Good things!

[wildeabandon]

I'm feeling considerably more cheerful than I was a week ago. I'm now a lot more excited about coming home to London and getting to see more of obandsoller and robert_jones and other friends, and a lot less sad about my contract ending. I've put out some feelers for jobs in London, and the market looks pretty buoyant.

On Saturday I ran the Pride 10k, along with themidnightgirl and a bunch of chaps from the LGMC. I signed up for it a couple of months ago with lots of good intentions about training, and then the heatwave happened and I basically didn't run for two months. I had two targets originally; 50 minutes for my "I'll be quite pleased with this" time, and 45 minutes for "astonished and over the moon". Considering the complete lack of training, I'm in fact very pleased with my result of 49:38, and I've signed up for another race on the same course in early October, to see how much better I can do if I actually do train. I don't think getting down to 45 minutes is going to be realistic in that time frame, but 47 feels like it might be a plausible stretch goal.

Afterwards Robert had to dash off to a poker game, but I went to the pub with the chorines, and caught up with some of the gossip from my season off. On Sunday evening Ramesh & I went to "Songs of Gays", a short concert by the LGMC Ensemble (a small group of the strongest performers who do a bunch of extra concerts), and had to be careful not to join in with the singing and choreography of the songs I knew. It really brought home how much I've been missing singing, so I'm incredibly excited to be getting back to rehearsing tonight. And of course making that less logistical is another big bonus to my contract in Birmingham ending.

Comments

[sfred]

Hurray for good things!

[simont]

I'm in fact very pleased with my result of 49:38

As I've said in the past (to atreic, about a different length of race), my immediate instinct is to see that as a result to be pleased with even without any idea of what your particular expectations might have been, because it's surely always more satisfying to come in just under an integer multiple of some round-number time like 10 minutes rather than just over one, regardless of what the multiple actually is :-)

[wildeabandon]

That's true to an extent, but I think I would more disappointed at missing my target by almost ten minutes than by a few seconds :)

[halojedha]

That seems like a good result on the race to me! Congratulations - hope you enjoy the training. I find that making pre-commitments like the second race can be a good way to persuade myself to prioritise things I want to do, but struggle to make time for. Well, up to a point.

Glad you'll be able to get back into singing again soon. I was watching an episode of Queer Eye recently where they found a gay chorus for a man who'd left the church due to homophobia, and was really missing singing as a result. It made me think of you. (It also pinged my periodic I-miss-singing-in-choirs response, but I think I already try to do too much.)