Guten morgen
After a drought, a flood.
Two blogs in a week.
Keep ’em short and keep ’em regular.
Man with a plan!
My running has been drifting in and out of the doldrums. With no races on the horizon, I have become a slacker, so I needed to do something before taking up stamp collecting. My training has been minimal at best.
The current, astronomical price of diesel has certainly made me think twice about non-essential journeys.
Much as I dearly, dearly love the Lakes, when it is costing £50+ in juice for a ride over there, I cannot afford or justify doing that every weekend. If I cannot train on the fells, I am definitely going to get my sorry ass wupped and handed to me on a plate, racing on the fells, so I had to think about alternatives closer to home. Ideally something I could recce on public transport.
After helping out marshalling at a friend’s races, I had accumulated some “points” to use as credit and cashing the whole lot in, in one go, I signed up for THE HARDMOORS 110.
A 110 mile/176km race along the Cleveland Way, starting at Helmsley across the North York Moors, up to Saltburn and round and up and down and up and down to Filey Brigg, with a 36hr cut-off.
Doable?
Hopefully!
I ran the Lakeland 100 (as a bet) in 2011, and was absolutely clueless, but somehow fudged my way round in 31:55, vowing never to run 100 miles ever again!
Fast forward to October 2026 (and ultimately May 2027).
The mind is very selective when it wants to be!
Watch this space…
Maiden Voyage!
After months and months of yes-ing and no-ing, last weekend I put on my Hypocrite hat, blew a tank of diesel driving up to Oban to pick up an eBay bargain and thereby became a Tentbox W@nker.
Not altogther convinced if I had done a good thing or not, I took it for a spin when I seized the opportunity of the weather gods and the days-off-work-demons aligning on Thursday and Friday.
After a lifetime of avoiding any eastward movement on a weekend/bank holiday (towards the Yorkshire Coast) in good weather, (the A64 has a tendency to be a car park), I snook off on Thursday morning with a loose plan.
Thursday – Pitch camp and follow the aimless lead of the “flâneur” (a group of idle French saunterers who lazily followed the flow).
Friday – Scope out some of the Cleveland Way. (As part of the Hardmoors 110 mission).
I found a cracking little simple campsite called “The Hulleys” between Scarboghorror and Robin Hood’s Bay. After lounging about I headed to the coast and ambled south, chatting to fellow ramblers and taking no set route at all. A rare day of zero pressure and nothing to do and nowhere to go or be.
Friday – The original plan was a leisurely jaunt from Whitby to Scarborough.
A dawn start and an implusive change of bus destination removed the leisurely part of the plan.
I realised that beyond Whitby, the bus carried on to distant Guisborough (which is not easy to get to from Tadcaster), so I stayed on the bus with maps from Whitby to Scarborough, live life on the edge, go wild!
All for a route which was off the maps in my knapsack and into the unknown (this is however the Cleveland Way, not the NW Passage, getting lost would be tricky, “on the trail”, but in urban areas a distinct possibility).
My only worry was getting back in time for the bus back to Scarborough and then getting back to the campsite before it got dark (as it suddenly does now in October, especially when one had planned to be back mid afternoon originally and has 3 torches, but in the tent!)
Guisborough to Saltburn was a joy (apart from getting lost here in a maze of Lakeland named streets, oh the irony of my last fell race before I spat my fellrunning dummy out!)
Saltburn to Staithes along the up and down sea cliffs was a breezy breeze
Then, whilst trotting down a ridiculuously steep path into Staithes I felt a sharp pain in my (face not butt) cheek which was a thorn off a thorn bush waving wildly in the wind, which I unhooked, thus hooking my hand, then with momentum, gravity and clumsiness, I fell and rolled into a trench filled with brambles.
Extracting myself from nature’s barbed wire, with that “Nothing happened here” look I carried on, slowly I was going mad calculating how much time I didn’t have to catch the X93.
Passing through some amazingly beautiful tinpot coastal villages, with no stoppages more than a minute (apart from thorn wrestling) and turning myself inside out, I arrived at Whitby bus station with literally 1 minute to spare.
A deliciously red hot bus ride back to Cloughton, with a drunkard pressing the stop bell every 2 minutes and up and across the fields/through the woods just before the sun plummeted like a golden bullet, swapping places with the moon and near instant pitch blackness.
(Didn’t realise I had cut my leg until I spotted a fellow bus passenger gawping at my bloody war wound).
Temu £2 windshield worked a treat, but after daydreaming of bananas and custard (not a euphemism) all day, guess who forgot the tin opener!
Post-outing thoughts?
This was a fast walk/tabbing, not a run. It was a quarter of the route.
Afterwards I was pretty much done in.
If I had carried on at this same pace, I would have still been inside the cut-offs, but afterwards I was as stiff as a board for days. (Although training has been shockingly inconsistent this year so what did I expect!)
I have a LOT of work to do, but thankfully, with 8mths to go, time is on my side. Time to cook up a plan…
Tentbox musings???
I am still undecided.
All the pros and cons I had researched and anticipated were painfully spot on.
Pros:
– Super quick to set up.
Cons:
– You really don’t want to have to take a leak in the middle of the night!
A good investment?
Hmmm?
Need a few more trips before it goes back on eBay!
(I have taped over the logo).
Time flies!
Seems like only 2 minutes ago since the Youngster was joining Brownies, now she just got her bronze award in Guides.
Growing up too fast 😦
And finally…
(Or, hanging on to my former youth!)
As a young man, I used to go to a lot of gigs. Leeds was a hotspot for bands touring. My favourite haunt was The Duchess on Vicar Lane, close enough to the old bus station to sprint for the last bus. Small enough to be an intimate gig experience. Big enough for up-&-coming bands.
There were other venues of varied sizes; Adam & Eve’s, The Warehouse, The Queen’s Hall, Leeds Poly, Leeds Uni, right up to the likes of Lady Madonna and Wacko Jacko and the big guns at Roundhay Park, but the Duchess was unique and the diddy fliers which came out every month were eagerly awaited.
In the heady days of working at the Litte Chef, we used to supplement our meagre wages with some casual ticket touting for bigger gigs, buying as many tickets as the hard earned £1.48 per hour wage, serving Early Starters and Big Seven burgers would buy. Always hoping that the gig would sell out and also hoping that we wouldn’t get chased off/done over by the “official” touts, who unsurprisingly were not overjoyed by our youthful entrepreneurship. (An additional occupational risk was the fact that gigs didn’t always sell out. I was once left with a fistful of worthless Radiohead tickets at an eye popping £6.50 apiece before the Abingdon rockers got big. I didn’t even bother popping in to see what they were like.
The Ramones, The Cramps, RHCP, Stray Cats, Wedding Present, James and many more bands, I naively imagined those times would last forever, as I naively thought the bands would last forever and gigs costing less than a tenner would also last forever…
The one gig that was simply the best ever night of all time was the one and only KING KURT.
“King Kurt fuse psychobilly mayhem with a mischievous mix of rockabilly, punk, funk, and tribal rhythms, crafting a sound as raucous as their shows. Famous for interactive, chaotic performances—flour fights, onstage haircuts, and surreal themes—they turned gigs into carnivals. Their irreverent humour, cartoonish edge, and cult Zulu beat left a lasting mark on the British rock underground”.
In a nutshell, it was absolute unbridalled muscial chaos anarchy!
The Wheel of Misfortune was a spinning wheel mid-show sideshow where the lucky contendant would be fed Snakebite through a tube from a bucket and spun round and round, until the inevitable happened!
Eggs, flour, fish, rice pudding. More ingredients than Bake Off resulted in very messy nights. The band played at the Duchess in 1992 and I was there. Nothing came close to the sheer madness and energy of a live King Kurt performance.
So, when they announced a 40th (!) anniversary tour, I was in.
Bradford Underground, Saturday 03/10/26 was on the calendar.
Then, on Monday 28/09, it was announced the band had split!
Then, on the Friday before the gig, it was announced they had split but were reforming, just sadly not in time for the next day, so it is postponed!
King Kurt are back again, back on the road to rack and ruin.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you KING KURT 🙂
Hasta la proxima!
Johnny
