The 2012 Tour

I’ve only caught bits and pieces of the Olympics on the telly over the past few days as I’ve been too busy enjoying a much more important event on the Milne’s sporting calendar; The Tour of Fife 2012! OK, so it might sound a bit daft that a wee running event is more important than the Olympic Games but, ocht, it’s all relative! As I explained in a fairly lengthy blog post last year, the Tour is unique and this year we, once again, thoroughly enjoyed everything that it had to offer. There are actually many similarities between the Tour and the Olympics: it’s a gathering of fantastic athletes in an atmosphere of mutual respect; team spirit; friendly camaraderie; and gutsy determination to win a med... I mean, a mug. Yup, the Tour definitely has much of all the good stuff that the Olympics has to offer (with none of the nonsense that’s made me feel a bit let down by London 2012; ridiculously inflated ticket prices, a disgraceful number of empty seats, Gary Linekar’s hapless commentating skills, the commercialism, the politics etc etc...), albeit on a much smaller – but no less emotive – scale. Having said all of that, I've just watched the GB men's gymnastic team win a Bronze medal and was in tears! Gymnastics was very much my sport, as a youngster, and our coaches used to tell us that gymnasts from the UK would never reach the Olympics as the Brits simply couldn't compete with the likes of the Eastern Europeans. Just goes to show, you should never say never.....

Yup, definitely stick to running dear......

Anyway, back to the Tour! Just like last year, Alex and Ross competed and I clapped and cheered (it’s an important job you know!) Just like last year, the Tour consisted of 5 gruelling races on 5 consecutive days around the beautiful Fife countryside and coast line. Just like last year, the sun shone! Hooray! And, just like last year, Alex and I made the most of it and camped up in Gemma’s student digs in St Andrews, combining the Tour with a short break from work. Lovely! (And, just like last year, poor old Ross couldn’t get time off from his summer job and had to drive up and down for most of the Tour. He did, however, manage to stay up over the final couple of days over the weekend.) 


Ross running up Hell...

The weather was perfect for all five of the Tour races. Well, maybe not perfect for the Up Hell Time Trial as the wind pushing against them made the final stretch up the hill extremely tough for the runners. Brian, the Tour organiser, scooshing them with a super soaker while dressed as a devil (after completing the run himself..) added to their misery – but both the wind and the devil were gloriously defeated to see every one of the starters complete the race. (From a lowly spectator’s perspective; it was absolutely baltic up there! What an eejit I was to wear my flip-flops. Don’t think my wee toes have ever been so cold...but, it was all worth it to be one of the many supporters cheering the runners on as they battled against the gradient and the wind to complete the Blue Riband event of the Tour!) 

The chat and banter between the runners and the supporters – not only at each race, but also on various blogs – was brilliant. Aw man, I laughed out loud when I read this wee snippet – written by one of the runners - after the first event: “The warm evening had me sweating buckets and when an older looking guy (my age group?) from Central edged by, I couldn't keep up with him..” The blog’s writer was last year’s M45 age group winner, Peter Buchanan from Portobello Running Club and that “older looking guy” he referred to was Alex - who was indeed in the same age group! Now, Alex has always looked older than his age (ever since he was the first in our year at school to start shaving...), but I think in recent years everyone else has caught up! Alex has looked over 40 since he was about 25, but I happen to think my old man’s wearing pretty well! Anyway, it gave rise to a great deal of ribbing from me and Ross and some good competition between Alex and Peter as the Tour progressed.

Portobello Pete being chased by my old man....

Alex managed to hold Peter off to win the sprightly young age category of V45! (And I do mean sprightly young age; there were runners taking part in age categories right up to V70. I salute them all!) Ross isn’t as fit as he was during the Tour last year, but he still enjoyed the event. It was the founder of the modern Olympic movement that said: “it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts...The important thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.” Wise words, but not always ones that young athletes want to hear or understand. I’m delighted that my kids have inherited their Dad’s attitude to his sport: don’t make up silly excuses if you don’t do well (the old, “I was wearing the wrong shoes” doesn’t go down well in our house..); don’t give up on something you enjoy doing just because you’re not the best at it; just because you’re not the best doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best – then, who knows, one day you just might be the best...; treat your fellow competitors the way you’d like to be treated yourself; be a good representative of your club and wear your club colours with pride (even if your vest’s a bit washed out and looks like an old yellow duster...); and, the one learned from his old coach - the legend that was Shettletston Harrier’s Alex Naylor - and the one that’s not so easy to stick to, ‘run fast, get to the front and don’t let anyone pass you’...Yup, simple really... Anyway, it was great, as ever, to see Alex and Ross competing together alongside members of many other great Scottish athletics clubs. All (well, most of them anyway) wearing their club vests with pride, but supporting and encouraging their rivals regardless of club, age, gender or how far ahead or behind they were in the Tour rankings! 

The organising club, Fife AC, put so much effort in to making this such a great event (with the best post-race spread of cakes I think I’ve ever seen!) and I’m already looking forward to cheering on Alex, Ross and all the other Tourists next July. I can't run anymore, but I still love being part of the running fraternity. And the Tour of Fife is a perfect example of why that's so.

(p.s. Many thanks to Fife AC for some fantastic photos - and reminding me of the quote by de Coubertin!)

Justifying Gemma's rent

If you have young kids and you have any inkling at all that they might end up going to University, the best advice I could give you is: START SAVING!! Now, before I go any further, I should stress that - as far as my kids are concerned - I wouldn’t have things any other way (Gemma’s going into her third year at St Andrews, Ross is about to start his first at Strathclyde and Gordon doesn’t know what he wants to do when he leaves school), but it doesn’t change the fact that this further education lark’s an expensive business! We’re extremely proud of how hard Gemma and Ross both work at their respective jobs to help pay their way but, like most parents nowadays, we still have to make a hefty contribution to make studying at Uni possible.

One of the biggest expenses is the accommodation fee and it’s especially frustrating that many student flats have a twelve month tenancy contract. Letting agencies and private landlords know that students scrabble for accommodation and, to save the owners the hassle of looking for short-term lets over the summer months, they often set up 12 month leases - knowing full-well that the vast majority of students won’t be occupying the flat over those summer months. Fair enough I suppose; they don’t owe the students anything and they know they have a captive market. Consequently, we’re still making rent payments for a flat that Gemma moved out of 2 months ago. Shorter leases are sometimes available (such as in the flat Gemma’s going into next term) but what we’ve found is that this is simply balanced out by a much higher monthly rent being charged.

Anyway, to make this all little less galling, Alex and I have taken a few days off work and are having a wee break - staying in Gemma’s student flat. If work work wasn’t so hectic at the moment, we would’ve used the flat a bit more often over the summer but, still, it’s lovely just to have these few days away. Even better, we’re mixing our little holiday with a series of races that Alex and Ross are competing in called The Tour of Fife; five races over the course of five days held in different parts of Fife. It started on Wednesday night with a hill race, was followed on Thursday night with a trail race, Friday was the ‘Alpe d’Huez’ Time trial Event’ (just like in the Tour de France – are you getting it?!), tonight’s the St Andrews Beach Race and it finishes with the Twisted Chicken Run (don’t ask as I don’t yet know why it’s called that!) on Sunday. Just like the real ‘Tour’, all the competitors have to do all the races, there’s a leader board and a yellow vest – it’s brilliant fun and deserves a blog post of its own; so, watch this space!

Anyway, back to our wee holiday. We arrived late on Wednesday evening – straight from the first race on the Tour - and, after making up the mattress (we’re in a student flat remember – no such luxury as a bed!) we hit the sack. The flat’s in an old tenement-style building and is, generally, a bit shabby. However, the room that Gemma rented is a modern attic conversion with fantastic velux windows. If you open them up and stand on your tippy-toes, the vista across St Andrews Bay is pretty awesome. What’s not so awesome however - we discovered at four o’clock in the morning - is the sound of the squawking f***ing (and I meant that quite literally folks) seagull orgy that’s going on a few feet above your head! One of them even had the audacity, every now and then, to take a break from his activities (a kind of cigarette break, I suppose) to wander over to the velux, look through the glass - down at us lying on the mattress staring straight back up - then peck on the window, as if to say, ‘Haw You! What you doin? Why you there? You not student. You old gits. Why you awake? Dadada...dadada....dadada.... and so it went on till he went back to join his squawking f***ing pals. By six thirty we’d given up trying to get any sleep, so we headed out for a walk in the early morning sunshine instead.

After a delicious big Scottish breakfast in a lovely wee Scottish Deli, we stepped back outside, ready for a lazy day on the beach. Unfortunately though, while we’d been recharging our batteries, the clouds had gathered, the sun had disappeared and the heavens had opened. So, following a quick change from sandals to sensible shoes, we headed off for a morning of rainy day activities! There’s always a positive slant; if it hadn’t been for the rain, we would never have ventured in to the St Andrews University Museum, and we’d have missed a wee gem. I learnt such a lot of really interesting stuff about Scotland’s oldest University. For instance, I didn’t know that St Andrews Uni was the first in the UK to accept female students, and I would never have thought that it was the first European University to teach in English rather than Latin. It has such a reputation for being stuffy and sticking to old traditions – but it is (and turns out always has been) quite a progressive and, to a greater extent than I thought, pretty inclusive place.

The rest of the day was spent lazily reading and snoozing before the second race of the Tour in the evening. Another great night spent with a fantastic bunch of folk from the running fraternity followed and, fortunately, we were both so knackered by the time we got back to the flat that no amount of frivolity by our feathered friends could keep us awake.

Yesterday was dry. Hooray! We started the day with a walk down by the harbour. Predictably, when we got to the end of the pier, Alex said, ‘I should’ve brought the fishing gear’. Now, our garage is full of high-falutin fishing rods, reels, feathery things and bits of lead, but every time we go away anywhere in Scotland, Alex forgets to pack them. Then, every time we’re away, he says, ‘Should’ve brought the fishing gear’. Then we go and find a wee shop that sells cheap wee rods and reels. Then, we go somewhere for Alex to fish, for me to read (or write), and for him not to catch any fish. And that’s pretty much how it went yesterday! It was absolutely baltic and Alex didn’t catch any fish. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed sitting, wrapped up like a Granny, doing my thing and watching Alex be a wee boy yet again.

The sun came out, at last, in the afternoon – long after the fishing had been abandoned – so we spent it lazing around just watching the world (and some really poncy looking golfers) go by!   The third race in the series was another fantastic event, made even better by the fact that Ross was coming straight from it to join us for the rest of our stay in St Andrews. It means that all chat now is based around running, beer, grub and running – with lots of laughs in between!

This morning finds me sitting in Starbucks in Market Street (as it has free internet access!), rattling up this wee blog post. Ross and Alex are sitting opposite me, laughing and comparing notes over the races in the Tour so far. It’s been a lovely morning; our good friends, Elaine and Eric, happen to be up in St Andrews at the moment too, so we met up with them earlier for breakfast, then had a wander to a local speciality beer shop to stock up for the post-race celebrations later, before stopping off for a quick cuppa and internet fix!

So, that’s a wee run down of my few days holiday in St Andrews so far – nothing wildly exciting, no tropical sunshine, no lounging on a sunbed by the Mediterranean Sea (sighs longingly...), but it’s been brilliant. Not even those frisky seagulls have spoiled it – and justifying paying that extra rent on Gemma’s student flat has definitely made me feel great!