Emer Casey Memorial 10k

Catherine and I went along to the second Emer Casey Memorial 10k in Youghal this weekend.

Emer was a colleague, and fellow trainee solicitor, of Catherine’s in Matheson, Ormsby, Prentice until she tragically died from ovarian/uterine cancer 2 years ago. The Emer Casey Foundation website talks about how much Emer is missed, and the size of this event just goes to show much that is true.

I can only guess how many runners and walkers participated on Sunday, but I’d guess somewhere around 500 people. It looks like the foundation will be able to channel lots more much needed funds into researching the early diagnosis of this form of cancer. Last year they managed to raise an amazing €160,000.

Many congrats to all the folks involved in organising the event and thanks to the people of Youghal for the very warm welcome. I know I’ve never been to a race before where I got a cup of tea, tasty sandwiches, some cake and a hot shower afterwards.

Youghal Lighthouse – taken by huggs2

I found the route of the run itself fairly unusual. After the first k or so, it went fairly steeply downhill for at least a couple more k with the rest of the race consisting of an out and back along the windy seafront. So, a long downhill, lots of flat and no significant uphill.

I would have loved that except a bad case of shin splints had me reduced to a slow jog on the downhill. Once I hit the flat, though, I pushed myself harder than usual and finished in reasonable 48 minutes.

The surprise of the day was my wee little wifey, who had been aiming to finish in 60 minutes, crossed the line in a brilliant 54 minutes!

Advertisement

IMRA Leinster League :: Corrig

I only decided at the last minute to go along to the Corrig race (I was supposed to be seeing a man about a boat – more on that later), so when I arrived at the car park of Scholar’s pub near Tallaght, it wasn’t just for selfless reasons I was looking to carpool … I hadn’t a clue where Corrig was 🙂

Sean O’Byrne was kind enough to give me a lift to the start, and it was definitely the most isolated run I’d been to so far. I don’t think I could find the place again if I went looking … Funny to arrive at a random forest track and see a little gazebo with a line of runners queueing up to register.

It was a fun race – straight up the mountain, down into a boggy saddle to another small summit, back across the bog again and then down to the start by a different route.

Me and Barry Dooley – taken by Colleen Robinson

I definitely didn’t have the energy in my legs to make a decent fist out of racing, but it was nice to have a sprint finish with Barry Dooley who I’d had a good chat with at the start line. Final result – 116th place, 46 minutes 31 seconds and a poor 146% of the winning time.

(Nice to see the IMRA site improving all the time with new features like “marked runners”, “this is me” and the much needed slideshow for the photos. Yay! 🙂

Lugnaquilla

Catherine, I, Conor and Donal went for a walk up Lugnaquilla recently on a fairly damp, gloomy day.

We took a fairly unconventional route – again thanks to Lonely Planet’s Walking in Ireland – starting at the footbridge in Glenmalure, up the road to the bigger car park and the youth hostel, up through Fraughan Rock Glen onto the eastern spur of Lug, to the summit and back to the start via Clohernagh.

Looking Back Down To Fraughan Rock Glen and Glenmalure

Once we climbed up out of the boggy Fraughan Rock Glen, I really enjoyed getting up onto the spur and finding the summit in the dense mist. Lug is a bizarre place in low visibility; a flat grassy summit with serious drops on either side – the North and South Prisons – and lots of people milling about, having their lunch on the cairn marking the summit.

Top Of Lugnaquilla

The sun made an appearance as we started down from Clohernagh which is probably what made us go a bit wrong. Rather than taking a northern spur down to Art’s Lough, we went down the eastern spur and ended up at the opposite side of the forest from where the zig-zag path to footbridge begins. Full of beans, we started ploughing through the dense forest thinking it wouldn’t be long before we came upon the path. A good 45 minutes later, we finally made it through, scratched to pieces and with a nice collection of pine needles in our clothes.

Conor, Me and Donal

Unlike the rest of us, Donal – the one who wanted to turn back half way up – seemed to love this part. The quote of the day was definitely his “every day should have a moment when you feel like Rambo” …

Buying a Boat, Step One

Step one – fit a towbar to your car.

If I’m to buy a boat, I’m going to need to be able to tow it back from wherever I buy it. So, after getting a €615 quote from Finglas Ford, I decided to buy a Bosal detachable towbar (€180) and wiring kit (€60) from micksgarage.ie and fit it myself.

Well … “myself” might be a slight exaggeration … I actually went down to Waterford yesterday to my ould fella, made him cancel his Saturday morning golf and spent the entire day with him figuring it out.

Here’s a rough summary of the steps it took to fit it to me ’06 Ford Focus:

1. Jack up the back of the car and remove both back wheels for easier access. Otherwise you’ll have to just work around the wheels.
2. Remove most of the panels from the inside of the boot – the carpet, spare wheel, panel at the back of the car and soft panels on either side.
3. Next remove the bumper – there are two screws underneath the car, another couple either side of the boot opening, a couple of torx screws in the rear wheel housing and, finally, behind the wheel housing cover there’s a small bolt. With all them removed, you should be able to pop off the bumper and detach it from the cables for the reverse and fog lights.
4. Now detach the “bumper insert” – a big chunk of metal held on by three nuts underneath on each. You won’t need this again.
5. In its place, slide in the towbar frame and fasten it with the four nuts and bolts supplied.

Here’s what the towbar looks like attached and detached.

Detachable Towbar

That’s the easy part, believe it or not. Now you need to fit up the electronics.

In the wiring kit, you get a black relay box, a length of 7-wire cable with a connector for the relay box and another length of 7-wire cable with a socket at one end which gets fitted to the hitch. The basic idea is that you need to locate 7 wires – left/right indicator, left/right park, brake, fog and reverse – and connect each the wires to first length of cable using snap-on connectors.

However, things are complicated slightly by the fact that the relay box itself needs its own independent power source direct from the batter. So, you need to take a feed from the fuse box, get it out of the engine compartment, through the car and into the boot.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find each of the 7 wires – for the 2 indicators, 2 parking lights, fog, brake and reverse – by tracing the wires back from the bulbs to a convenient place to tap into them. We removed the sets of light holders on either side of the boot and traced the first 4 wires from there. The other three we traced from the bumper connector. Use a digital voltmeter, turn off all lights except the one you’re testing, find the live connector and trace the wire back.
2. Once you’ve located where you’re going to tap into the wires, decide where you’re going to put the relay box. We put it in back left hand side of the boot, down low, behind the paneling.
3. If you’re going to tap into wires on both sides of the boot – we took the left indicator and park from the left side and the rest from the right side – strip the first 7 wire cable back, split out the wires for each side, wrap them together in insulation tape and feed from the relay box to your tap-in points. Then use the snap-on connectors to tap into the wires.
4. Next, bore a hole – above where you’re going to fit the wiring socket to the towbar – into the boot compartment. Fit the grommit to the hole and feed in the other end of the cable from the socket and wire that up to the other side of the relay box.
5. Now locate somewhere in the fuse box to take a permanent (i.e. still live when the ignition is off) live feed. We took it from a “bus bar” in the auxiliary fuse box in the engine compartment next to the battery.
6. Connect a wire from this point to the supplied little fuse box and from there feed it back out of the engine compartment all the way through the car to the boot. We removed the battery and were able to pass the wire into the car through the hole where a bunch of other wires went, out above the central fuse box underneath the glove compartment, tucking it under the panels below the doors on the passenger side and into the boot.
7. Now connect the ground wires from the relay box and the towbar socket to a ground source.
8. Finally … tidy up all the wires and put back the bumper and all of the panels.

Here’s a shot of where we took a live feed from the auxiliary fuse box.

Live Feed

Other notes:

1. You need quite a selection of tools for this – spanners and sockets/wrench for 6mm to 19mm, torx screwdrivers, voltmeter, wire strippers etc. etc.
2. Don’t forget to bring the “lock nut” for removing your wheels if you have one. Yes, I forget mine.
3. Be careful not to assume that a certain colour wire means the same thing everywhere – you need to physically trace the wire – e.g. the wire in the bumper for my reverse light was green/black, but in the boot compartment it was green/orange whereas green/black there was an indicator.
4. If you do disconnect the battery, you might need a code to get the stereo working again. Don’t expect to be able to ring your dealership on a Saturday evening and get it.
5. You might run down your battery with all the messing about. That happened with me and we thought we’d seriously screwed something up when relays in the two fuse boxes started making awful sounds and the ignition often wouldn’t turn and, when it did, the engine wouldn’t start. In other words, have a set of jump leads handy.
6. The relay box that came with the wiring kit makes a sound when a trailer is hooked up and the indicators are on. Don’t worry, this is just to give you peace of mind that the lights are working. It doesn’t sound when there isn’t a trailer hooked up.

IMRA Leinster League – Hellfire

At Aisling‘s suggestion, I wrote the race report for this one:

Hey, it’s sunny out! That can’t be right, surely?

A beautiful, hazy, sunny Wednesday evening saw a motley crew gather in the South Dublin hills for the third installment of the IMRA Leinster League. This week, the location for the race was the Hell Fire Club forest south of Rathfarnham/Ballyboden.

Runners had to negotiate a 6km course involving no less than four steep climbs and similarly steep descents. Apparently, Jane and Graham can be blamed for this “Hellfire and Brimstone” route.

Fortunately, though, the warm weather, the relatively short course and the wide, dry trails made for a thoroughly enjoyable race … if a little frantic on some of the descents.

Also, runners can be proud to have briefly diverted the local hooligans at the Hell Fire Club ruins from their cider flagons for a few minutes!

…

I really enjoyed this race – nice and short, frantic descents and … yet another battle with Tommy Galvin.

Me and Tommy – taken by Colleen Robinson

I’ve mentioned Tommy as my “nemesis to be” before, and I’m not kidding. Every race we seem to trade places a few times … and this time, I just managed to get home one place and 13 seconds ahead of him! 🙂

Cardiff and Brecon Beacons Horseshoe Walk

Last weekend Catherine, Janina and I visited Vanessa in Cardiff.

Catherine and I went over Thursday morning and stayed in the lovely Vale Hotel in the Vale of Glamorgan, had a massage, wandered around the golf courses, ate, drank and generally just chilled out.

For the rest of the weekend we stayed in Vanessa’s place, close to Bute park in the centre of Cardiff.

On Saturday, Vanessa brought us for a classic Brecon Beacon’s walk where we started at the bottom of Craig y Fan Ddu, around and up to Fan y Big, Cribyn, Pen y Fan, Corn Du and back via the upper Neuadd Resevoir.

It was a long enough walk – maybe six hours at a decent pace – but we were rewarded by stunning view after stunning view. It’s hard to describe the geography of this area of the beacons … it’s like a series of peaks joined by a ridge, the north side of which is a pretty sheer drop and the south side made up by a series of glacial corrie. All that makes for lots of ups and downs and walking along cliff edges.

Cribyn – Humphrey The Camel

“Humphrey the Camel” … WTF? I can’t post that picture without also posting this:

Who’s at the top of Cribyn! – Humphrey The Camel

Strange goings-on seems to be the norm around here – just as we got back to our car, we could see a group of fell runners blithely tearing down the steep slope we had climbed at the start, while at the bottom one of their group was wildly waving his arms pointing another direction. Looks like they’d come down the wrong ridge and the poor buggers had to trudge back up and go down a different way to their cars.

Anyways, it was definitely one of the most enjoyable days walking we’ve had in quite a while. Our appetite has been whetted again for hard walks. Back to Lugnaquilla next weekend!

IMRA Leinster League

Last Wednesday in Howth saw the second race of IMRA’s Leinster League.

Since I know the route well at this stage, I was hoping I’d run it a good bit faster than last time. Off I went at the start, pushing it as hard as I dared on the lap around GAA pitch and into the woods, but it wasn’t long before I started struggling to keep up the pace. By the end of the first lap, I’d lost a good few places, but was happy enough plodding along.

In the end, I finished it a minute and a half faster than last time, but slower in terms of percentage of the winner. Slow down there youse out front!

I live down the road from Howth, so I went up early and helped out with the registration by handing out the race numbers. It was funny still doing registration for the 19.30 start at 19.40, people running in a panic thinking they were late and me saying “I’m running and haven’t even changed yet, so you’re grand”. Nice to chat to Aisling too and do the whole bizarre “I know you from the Internet” thing 🙂

Top of the first ascent – taken by John Shiels

You can’t see it in the photo above, but at other points there was a clear sign of my future dilemma – lots of sailing dinghys out in the bay … It seems that Wednesday night is the night for sailing around Howth, so if I do buy a boat soon I’ll hardly make it to many more of the Wednesday night races.

Hopefully I’ll make it to Hellfire tomorrow night, but goodness knows what time I’ll have to leave work to get all the way over there for 19.30 ….