Late nights, early mornings, willpower and allowances


I didn’t get to sleep until half past one last night, and at six a.m. my alarm went off. For a moment I lay there, contemplating putting the alarm on snooze for an hour. But because I’ve been rereading Feet In The Clouds, a highly enjoyable account of fell-running in Cumbria and all points north, I knew that I had to get up and go for a run. I didn’t manage much; tired from yesterday’s 10k (my longest run for a month) and strung out from not sleeping enough, it was an achievement to put my shoes on and get out there.

Not much of an achievement, compared to covering 42 peaks in under 24 hours, but we all have to start somewhere.

So I’m in plodding mode for a while, until I get the miles up. There’s not much sense in me running hard intervals yet; they tend to do me more harm than good, as I’m a bit fragile. Perhaps if I could guarantee eight hours sleep every night, I’d be robust enough to absorb the extra training load, but a young child is the enemy of aerobic fitness. At least when she gurgles I can assume my heart rate goes up and down with joy, not hypertension.

I managed 2k in a whisker over ten minutes. You just need to repeat that twenty-one times and you’ve run a marathon in about three and a half hours. What could be simpler?

After I got home and weighed myself, my wife and child eased themselves from the bed, and I lay down and slept for an hour. I used to think that going for a run would imbue me with energy for the rest of the day. Today seemed like a good counter example. Then again, if I’d stayed in bed until I was fully rested and then gone out for a run, it would have been too hot and I would have felt much worse. At least this way I was making some small dent in the Sisyphean task of preventing my entire body turning into cheese. I still feel worn out now, on the other end of the day, but at least I’ve done something in these 24 hours.

Preparation for our holidays has begun, if only gradually. Last night I downloaded maps of England, Nova Scotia and Colorado to my phone. (One of the good things about the Nokia is that you don’t need a data connection, and the accompanying huge bill for roaming charges, if you want to use GPS and navigation apps in a foreign country. Or at least so the spiel has it. We’re fortunate enough to be able to test this when we visit the UK, rather than getting to the wilds of Canada and then discovering we have not a clue about where we’re going.

Today I learned about the different limits for importing alcohol into the UK and Canada. In Singapore, you can have six bottles of beer (about two litres) tax free. After some searching on the internet, it turns out that Canada will allow us up to 24 355ml bottles of beer. That’s 8.5 litres of beer, for those of you too drunk to work a calculator. But in the UK, you can have up to 16 litres of beer, and four litres of wine, and a bottle of spirits or two bottles of fortified wine. And you don’t need to search long and hard to find this information, it’s the first thing you find when you search for "UK duty free allowance". Almost as if we were all a bunch of drunks.

(If that wasn’t enough, you can bring in almost £400 of perfume too, but only the most desperate would try drinking that.)

I’m not sure that we have enough of a luggage allowance for me to fly 16 litres of beer from Singapore to London, or to then drink half of it before flying to Canada, but then it’s not like we need to pack much else. What could possibly go wrong?

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