running is way more popular, races sell out before closing dates, entry fees are not £1 and if you can find a first class stamp for 20p, I will have a book of 12 please 🙂

All of which is a seamless, albeit lengthy segue from teaching a class of unknown quantity/level to modern day fell race organisers.

Races are booked online to cut out a shedload of admin on the day and to know whether to cater for 20 or 200 hungry post race runners!
Why would you not have pre-entry races?

As a result of my hopeless lust for nostalgia and shocking admin, I have either missed the race closing date or not-got-in-before-it-filled-up. Resulting in a change of gameplan.

Life is not linear and races fill up faster than you think!
I had planned on running the Half Tour of Pendle, then the Coledale Horseshoe before Jura, but…

I missed the closing date for Pendle and Coledale was full before you could say Supercalifra…

So, the plan is to run ESKDALE ELEVATION

(I won’t go into any details until I have actually set foot on the start line!)

Training – in and out!

In the jumble of nonsense that goes onto my Strava profile (what I loosely call “training”), it is notable that there is less running these days, as 2024 is the year of S&C (not to be confused with S&M).

I had big ideas with the mighty STAIRMASTER, a kind of uphill treadmill/stairway to pain, but reality means that I don’t get to the gym often enough to make it pay, so sadly the Stairmaster is now OUT.

In come weekly Weights, wobble board and weighted vest

And I am three months in with Carla Molinaro’s excellent SCY programme.

Just need to find some time to do some running now!

Tight lines

The Nipper and I hadn’t been fishing in a while and rather than getting battered by the North Sea, we opted for a day inland.

Despite having a full week off work, (to be fair the forecast was generally crap from Monday to Friday) I chose the coldest and windiest day to go fishing with the Youngster.

Highfield Pond was our chosen location. “It is fishing really well” said the bloke in the fishing tackle shop.

Arriving early (being the only car in car park was an ominous precursor) we took shelter from the bitter wind and thence started a pretty lean day of fishing.

The Nipper lost one fish (only bite of the day), I managed to snap my rod and we had eaten our packed lunch by 11am, so we went home, just as the sun came out!

First blank in a long time, but it is always good to get some fresh air 🙂

MAN-WITH-A-VAN?

In the last ramblings, I was on the trail of a new (or more like 15th hand) van.
After hours and hours and hours scouring ebay, I was on the verge of giving up, then by sheer chance a bloke at a garage told me that his mate was selling his van.
It ticked all the boxes and best of all didn’t involve a 18hr train ride to Torquay.

Affordable 🗸
Not a wreck 🗸
Local 🗸

I was given a number for his wife, (as she was better with phones than he was, I was told).
What could go wrong???

After some second hand chat with the bloke, a price was agreed and a meet up was arranged.

I sorted out provisional insurance, emptied the ATM and was on my way!

Literally just as I was walking out of the door to go and collect the van, with a wad of £20 notes in my pocket, I got a text saying that he had decided not to sell the van.
Make of that what you will!

So (for now), I have given up on the dream as a daft idea!

(As a footnote, one may ask “Why did you sell a perfectly good van last year?”
The answer is threefold.
1) It would have been cheaper to run it on a mix of liquid saffron, pure cocaine and unicorn’s tears.
2) LPG garages seem to be mainly located near El Dorado. (The mythical land, not the soap opera)
3) I simply needed the brass.

Raiders round-up

Not a lot of good news coming out of Craven Park of late.

Beaten away at local Jam-eating rivals, Whitehaven, by one point, a late drop goal, means that the only way is up for the Shipbuilders right now.
(Although, as no teams actually do get promoted this year, the only real way is not to go down!)

Still looking for an elusive win in the league, at home to York next weekend.

Barrow Ladies meanwhile just got edged out by Wigan by 2pts in their most recent Superleague game.

Both teams need to get into winning ways soon. COYR!!!

AND FINALLY

I am just about keeping up with my promised quota of 1 video per month.

The realisation that the Jura race is about 8 weeks away made me panic, but my mate, Barry stepped in with a suggestion of a trot round the only AL race on the North Yorks Moors (“AL” races are minimum 20km and average not less than 50 metres climb per kilometre).

The Bilsdale fell race starts at Chop Gate and does a big loop up and down every hill and boggy bit in the vicinity. It was a clear but breeezy day on the tops. I went for something a bit different this time with the filming. Less chitchat and much shorter duration. I am sure the old format (sprawling wafflefest) will be returning soon!

So, here is ladfromtad.com vlog episode 3 (<5mins, with an alternative soundtrack from the original!)

Then, inexorably, rearending straight into episode 3 is the red-hot-off-the-press Easter Lakes outing in episode 4.
Glenridding-Catstyeyam-Helvellyn-Nethermost Pike-Dollywagon Pike-Fairfield-St. Sunday Crag-Glenridding. Less than 10mins long. The editing was brutal as I chopped and slashed and burned it down to a watchable length.

Plus, a rain free and clear day in the Lakes, priceless 🙂

That’s all for now folks.
See you next time 🙂

Johnny