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Did a proper half marathon on Sunday. Brutal hill between mile 2 and 3. The steep downhill was hard on the quads and feet.
Sore feet from mile 8 slowed me up. In my traing runs my last 3 miles are always the quickest.  Finished in 2hr 21 mins

I've done one half marathon in the past - full of hills, but I was saving myself for a heroic sprint finish along the flat final stretch by the seafront

And just as I got there - there was a hailstorm

It only knocked a minute or so from my time, but shielding my head with my hands from golf ball sized hail was quite different from the image I was planning to project at that point

A professional photographer would be pleased with that second shot Kev, you should have it framed and put it on your wall.

Thank you Tom, phones today are unreal. Funny you should say, put it on my wall. My dining room is full of photos of our travels and it needs updating. I'll try to remember to take a photo and send it to you. Or even better pop over. Kettle's always on.

I quite like this company if you want to go one extra to just framing them https://www.snapfish.co.uk/canvas-prints (they have other options as well)

I think only one of the photo's that I've taken and had them made up into a canvas print could actually pass as a truly professional picture but if you catch the right offers they do it's not too expensive

I have a much smaller amount of greenery to deal with - but I've decided on more of a re-wilding project

Means the local predators have more cover to hide behind though

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

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Also, someone needs to explain to me why people are leaving one safe country to risk their lives to get to another safe country.

...

Some of it is because they don't feel safe there

France has many times the number of asylum applications and takes in many more refugees than Britain -this coupled with the fact that many more refugees speak English compared to French might be why many feel the risk is worth getting away from the oftentimes hostile environment in France

About half of refugees also say they already have family in the UK, so there's a pull reason as well as a push reason

And that's just those that have a choice

If you pay a people smuggler on the edge of Europe to get you to safety, you might get told to get in a truck at one end and then told to get get out of the truck and onto a boat at the other end. It's the people smugglers who decide the routes

Apart from the half having family in the UK I don't have figures to show what proportion those apply to - but those seem to be the biggest factors

... Plenty of people do marathons where they walk 5 mins, run 5 mins
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I did a half marathon more or less like this a few years ago and I agree it works pretty well

It was very hilly so I adapted it a bit on occasion to run downhill stretches and walk uphill one's but the 5 mins and 5 mins was what I was basing the idea on at least

That insurance will cover their costs - if you lose, they're guaranteed to at least break even.

If they break even in every case they lose and make a profit for every case they win then they're not going to do too badly.

FWIW I have seen some articles that suggest that you are more likely to get a higher payout through the ambulance chasers so it 'should' make it worthwhile

I know what it's for.

I just think there is close to zero chance of my losing this case and that the insurance is a needless expense for me.

The aim was to point out that the reason for the insurance is primarily for their benefit - not yours

And as described, they would probably fold like you suggest - but it's not a 'no lose' case

The general principle of why they would lose is that they have a duty of care to their customers - the wet floor signs should be the normal mitigation for that

But personal injury claims have successfully been defended in the past where the defence has successfully argued that the plaintiff also has a duty of care to themselves - there has to be another factor for them to latch on to for this kind of thing to work though, like you were running, or carrying masses of parcels

But, to reiterate, this does seem clear cut and by the far the highest likelihood is that they'll just settle

I thought the biggest problem with this sort of insurance were no win no fee lawyers refusing to take the case if you didn't pay for the insurance - but I haven't completely kept up and it's entirely possible that they're not allowed to make it a criteria for doing the case anymore

That insurance will cover their costs - if you lose, they're guaranteed to at least break even.

If they break even in every case they lose and make a profit for every case they win then they're not going to do too badly.

FWIW I have seen some articles that suggest that you are more likely to get a higher payout through the ambulance chasers so it 'should' make it worthwhile

I can remember broad concepts from an article I read a decade ago

But I usually forget why I've entered a room as soon as I've done so

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Good German word, this: Sprechgesang. It's the style of singing Fred Schneider has in the B-52s. Sprech as in Speech and Sang as in Sing.

See also sprechstimme (speech voice),

Opera, and Hip Hop are other musical forms which use these styles a lot

Opera -> B52s -> Hip hop

It's an obvious connection really

[from what I can gather Sprechgesang is more like singing in the style of talking and sprechstimme means talking in the style of singing]

because it literally cannot be worse than what we have.

truss announces an economic plan, tries it for a few days and then essentially say 'please don't repeat anything i've said back to me, we've changed our minds on all the big ideas".  we lose another chancellor, another home secretary and another PM.

labour could at least govern. the tory party cannot in it's present form.

most parties will have policies that benefit me in some way, harm me in others, some will be better or worse for different aspects of the country. i will never like everything a party does. i just ask that they go about business with some competence and a veneer of being about public service: high tax and investment in public services: fine, just make sure you actually go about improving them. low tax and a focus on growth: fine, just ensures it leads to competition that benefits consumers, and doesnt simply benefit the incumbent big corps

this lot can't get anything done, can't even pretend they are doing anything other than protect their seats, can't decide what direction they want to take us forward. can't keep anyone in place in high office for more than a few weeks.

will boris want his own chancellor and home secretary? what happens when he's forced to fuck off back abroad after a month of in fighting?

i would not have voted labour at any point in the last 20 years, but this is fucking abysmal.

You still seem to be pretty much basing your opinion just on what Liz Truss has done - not on the Conservative Party as a whole

So one leader massively screws up - that's your basis for ignoring democracy and just deciding the other side should have a go instead?

Don't get me wrong - if they elect a new leader and the government breaks again before Christmas - then that's approaching a constitutional crisis. But there seems to be a lot of generalisation over the entire party based on the actions of 3 of it's members (Truss, Kwarteng and Braverman)

If Sunak had won the leadership election do you think the same thing would now be happening?

[voted]

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If we are to have a king, can he not step in here and say he will only call on a democratically elected PM

Boris fucking Johnson is the front runner.

We are going to have to start burning stuff and pulling statues down at this rate

It's utterly disastrous. They cannot govern
 
The guy who authored the 2010 austerity program was begging the king to call for starmer yesterday, as at least labour could govern

They are done.

Yes - it's a shit show

But more people voted for the Conservatives than any other party in the last General Election
The Conservatives won more seats than any other party
Conservative MP's voted to nominate every potential Conservative Party Leader
Conservative members voted for who the new Conservative Party Leaders were going to be

And your idea of democracy is to get a hereditary, unelected Head of State to say - but you're doing it wrong, start again?

Or is it more like your last few lines - to preserve democracy we should just hand over power to the other side?

Currently somewhere underneath the constellation of Cassiopeia

Click to see full-size image.

[a]

The machine was busted when I went back.  I eventually had my go on the body fat machine yesterday.

I have been going to the gym a couple of times a week and the highlights of the results are as follows.

Weight 95.7kg.
Body Fat 30.5%.
Metabolic Age 70 years.

No idea what the bottom two were a month ago. Glad the intervening pain was all worth it. 

FML on the metabolic age, might take that with me to the Super Seniors?  Struggling to believe that the 70 years is accurate.  My dad was massive and never did any exercise.  Think he must have died at a metabolic age of 120 if this is accurate.  RIP big man.

Will hopefully get this down to 65 on my next update.

FWIW muscle mass was good and visceral fat was only amber.

This is the first time I've heard of metabolic age. What is it anyway?

You burn calories by doing nothing - that is your metabolic rate

In general you burn less calories doing nothing the older you get

So if your chronological age is 45 but your metaoblic rate is what most 70 year olds have then your metabolic age is 70

However - it's the fluffiest of sports science fluff

It's a measurement to compare but it doesn't really mean very much

[Except]

The problem for me is that unless outlook or the chrome browser itself is the source of the data breach or I have some malware somewhere, I can't work out where the username password combo has been accessed.

The message you received - is not like anything I've had with Chrome, and Chrome does tell me about passwords being compromised

There's a chance you're just on an updated version of Chrome (or something like GMail has slightly different version)

But how it works on Chrome (at least how I've got it) is in settings/passwords - it shows all your saved usernames and passwords

If any are compromised there is a red triangle near the top which says "check passwords" and how many are compromised

When you click on that it shows you all the compromised passwords with an external link to the websites themselves where you can change your password

Except when it tells you your password is compromised - it doesn't mean someone definitely knows your username and password

What they do is monitor website security breaches. If a website gets compromised and passwords leaked - it flags every user of that website as having compromised passwords. So if a site has a billion users and a 100 passwords get hacked - all billion users would get notified that their password is compromised.

What you've described doesn't "exactly" match this - but it could be along those lines

If it had a link in the original email it obviously could still just be spam.