I’ve got a Watchman Sensit.  New tank last year so it came as part of the package.  Works well.

I picked up an R500 frame in 1987 for ~£180 after I stuffed a 531c.  I won so many races on that thing.  Power transfer was unreal… back in the day of 20mm tyres @120psi.  As a big powerful rider I became a specialist in… hillclimbing (with the bike in full road trim with 32 spoke wheels)  just because the thing put all the power to the road.  Amazing.

Probably 1990, money got tight and I tried to sell a beautiful Columbus SL framed bike but the guy who came only had eyes for the Cannondale and reluctantly I parted with it.

Nor mine. Dessicant type is very efficient,

I was doing some research recently and the received wisdom out there is the opposite of this, so really interested to hear.  As you mentioned earlier, dessicant is effective at dehumidifying even when the room temperature is low (unlike compressor types).  That’s always seemed like a really good capability to me.

Presuming the large box is the master socket,  the thin cable coming “out the other side” is extension cabling.  Perfectly legit to pull this out.  Yes, the plastic slots are IDC terminations.

But best to do your research and be sure you know how to put it all together for your final needs.

The cable will be “insulation displacement connections”.  i.e.the wire is pressed between a pair of contact blades that cut the insulation.  If it is really old, there could be screw terminals inside (very rare these days but I have seen some).

It sounds like it is “between rooms” rather than “from the outside into a room”  so the possibility is it’s extension cabling and completely up to you to do with as you like.  If it is the master socket and the master socket cabling then it is technically BT’s network and they don’t like you mucking about with it (legal stuff).  The question becomes: “If you stuff it up and can’t get it back working again, who are you going to call?”

So:
1) consider your risk appetite
2) buy an IDC push down tool (~£1 plastic thing)
3) watch a youtube video on using IDC tool on BT type sockets
4) open up the box and take photos of which colour wires go where in the connectors
5) yank them out
6) pull wire
7) do DIY
8) consider how to put the wiring back together again

or….

1) work out it is an extension that doesn’t have any purpose in the modern home (DECT or digital voice or you use mobile phones), so go straight to step 4/5 in the above

Just on the costs thing, I plotted out a few suppliers for their general platform costs on Desmos.  It’s not perfect and it isn’t a complete picture of the market as I did it to cover consolidating my pensions.  There are no transaction costs in this because my need was to consolidate and park my pots without new contributions.

Notable that Interactive Investor (who market themselves as the cheapest because of their flat rate) are not the cheapest because: a) their flat rate isn’t flat; it is tiered b) their flat rate is higher than some others cap their percentage rate.  There also appears to be a tiered transaction pricing hidden in their fees so above a threshold a trade might be £40 instead of £3.99.  That’s a really sneaky bit of sharp practice.  Their costs are also insane if you get an ISA with them alongside their pension.

HL get two plot lines depending on whether you’re in stocks/ETFs or managed funds.  The funds option is the orange line that is far and away the most expensive on the graph, but it is really an all inclusive price.  Their stocks/ETFs pricing is actually quite acceptable (but trading charges are known to be high at £11.95).

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/6qi8hd3hnb

^^^ the plot is percentage of pot plotted on the y axis vs size of pot.  On this analysis, AJBell and Aviva were joint cheapest above a threshold size of ~£92,000.  (Caveat: do your own research)

Youtuber Chris Palmer does a round up of pension platform costs that he publishes as a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I04rPygSWLJhdMx8aBJuJfluhJmACtHOcJm4I9MZXuA/edit?gid=0#gid=0

I did some more digging around these and really didn’t feel the Fidelity pricing was accurate because at the bare price it is so limited it is almost inevitable you’ll incur some of the heftier costs (i.e. choice of ETFs)

Vanguard is cheap for small pots and massively expensive when they get big.

InvestEngine have not yet built the ability to transfer in (maybe October).

Halifax are sneaky bastards who invent charges when you’re accessing your pension (others don’t) so I wouldn’t want to give them the business

Some will not manage a pot in drawdown, so you’ll be transferring out at retirement.

I’m also keen on something that can be viewed on a wealth consolidation dashboard app like MoneyHub.  After all of the analysis, AJBell seem right for me, but I haven’t moved anything yet and YMMV.

how do you think these tracker managers pick stocks?

Tracker managers?  Passively managed ETFs largely replicate the index holding (and it is this that makes them good ones).  There is no-one calling “Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell!”.  They run a system of staying inline with the indexed securities coping with fund inflows and outflows.

It is a doddle to find index ETFs that track their respective index.  It is a doddle to find a diversified index that trends upwards because the market has trended upwards for over a hundred years.  The counterargument to “trading” is that most traders do not beat market indices.  In a thread about pensions started by an OP whose decision is about whether to pile in more on a workplace pension vs a SIPP, I’m not sure what the tipster vs ETF discussion is adding.

I’ll just leave this here

https://www.hartfordfunds.com/practice-management/client-conversations/managing-volatility/timing-the-market-is-impossible.html

It’s 3%, the employee minimum is 5%.

My mistake.  The other rule is that the minimum total contribution for auto-enrolled is 8%.  I’d been with my employer since before the rule and I paid 3% and they paid 6% which skewed my understanding.

Nah.  Employer minimum is 5% these days.

Your age?

Your tax band?

Your employer?

Your health?

If you increase salary sacrifice you get a reduction in the national insurance contributions you make.  This is usually 2%.  You don’t get that in a SIPP.  Huh?  2%? Why is 2% important?  a) Because it is certain; b) because it might not be the whole story; your employer might offer something back on the employers NIC that they pay (proportion of 13.8%)

The other real benefit of salary sacrifice is that it is set and forget.  You don’t have to pay too much attention.  This is especially true if you’re a high rate tax payer as you don’t have to claim back the extra tax relief.

Next thing though is to look at  how the workplace pension is invested.  Usually you’re dumped into a default fund which is seldom the right answer for most people.  If you were investing through a SIPP you’d be making your own choices for investment, so this is no different.

Default funds across the pensions industry are set up to be moderate in all regards.  Why?  Because the industry has a regulatory responsibility to assess investors attitude to risk (ATR).  ATR is individual, so if you’re a company setting up a workplace scheme you’re not permitted to take excessive risks so, instead, everybody gets the moderate risk option…  but then we need to translate the industry’s definition of risk into you and me terms.  Risk in investing is all about volatility.  Stuff goes up and stuff goes down.  Non-risky is usually reserved to things which don’t go up and down… like cash.  But holding cash is actually “risky” because of inflation.  You will never beat inflation with cash.  So the things that go up and down the most (equities), evened out over a broad diversification and over a longer period of time do go up and beat inflation.  And that is without historical exception.  So the risky investment is actually the “safe” (go figure) investment… with a few caveats.

The caveats are: “longer term”: the market will drop from time to time and recovery from a drop might take months or a few years.  In most instances, you as an individual are ill-placed to determine if the market is going up or going down, so the behaviour that nets you the most certain beneficial outcome is to ignore the market and just keep tucking money way into your pension, into the same diversified investments.

The second and most important caveat is with how long you have to go until retirement.  This is because if the volatility strikes in the early years of retirement, you will be cashing out “distressed investments” and your retirement will suffer because of this.  So on the approach to retirement you need a plan (do your research and consider getting advice).

Once again, if you start a SIPP you’ll be making all these decisions.  You will underperform the market if you get sucked into “trading”, because 98% of actively managed funds underperform in the long term and you’re not a top 2% fund manager (after survivorship bias) on a run of luck.  So you need to park your money in something that (warning) will go up and down but if you hold it in the long term it will go up and outperform inflation.

So log into your workplace pension account (98% of people don’t ever do this) and see what it would take to change your investments to some sort of broadly diversified low cost ETF.  Think about what you’ll be happy investing in for the next 30 years (i.e. no single company; but a low cost index fund probably ticks the boxes).  Why 30 years?  Because if you’re miles away from retirement you have this much time anyway and if you’re closer to retirement, retirement isn’t the end of your investing (unless you take an annuity).  30 years is a good amount of time to think about and it gets you out of the mindset of thinking that this month, next month, last month have any significant importance.  They don’t.

Low cost does have an impact over 30 years.  Make sure the investment is low cost.

All SIPPs cost money.  The workplace pension charges a fee as well.  So think carefully about whether you want to pay for both and whether you have the discipline to put money away every month.  Set and forget is the winning argument for the workplace pension.  Just don’t forget it when you leave your job – that is the time to maybe consolidate that pension into a SIPP alongside any workplace pension from your new job.

scans of loads of handwritten notes that I remember being shown on the 24th floor of Centrepoint, asked me if I remembered them, 

That sounds familiar.  I had an AVC from the Centrepoint dudes as well.

I just take the 25% out of the three small pots I’ve got,

Not specific to you @theotherjonv because I think your small pots are larger than “small pots” in the pension rules, but I’m posting this to plug a tiny gap in all the other pension scenarios that have been covered.

There are special rules for cashing out pension pots less than £10,000 (small pots rules).  You can do this 3 times only in your life for personal or stakeholder pensions and any number of times for occupational small pots.  You have to cash them out entirely as a lump sum (as long as you’re above pension age (55 now) and it terminates all benefits under that pension arrangement).

In itself, dong this isn’t a crystallisation event so it apparently doesn’t trigger the money purchase annual allowance.

For uncrystallised small pots, 25% would be tax free; 75% would be taxed at your marginal rate of income tax.  Apparently you need to have available lump sum allowance but the tax free lump sum amount is not in itself decremented from your lump sum allowance (weird rule).  If you’re instead cashing out the remnant of a pot that has had some crystallisation, the tax free amount will only be on uncrystallised portions and MPAA will already be applicable.

There is also a separate rule for “trivial commutation” which is if all your pension pots add up to less than £30,000.  This situation might occur where you’ve been running down your pots with a plan to have ongoing reliance on the state pension only in addition to non-pension sources of funding (ISAs, rentals, part time work etc.)

Because trivial commutation is a separate provision, if you have small pots, you can take them first and trivial commutation can kick in if the remaining amount is below £30000.  This means that in an extreme example it may be possible to take up to £60000 through the combination of these rules (with 25% tax free in this way) if 3x personal or stakeholder pension small pots and more if there are multiple occupational small pots.

These rules are largely in place to assist people whose occupations (moving from job to job) have resulted in a very fragmented set of pension pots building up but they constitute a weird outlier part of the pension rules that might have value in other situations.

One of the perks my company does is adding their employer”s NI to anything I put in my pension.  So far so un-mazing, but the weird thing is that they do it at the 13.8% lower ( standard?) tax rate rather than the marginal 2% rate that they are actually saving. So I save 40% tax and 13.8% NI.  Daft but handy

13.8% is correct.  Employers doesn’t  vary.  It is 13.8% on every pound above the secondary threshold calculated per period of pay (i.e. no aggregation over the tax year; it is a weekly or monthly threshold value depending on how you’re paid).

You’ll also be getting Employees NIC reductions on your payslip (just less NIC paid).  If you drop down through the thresholds you’ll be getting some relief at 2% and then some at 8%.

It’s not a kick in the teeth

I’ve usually experienced harshness from rebound being too slow.  Experiment in the other direction, maybe.

Having sessioned Top Chief a bunch of times (and raced it), it helps to know where it is going through repetition.  Just doing a one and done on a tricky trail leaves you with more questions than answers.  Apart from that, my only suggestion is to get yourself nicely centred on your bike.  Make your position “low”, not “back”.  You’re absolutely right that it is easier with a bit of speed.

You cannot simply penalise people for doing what they need to do.

I thought that was exactly how it works.

Developing tax policy to inhibit non-preferred behaviours is a thing.  I’m not denying that.  Just saying that taxes always get set according to political affordability which only becomes linked to individual voter affordability if the overall revenue curve from an increase reaches an inflection and the opposition drive a wedge into that particular issue in order to screw us elsewhere.  We pay what can be afforded (cf. price of bikes/e-bikes) and we get a chance to cast our vote for one or other pack of scoundrels to form our government.  These rules seem to be constant.

I agree, at some point they’re going to have to do something because:

a) Roads need paying for if people want to drive

Any old public money can pay for roads and vehicle excise duty can pay for, you know… that expensive thing… the NHS.

Is this thread supposed to garner responses?

Great escapism!

Kerry is a Scottish mountain biking champion apparently. Anyone know her?

I know I’m a week out of date but I rode with Kerry in her very first days moving over to MTB from moto.  She’s a proper talent with a complete natural feel for getting a bike in the air.  No way I’d keep up with her nowadays.  I think she was eleven times British motocross champion and all that experience came through to the bike. Great character too.

Kerry is a Scottish mountain biking champion apparently. Anyone know her?

1. My better half does this plenty. Remelts candle wax and pops in a new wick.  Just be aware of flashpoint and be super circumspect if doing over gas.  Do it with good ventilation because of the volatile hydrocarbons

I did a Vitra that wasn’t bad.  The clown show plumbers/builders managed to snap the debris shield and crack the cistern on iteration no. 1 so I had to dig their fiasco out of the wall and do the job properly.

Chose Vitra based on the flush plates that went with the interior designer’s (wife’s) palette that were in stock.

Fitting the pan was a doddle after the tiler had done their work.

Note: the debris shield on Vitra is non-removable once fitted and will snap some/all plastic tabs if you attempt to remove it.

If you get a high rise bar, you can get fore and aft adjustment with a minimal change in sweep angles (there is still change, but you get a good few mm reach before anything significant happens with sweep.). This is cheaper and more convenient than swapping in different length stems.

The position with a low stem (no spacers) and a high rise bar is more or less the same as you’d get with a longer stem, more spacers and a low rise bar. Of course, fashion dictates that long stems are naff and spacers are naff, so stick to modern principles and have all the benefits of actually being in the right position on your bike without the fashion police coming to get you.

and that makes it less efficient by definition than it could be

Just getting my utterly-pointless-pedantry mode triggered here…

Aerodynamic drag force is proportional to CdA. The A refers to an area characteristic of the shape for which Cd has been determined. It doesn’t need to be frontal area. The pedantry is that Cd is determined by the shape of the vehicle and A is just a scaling factor for that particular dimensionless coefficient of drag. If the shapes are different, the Cd is different. If you use plan area vs frontal area in calculating/measuring your Cd, the Cd will be a different Cd but CdA will be the same. Without knowing both Cd and A you cannot determine whether one vehicle is more efficient than another. So (pedantry), knowing A is bigger does not “by definition” mean the drag is worse when different shapes are involved.

This is utterly-pointless-pedantry because the shapes involved are, according to Wikipedia characterised as follows:

The average modern automobile achieves a drag coefficient of between 0.25 and 0.3. Sport utility vehicles (SUVs), with their typically boxy shapes, typically achieve a Cd=0.35–0.45. The drag coefficient of a vehicle is affected by the shape of body of the vehicle.

As a Honda CRv owner, the 1.6 diesel gets better mpg in many circumstances than cars I’ve had before but I also tend to drive it less like an adolescent idiot than cars I’ve had before. I bought it (secondhand in 2018) to get two bikes in the back *easily*. It has been a workhorse and has done necessary long distance work heavily laden and full. It has the nominal fallback of all wheel drive for when I need it in the Scottish winter, although I doubt it actually does much compared to proper 4wd with locking/limited slip diffs.

The descent from the gondola station back down to Aosta, at Pila.

^^^^ this.

It is awesome. That bit with the fence almost all the way across the path that you can sort of jink around at speed and let out a sigh of relief before remembering the next corner is deep in dust and has no grip at all. The steep linked esses. The serious bit of rough stuff at the bottom with the trees flashing by at over 60kmh.

Never did get down the Sam Hill bit without binning in the loam. Usually stuck to the main drag options and cranked out the laps. Grin every time.

And in particular, that day when it had rained just the right amount to settle the dust and get everything tied down with some extra grip.

My own experience is a bit patchy (pun intended).  I’ve had plenty of skin problems on and off and I can still trigger them pretty much by a combination of poor habits/diet.

So it’s inflammation, innit?!

Usual suspects are dairy, processed foods (general), sugar, alcohol, sugar, omega 6 fats (e.g. processed foods, mass-farmed meats (including farmed salmon)), sugar, caffeine, sugar.

I’ve leapt from cause to cause, eliminating gluten, dairy and caffeine by turn.  I hesitate to pin it on any particular dietary cause because if you replace one bad food with another your body stills fights to find its balance.  I can fix it by eating more veggies and less bread and slipping in the odd bit of oily fish vs avocado etc.  It has got to the point where I know how to reign it in and I know when I’ve done something dumb and deserve the consequences.

The dermatologist a few years back was useless, diagnosing “rosacea” which is the medical code for: “I don’t have a scooby but let’s put you on antibiotics for six months”.

I had to contest a similar situation years ago.

The company changed the van drivers report of what happened and invented a phantom vehicle that hit them from behind because they already had some nudgy-nudgy damage at the back of their van. I pointed out that the first point of impact would show the most damage (physics) and the comparative damage at front and rear of the van showed them up as complete liars and chancers. I also suggested in advance that if they started accusing me of reversing into them and causing the damage that way, they would also be lying (but I wouldn’t put it past them to serially lie considering how they’d started out). This was ridiculous but I ended up with a no-fault outcome but lesson learned that any tangle with insurance is a PITA and idiots will chance illegal abuse of insurance claims on the perception it is a victimless crime.

As someone who has mapped multiple natasp engines… there is no scope. The fuelling is the fuelling and swinging the advance will get you the square root of FA before pinging and putting holes in your pistons.

I’ve seen dreadful tuning on tuned engines. You can always make an engine make less power but going the other way is about implying there is a fault to be fixed.

With experience you can tune an engine for full throttle based on a couple of assumptions and be within an ace of it first go. And that is it. As much power as you will ever see.

Tuning for drivability, part throttle and transients is hard. Typically these days the factory is doing it better than the aftermarket. I’ve seen dreadful work done by charlatans who get the thing on a rolling road and join the dots.

The mapping is matching the fuelling to the air ending up in the cylinders. If you’re not changing any of the physical configuration of the engine, there will be no change in the charge and no potential for power.

Everybody selling you something different is a con artist.

A usability option for ultrawides and screen sharing and/or side-by-side work… run two cables to the screen and then PBP (picture-by-picture the two inputs side by side setting their resolutions to half-width.

This can be a pretty tough setup to get all the compatibility issues sorted. I have had it working on a 16:9 4k screen but it was more fuss than it was worth for me in the long run.

The argument in favour is that you can share an entire screen so the Teams call can see you working across applications which can be important for demos/support/training scenarios.

A key factor in running a bigger monitor is the distance between you and the monitor and the usable resolution – i.e. when the pixels become indistinguishable to the eye. This is why you have scaled settings in Windows and MacOS these days. A more distant, big, hi=res monitor can be a more relaxing all-day experience but then you can’t use native resolution on it for most purposes. This is where ultra wides are a pretty good option.

I put a tool together to model perceived real estate based on acuity/viewing distance

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bown7evuiq

Instructions:

TL:DR – play with the slider for pixel pitch (i). 0.23 is a good value for a viewing distance of 30 inches. If you’re viewing closer,

1. The top table lists monitor configurations for native resolution and diagonal. If the last column is empty for a row, it is not plotted in the comparison. If it is 1, it is plotted.

2. The slider for variable i is for the pixel pitch factor (units mm/pixel); this presumes that after a point, resolution is pointless; this is a viewing distance factor. 0.255 mm/pixel pixel pitch is about 100 pixels per inch. 0.230 mm/pixel is about 110 pixels per inch (viewing distance 30 inches). Play around with this.

You then get a bunch of outputs and the visualisation.

– viewing distance (in meters) equivalent to the pixel pitch (where the monitor resolution can be considered better than your retina)
– viewing distance (in meters) equivalent to the pixel pitch (where the monitor resolution is reasonable for office application type use)

In the table you get a bunch of calcs leading to…
– the scaled resolution you will use to view the monitor
– M – the megapixels of the display (a measure of real estate)

At that 0.230 value for i (viewing distance 1m), a 4k UHD 32″ 16:9 monitor and a typical 34″ ultra-wide are almost equivalent in real-estate at ~5 megapixels with arguably the ultrawide being the better shape. The ultra-wide will be at native resolution and the 4k will be scaled at 1.25x.

If you do photographic detail work (and sit closer to the monitor at 0.8m), the 4k monitor comes into its own at native resolution equivalent to 8.3 megapixels.

You have trouble weighting the front of the Optic and everyone is telling you to put a shorter stem on it.

How is that going to work? Short stems don’t make the wheelbase shorter.

Separate router?

First reaction was that it was a strange solution until I thought about it. If you’re in a position where you don’t have interference from neighbours I guess it is viable to run 2x non-overlapping 2.4GHz channels, that’s actually a pretty good solution. You’ve got twice as much 2.4GHz bandwidth. Maybe wife-friendliness would be a challenge for two ugly routers vying for space.

I’ve become a huge fan of TP-Link Omada network kit. This is TP-Link’s rip-off of Ubiquiti Unifi. Price point is good and it has all been released in the last few years with less reliance on legacy products but it is really only for cabled solutions so not as mainstream as “mesh”.

Omada allows the 5Ghz/2.4Ghz radios in each access point to be mapped to broadcast multiple SSIDs. Each SSID maps to a VLAN. You need cabling and some VLAN aware switching/routing to hold it all together. Apart from the access points I have a cheap managed switch with POE (TL-SG108PE) and an Edgerouter-X (Ubiquiti). The whole Omada thing runs with a controller (OC200) which gives you a web interface and app to control and monitor everything. No licence fees. It can be kept local or be internet available.

It means you can segregate even more than just an IOT vs humans split. I can spin up SSIDs for individual IOT vendors so they can speak back to their home bases and not have a clue about whether another vendor has a footprint in the home.

Omada has been rock solid for me since I installed it to get WFH through lockdown sorted in a London flat.
Having just made the permanent move into my dad’s old house it is on the to-do list to migrate from the installed BT Whole Home network to the Omada kit. The cabling is in place but the access point placement will need to be thought through. The older wall plate access points don’t roam as nicely as the newer ones so I’ll update a couple of those.

I’ve just launched into the deep waters of Home Assistant, wanting to trim down reliance on Alexa. Main thing I’ve done so far is put the smart socket that charges my eMTB battery on an automatic timer – generally I charge a flat battery to midway charged and then top it up the night before a ride. The timer function also maps to a surprising number of other use cases – outside lights in the garden; a shoe dryer. It is pretty mundane stuff but it seems to be in the category of making annoying things less annoying.

I run Cura 2 and Code RSC across my enduro and eeb respectively, both 29ers with 200mm rotors front and back on both.

Most recent outing was the eeb (Codes) on steep Glentress off-piste. Absolutely rock solid. Great feel.

Took the enduro bike to Les Gets this summer and I have a soft spot for the Pleney Black. Getting top to bottom of the black run in 4mins and the Curas did the job reliably. Great feel again. If anything they felt like they had a smidge less margin than the Codes – or more modulation. It’s not like I’m dragging on the brakes on a run I know and going at a pace but these brakes (this specific set) have been my big mountain setup transferred across three bikes and have been completely trustworthy, strong and easy to live with. If I wanted to sharpen them up that last nth I’d go to a 220 rotor.

I’ve had a Cura 4 set sitting in their box in my spares for a few years now. Its never been on my priority list to put them on the bike.

That combo.

The first time I tried it I had the same experience. Getting the bead right down in the rim well made it easier on subsequent goes. Some rims make it harder than others – near impossible with Spank Oobah type.

I use a circular saw now and only use the Jigsaw to trim into internal corners.

Oscillating multitool is great for finishing into internal corners.

Jigsaws with pendulum adjustability need to have lots of pendulum action for hard, thick materials. Pendulum is the motion where the blade rocks against the face as it makes the cut rather than just straight up and down. It helps clear the kerf and keeps the blade temperature more sensible. The leading face of the cut will not be a straight vertical but because you force it less, the blade finds a straighter path. Still not the right tool but better than a non-pendulum cut. For the final sliver into the corner you can wind down the pendulum to make a neater finish into the crosscut (not that it matters for this job).

This is very local to me (Kippen) and a shock. Potentially we had a rare sunny interlude with the sun low in the sky combined with a distracted idiot behind the wheel of a heavy vehicle trailer combo. That dangerous, neglectful idiocy is now compounded with serious criminality by leaving the scene. Hope they catch em. And it is bound to be someone local.

The air springs are cross-compatible across all the A1, B1, C1 Lyrik’s since 2016 until 2022 and Yaris too. Doesn’t matter if Lyrik is boost or non-boost, the spring will still work. Travel is the same whether you fit the spring in a 29er or a 27.5. The wheel size difference is in the casting of the lowers. The offset difference is in the CSU.

Thanks for the feedback @lunge. I’ve been very patchy this year; I’ve had two clumps of running significantly with big gaps in between (injury, distraction). I like running the half marathon distance (on trails usually) and have racked up 15 runs >15km this year but next to nothing in the last month and a half. Honestly I was very surprised to do that 5k this evening at that pace.

The volume I think is manageable and is actually more conservative than I’d run left to my own urges. I’m intrigued to see if I stick to the plan and whether the plan delivers any meaningful improvement. The November event will be a proper hilly trail, so pace will be an unimportant measure but I’d like to feel I arrived on the start line trained rather than winging it (for a change).

Wife has just signed us both up to a trail halfie in November and printed out a 12 week programme. I’m starting from a pretty poor base but I’m genetically annoyingly good at getting fit (qs long as I don’t get injured) and I’m bloody minded.

Mo – Rest
Tu – Easy run
We – Half marathon race pace
Th – Strength
Fr – Easy run
Sa – Intervals
Su – Long run

I’m currently on the first Wednesday so busted out a quick (for me) 5k at a 4:30 pace. So will that be my halfie pace come race day? Feels like a stretch

My one was the interface plate in the wall mount. If you can charge it up via the USB when you’ve taken it off the wall this is pretty much confirmed. Only problem is the part isn’t available. As a workaround, the thermostat will work on the wireless stand as that is supplied by 5v USB power. The problem is specifically with the 12v to 5v dc-dc converter in the back plate.

Man eating gold fish?