azazel

I'm staying five mins walk from London Bridge so I'm thinking that's about as handy as it can get for the morning at least. Wife and two kids are coming along so that's another issue but at least her pal lives in London so will be on hand to chaperone. Plus, that's out of my hands for about three and a half hours so no point worrying about it! Hope your training as gone well and you enjoy the day, I thought the crowds were great.

Just catching up with the thread. I ran Manchester last year and I think I had the same start time as you. I got there about 8am and did use the bag drop, which, to be honest, didn't take much time at all. I don't remember having to do too much hanging around aimlessly but the queue for the toilets was pretty long, even though there were loads of them. From memory, by the time I'd queued for the toilet and made my way to the starting chute, I was about as close to bang on time as you can get. If I was you I'd aim to get there for about 8.15am to be on the safe side as they're pretty keen to get you into the starting chute sharpish. I was staying out in Stockport which meant a taxi and a tram to get to the start so it was an early morning for me. Doing London this month and actually dreading the logistics of getting to the start more than I am the race itself!

I thoroughly enjoy the NFL but the the mock draft stuff doesn't do much for me. It seems like every journo or media outlet is or has an "expert" who is used to provide "stories" for weeks if not months. Is there any kind of site that matches all these mocks with what actually happens at the draft itself? It just seems like noise designed to keep people interested during a very long off season, which I suppose is inevitable when you go from early Feb until September with no actual action. I tried watching the draft last year and, man, was it boring.

Some dude who used to play for Rangers having to move his kids to a different seat at the West Brom game was definitely the highlight today.

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it. For my marathon last year I was very plan-focused and even ended up running the race itself with what felt like my face glued to my watch keeping to a steady pace. From a purely results-based perspective it worked as I was aiming for 8 min miles and ran exactly that, only going over 3:30 because I swerved around the course too much and added an extra 0.3 of a mile to the distance. I think, this time around, although I'm aiming for a quicker time, I might enjoy the whole experience more if I allow myself a bit more flexibility and perhaps just work even harder at the three quality session as you suggest. Cheers.

Question for the experienced runners out there: I'm training for London this year and my plan has me doing easy runs on Mondays and Wednesdays. Each Monday is four miles, while the Wednesdays increase by a mile a week, from four in week one up to a max of 11, before coming back down in the second half of the plan. Would splitting the combined mileage over Monday and Wednesday be a lot less productive than following the plan exactly (ie in week seven doing 7.5 miles each day rather than 4 on Monday and 11 on Wednesday)? Due to work and family commitments allocating the time to do the longer Wednesday runs might be problematic so splitting them in that way would make things easier but if it's going to be less beneficial then I'll just need to get out my scratcher super early every Wednesday. For completeness , the rest of the plan is speed/tempo work on a Tuesday, varying miles at race pace on a Thursday, and a long run and a hard 5k at the weekends, with Friday being the rest day. This will be my second marathon, having done Manchester last year in 3:31.

As a somewhat neutral - in-laws live in Dumfries and my elder daughter was born there so do have a leaning towards Queens - I enjoyed the game today. Took the wee one along for her first club game too (she’s been to hampden to watch Scotland) and she had a good time too. I thought Annan were hard-working but pretty limited. Can’t fault their effort but didn’t think they were up to much. Queens, imo, looked like a team of tidy enough players but were maybe missing a bit of purpose. First half seemed to be all about trying to get the ball out wide on the left to McKechnie to have a go at the full back, which he got some joy from but it didn’t really pay off. The Annan goal was a cracker from their point of view but probably wasn’t a great one for Queens to lose. Some equaliser from McGuffie though, an absolute beauty, and you could see all of Reilly’s experience for the winner. An excellent run and brilliant finish. Overall I thought Queens deserved the win and were generally quite good on the ball as they shifted it out wide but I felt they were missing quite a bit in the middle of the park and a proper final ball when they did get near Annan’s goal. From reading this thread Queens obviously were missing a few and maybe they make the midfield better but Ambrose was the best player on the park by a distance today.

Did Manchester this year in 3.31. Enjoyed it a lot, mainly due to the crowd, which was brilliant. There are a couple of long drags which aren't the most enjoyable but I'd definitely consider doing it again. It's probably not as flat as some folk claim mind you, there are two or three challenging hills around Altrincham which come just as the distance starts to get tough.

Football's a squad game, so while McGrath might - might - not be in our best 11 players by the time the window closes, he's certainly good enough to play a role. On that basis, seems a good signing to me. And if we've got a midfield that he isn't good enough to be a starter in, then we'll have a pretty good midfield.

Richardson off to Stockport on loan "for game time" because we've signed Devlin and Dadia. A good move all round you'd have to say. Although when I first saw Hatters I thought "Luton? Wtf?". https://www.afc.co.uk/2023/07/26/richardson-joins-hatters-on-loan/