@Scotroutes – might see you at Dramathon. My missus is running and I’m taxi/photographer so will be running that way myself.

I wasn’t a fan of the Thermarest NeoAir series, found even the newer version too crinkly. Went for a Sea to Summit Ether Light XT instead – and they’re available in Large/Long versions

I’ve never used 16 pegs with a Tarpstar, always carried 4 extras but could normally pitch off 8. I didn’t use the Alpkit footprint but a cheapo tarp of the same size with bungee on the eyelets so only needed the main 8 pegs. Only used it a couple of times but it was a decent shelter.

(Not-so-stealth ad – I’m selling my Tarpstar 1 in the Classifieds… not related to peg problems!)

Since no-one else has replied to you @Bazz!

“Good enough” is so, so dependant on what your aim is: If you’re just aiming to finish within the cut-off times, you’re probably more than ‘good enough’ already, you just need to know your body and pace yourself. If you’re trying to win, or aiming for a specific time target, only Smarties have the answer! ‘Not particularly fast but consistent’ is exactly what you need most of the time, longer events are as much mental as they are physical, if you can keep your head right, keep feeding yourself and keep moving forward, you’ll get the job done.

Maybe as evidence of that, I ran ‘The Lap’ Ultra in the Lakes a few weeks back – 75km with 2,800m of ascent round the summits surrounding Windermere. Not my first Ultra, and not the longest or hilliest I’ve ever run, but still a distance where completing isn’t a certainty but can still be a decent bet if you’re sensible about it. I’ve been running well recently, over shorter distances at least, and while I would have liked to have clocked up more long runs in the build up, I went in pretty confident that I’d get round even if it wasn’t that quick. Max finish time is 24hrs, I’d set a loose target of sub-18, I ran/jogged/fast shuffled far more than I was anticipating, managed the physical issues I had pretty well (knee pain on descents from about 45km onwards), pushed a bit harder when I could and cruised when I needed to, and finished well inside my target in 14:41:41.

Also, benefitting from the fitness accrued for and from the Ultra, after a good week and a bit of recovery, I’ve run a 5km PB and 10km PB in the past two weeekends, both on relatively hilly courses – 22:21 for 5km and 46:30 for 10km :)

If they don’t need to be fancy – appreciate you’re talking about a birthday present, but to me hiking pants aren’t a birthday present – Decathlon hiking pants – https://www.decathlon.co.uk/p/men-s-robust-trekking-trousers-mt500/_/R-p-351265 : Not huge money, comfy enough, and always seem to tend towards ‘tall and slim’ sizing more than chunky shortarses like me.

Otherwise, classic Montane Terra pants (https://montane.com/collections/mens-terra-pants-collection). I like the Terra XT as an autumn/winter hill trouser.

Timely thread! I’ve just pushed the button on one of the Alloy 50s from Pauls, had my eye on it for a while and decided it was a bargain I was willing to go for – so stealth ad, I’ll be chucking my Evil Following up for sale once the new one’s arrived…

I’ve always liked Rocky Mountain, I used to have an ETS-X, the traded that up to an Element that I loved, bought from Vondally on here, best climbing full suss I’ve ever had. Traded it out for the Evil to get something slightly longer travel as my riding diverged, always had the itch for another RM for a while and it looks like the Instinct fits the ticket.

For those in Leeds who like fruit beers, Kirkstall Kriek is rather tasty.

Not posted on here in a while, but still running! Been dealing with a niggling hip flexor injury since May that’s been intermittently junking my lower back, but physio and sports massages have helped, along with downtime and a lot of yoga. Had a very mixed few adventures recently, including a 36 mile lapped Ultra (3 miles on the hour, every hour for 12 hours) a few weeks ago, and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, a 1 mile race last night.

Plodded steadily around the Ultra since it was just laps of Hyde Park in Leeds, only intended to get some distance in the legs. The Summer Mile last night was a bit more pressure since I did well at it last year, happy to say I knocked 30s off my mile PB to get 6:12.4 and second in my heat. They run the heats slowest to fastest based on your own predicted time, so it’s great to do a heat then grab food and watch the properly quick people race, think the overall winner did something like 4:38.

The original Hawkeye Pierce. Will have to have a dry martini this evening. No olive though, we have had to make certain concessions for the war…

My train last year was mid-morning, I wasn’t the only one dozing in Waverley waiting rooms. Wished I’d taken a better lock with me, though, paranoia hampered my sleeping.

If you want a nicer spin up to Waverley than just hacking up the roads, head along the coast from Cramond towards Granton and Leith and pick up the old railway line near Ocean Terminal. It’s a nice spin up from there and it brings you out just between Murrayfield and Haymarket.

While you might get some decent, sensible answers here Lucy, you might be better setting up your own profile and asking in the Women’s forum – https://singletrackworld.com/forum/forum/womens/ . Unless Joe’s set his pronouns to ‘she’, you’re unlikely to be able to access from his profile.

There’s also the fun side effect that you can slag him off in there if you ever need to and he won’t be able to see… :D

I have the DD Hammocks synthetic one –  https://www.ddhammocks.com/products/insulation. Not the lightest to carry, but decent enough and not super expensive

Yep, underquilt. The hammock compresses the sleeping bag both under you and round your sides, so you lose a lot of insulation, as well as there being a big cold air gap under you. Underquilt makes a pretty big difference.

All the best for the new adventures Amanda – and good to meet you briefly at Frontier 300 registration! 😆

@Drac – Yep, one of the small benefits of ‘The NHS’ being made up of lots of smaller organisations that fight with each other all the time. Nothing’s joined-up enough for a cyber attack to take out the whole shebang!! :D

 it was a handful of hospitals who use a private pathology company. The NHS was not hacked just a small external provider, those affected started their back up protocol.

Not trying to contradict you, Drac, but it’s a bit more serious than that. It’s a couple of the biggest Hospital Trusts in London who work in partnership with a private provider for their Pathology services, both internal and external – Synnovis sure as heck not ‘a small external provider’ in the grand scheme of things. As well as hospital path lab services, they also hosts a large percentage of the Primary Care (GP Practice) blood testing for London. While it’s not ‘The NHS’ being hacked, it’s provider equipment that very likely sits on internal connections within some of the hospitals themselves.

From Synnovis’ own website:
“Synnovis is a partnership between SYNLAB UK & Ireland, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. 
A state-of-the-art ‘hub’ laboratory has been opened as part of this transformation at Friars Bridge Court, in Blackfriars Road, London, bringing cutting-edge instrumentation, technology and innovation together under one roof. On-site hospital laboratories (the ‘spokes’) will be developed to provide essential services, focusing on the rapid turnaround of urgent tests, such as those needed for A&E departments.”

And the ‘back up protocols’ involve all test results being printed out on paper, portered or couriered to the correct location, then manually typed/coded back into the patient record. That’s a massive loss of efficiency.

We had a similar scenario in Leeds a few years back, not a cyberattack but a massive failure of the servers that the local Hospitals Trust use for the electronic transmission of blood test results – called TelePath, ironically. While they could outsource the testing to other local hospital labs, due to the way the systems are set up it was the same end result as this cyber attack: no electronic transmission of results, revert to paper. 

The immediate effect was people having to be recalled because the stuck/missing results between the server failure and the ‘revert to paper’ decision being made were lost entirely and the blood samples were no longer viable.
The secondary effect was a significant delay in the paper results making it back to people’s GP records. That’s fine if it’s a less urgent test like a routine cholesterol screen, but a bit more important when it’s, say, bloods monitoring for a patient on antipsychotics.
The tertiary effect was mounting pile of paper results that GP Practices didn’t have the capacity to code back to records because they’re slammed, under-staffed and under-funded, plus the absence of some of the analytical markers (ie, the ‘This result is/isn’t within normal ranges” flags) meaning GPs had to employ extra staff just to code results back into the records, with all the additional possibility of human error meaning a result was mistyped.

In terms of numbers and time, Leeds is a decent size city: it’s not London, obviously, but it’s pretty big. Our GP Practices put close to 10,000 blood tests per day through the hospital lab, on top of whatever volumes the Hospital is testing for itself. It took 3 months to get TelePath back up and running, and six months to a year to clear the backlog of paper results at GP Practices. There was talk of the Practices collectively suing the Hospitals for the cost of the extra staff they’d had to employ to code the results. And when the (5-year) project began to get TelePath replaced, the hospitals had the cheek to ask whether electronic transmission of results was a priority in the new system…

So yeah. While Synnovis and the trusts can recover from this, the longer they’re stuck on paper the more impact this is going to have on the local system.

The River Eden (?) that you cross between Carlisle and Gretna

You cross the Eden about two mins after you leave Bitts Park. The one you cross nearer Gretna (by Longtown) is the Esk 😊

I have a set of the Alpkit/Sonder Scope bars, 15° sweep, on my Yeti Big Top. Look a bit funky but definitely helped with some wrist issues and weren’t super expensive for an experiment

A mate of mine who’s definitely on the ‘larger gentleman’ side of the scales picked up a second hand Genesis Croix de Fer which he reckons is perfect for his size since it’s a full steel build including the fork, it was a carbon fork he was worried about in terms of loading. Only change he made from the stock build was to upgrade from the cable discs to JuinTech cable hydros for a bit more power. We had a few days bikepacking up in Galloway and both he and the bike coped brilliantly.

Edit: Damnit! Beaten to it …

I think the problem is that many front racks assume that the rivnuts are built for a “Lowrider” rack, so likely one rivnut halfway up the fork leg and another threaded part near the axle )that might also be used  to fit a mudguard). The forks on that Cairn are built with the more” modern” concept of fork mounted cages in mind, and so the rivnuts don’t line up.

Yep, agreed – called that one early! The issue is that the bolts are set up for cargo cages, not a low-rider rack like that. You may be able to get a rack that fits those bolts, but that one won’t!

There’s a few options on this link below, but bidding that rack to fit is probably a bad idea

Small & Lightweight Front Racks for Bikepacking & Touring

A front rack? I’m assuming he’s using the bolt hole on the crown for the top but stuck because the lower doesn’t match up with the cargo cage mounts?

The SFM mounts above would work to a degree, but not sure what the load rating would be, depending on what he wants to carry on the rack. Might be better to point him at a couple of cheapish Blackburn cargo cages and/or a bar harness rather than try and bodge a rack into a fork that isn’t designed for it

17. Worse than I did a few months ago – memory obviously fading!

Once again for those with a sense of humour bypass, it was said in jest. That’s what the wink straight after (that you’ve failed to quote) was conveying.

Suck it up, Princess 😉

Ffs grow a sense of humour.

I made a flippant point followed by a nugget of truth. Like I said, prove me wrong.

This place just gets worse, honest tae ****…

… Hmmm. A previously commented thought occurs. Think it was:

get over it snowflake

😐

As for offence, your lot has been throwing shit at my lot (millennials) ever since we started thinking for ourselves, get over it snowflake 😉

By all means though, show the error in my working. Show of hands, any Gen Y who has a problem with voice messages…

Ooh look, more tribalism! That’s exactly what we all needed… 😐

(NB: no idea what ‘Gen’ I’m supposed to be…)

A mate has something set up on his phone so he can do WhatsApp voice notes to his missus when he’s driving without having to touch the phone – seems a good way of doing it to me. Sure as hell safer than typing

I have two job titles, depending on which of the two org charts for our joint NHS-Local Authority structure you’re looking at. I am both IT Manager and Principal Engineer, I have qualifications for neither.

As IT Manager, I have no background in IT and don’t actually manage anyone
As Principal Engineer, I have no background in Engineering, and don’t have many principles either.

I have a degree in Environmental Energy Science, and a career that’s ranged from Environmental Management and conservation, through kitchen work and bar work, to managing a bar, to Data Analytics, to Forestry, back to Data Analytics and then sideways into Project Management and IT. Oh, and I do a lot of event work and water/hill safety stuff on the side (which I do actually have some qualifications for…)

Smack dab in the eye of the storm
Quite a ride just with the strength and size of it,
And I’m not sure what created this storm,
I feel safe in the eye of it now.
The commotion around me astounds me,
Tomorrow’s a solace which grounds me,
I’ve got both of my feet on the ground,
I’m not sure where to look for my head.
A tranquil madness I’ve found,
Or maybe it’s found me instead…

( https://youtu.be/6zEBECZ9iDw?si=ZCIbUNCJwZKuXRd6 )

There’s no real technical need of course, it’s just a ‘modesty’ thing.

I just wear tights – well, 3/4-length tights – most of the time. Couldn’t give a hoot about ‘modesty’: If someone wants to look at my bits, they’re there. Shorts over tights are just uncomfortable, look worse than just wearing tights, and are largely pointless as far as I’m concerned.

If you’re desperate, Skins do a compression full-length tight with an attached over-short.

I have a Logitech Lift (because I have a wonky right wrist) and an MX Mini keyboard. Even if I leave the laptop at work, the mouse and keyboard come home with me at night…

I thought they were leaving the tins as-is and only changing the squeezy bottle,?

In fact, it says as much in the article you’ve linked: “The rebrand will take place across the full product range, excluding the classic tin, which will retain the original illustration.”

Title only mentioned once – Skunk Anansie – Twisted.

(The subtitle ‘Every day hurts’ is the main chorus, but ‘twisted’ only gets a look in once…)

Loved his stuff back in the day, but I always wondered what dirt he had on the Director General of the BBC, because there was no other reason for him to be on the radio in the last decade, he was bloody awful.

I was known as Moose for a chunk of secondary school. To this day I’ve no idea why.

That’s a lot like what the Focal Events guys did when they couldn’t run The Distance event during the years of the Lurghi and it became ‘The (socially) Distance(d)’, with Bingo in 2020 and Blockbusters in 2021 – “I’ll have a pee please, Bob” seemed even more appropriate.

You can still see the cards online:

Yes, a long time ago. Had a Fuel EX but was racing more so wanted to swap it for a more ‘XC’ full-suss. Can’t remember where I posted – possibly on here – and ended up finding a successful swap for a Top Fuel a year older but slightly higher spec.

The one I made myself at an Axe Making Course back in 2022.

Oh, and just to prove a point on ‘different languages’:We funded a project to get remaining paper records at our GP Practices, the Lloyd George notes, scanned into the electronic record systems. We started with the handful of our Practices who use the EMIS Clinical system, and spent a lot of money paying a company to scan rooms and rooms full of Patient notes to create electronic records that could be pulled up in the GP system if needed. Seemed successful, job done.

One of those Practices recently changed Clinical System, migrating from EMIS to TPP SystmOne. Those scanned records, in a format that was necessary for them to be openable and readable in EMIS, won’t open in SystmOne…

Sort of an aside, but it might give some context to a few comments on here, especially about how poor sharing of records between bit of ‘The NHS’ is (and I put that in inverted commas for a reason…):

People believe that ‘The NHS’ is a single entity – because that’s how it’s referred to and how it’s put forward – but it isn’t. It’s lots of little organisations – Primary Care (GPs), Secondary Care (hospitals), Community Trusts, and the various other allied health professionals, plus Commissioning Organisations (formerly PCTs, then CCGs, now ICBs/ICSs: These are where I work) and assorted other hangers on that do the Admin side rather than the actual trying-to-make-people-better side. There’s precious little that links those organisations, and precious little interaction between them, except when they’re forced to. For us here South of Gretna, NHS England mainly just shout orders – sometimes comprehensible, sometimes half-baked – from on high, which we ad everyone else have to obey, because they’re the ones who have the money from the Department of Health & Social Care, and if we don’t do what they say we don’t get funded.

When it comes to Patient Records, the main issue is that there’s no single national repository, because the data storage requirement and cost would be astronomical (especially given the retention schedule on health data), so everyone has their own. Even where there are Shared Care Records (we have one in Leeds), there’s arguments about the data on it, who is the Data Controller, etc etc, so in our case GPs feed into it, Leeds Hospitals feed into it, but at the last shout Community Healthcare still don’t, because… Regardless of this all being a Patient’s data, each individual organisation is legally responsible, and they don’t necessarily want to share because of the Governance implications. And the security implications to prevent a breach. And the repercussions if/when there’s a breach…

The reason a lot of Hospital Trusts can’t share records between them – or even internally between departments – is historic. In the infancy of computers, departments in hospitals got their own internal systems, because all records were on paper so why should we ever need systems that talk to each other? As long as they can talk to a printer, we’re fine. As technology moved on, a lot of these systems were incrementally updated, but because centralised storage was costly and records were still predominantly paper, interoperability wasn’t a priority  – and even if it had been, a lot of these systems were so bespoke, there would have to have been the development of a common language for them to talk. Even GP electronic records were for a very long time in  two different Code sets – Read V2 or CTV3 – depending on which Clinical System your GP used. They were only updated to use a single code set – SNOMED – from about 2016, and the Read codesets were only retired in about 2020. Add into the mix that Hospitals mainly get funded specifically for the operations they provide – usually by Block Contract from the Commissioning organisations – so there isn’t a lot of spare cash floating around, and you start to see why a hospital might not be able to afford the project to bring together 50+ different bespoke departmental systems which all speak different languages, plus create enough server or cloud capacity to store all that data, plus make it talk to the various GP Practice systems, ideally? Unless DHSC suddenly decided that they could chuck a few month’s-worth of Bus Money (£350 million a week, wasn’t it? Six month’s worth might get a good start on it) at the problem, then by now, a single centralised National Shared Record is a technical pipedream – before you even start talking about the legal and ethical implications.

Also in terms of a single National record, schemes like the ill-fated Care.Data programme didn’t help matters – that could have vastly improved healthcare data sharing between NHS organisations for all the right reasons and for the betterment of healthcare – but DHSC wouldn’t remove the clause about also being allowed to sell data – albeit anonymised – to other companies, which rightly had people worried and meant people started opting out of any potential sharing of their health record. Understandably, to be honest…

So – TL;DR version: Why is health record sharing so poor in ‘The NHS’? Because everything’s in different languages, no-one’s got any money, it would be so huge and so heavily fortified it would cost astronomical amounts, and people would probably still object to its existence.

( < /rant > )