Tag: parkrun

I am now hating sheds and heavy commuter bikes.

Manuel Marques May 23, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , ,

Let’s say that I was involved a little “incident” with a loose step in my shed whilst carrying my  very heavy (>20-25 kg) commuter bike into the said shed. My knee didn’t like it very much…

stupid knee

But not all was lost. True, I didn’t manage to run the parkrun in the following morning but I still went down there (my driving abilities were unimpaired, much to my surprise) and helped out marshalling the course and taking some photos.

Canterbury
So I “planted” myself at the bottom of the hill, by the bridge over Sarre Penn, wearing a bright hi-viz vest, taking photos and yelling words of encouragement to the passing runners. Apparently it worked (the latter) as I had people later thanking me for the extra motivation boost! 😉

Sadly, I had a bit of another incident (this is getting repetitive!) , this time involving my DSLR lens – as I was taking it off a chair the strap got caught and it fell, lens-first onto carpeted floor from about 10-15 cm. The body is fine (after all, Tamia Nelson uses a similar camera in her backcountry expeditions with no issues whatsoever!) but the poor old Tamron 28-200mm got its internal mechanism dislodged and I couldn’t adjust the focal length properly after that. Still, I did manage to take those photos (yes!, this happened before the actual race!), but not without another silly thing happening in the process – given that I had been photographing in a dark environment the day before (see the previous post) I had set the ISO to quite an high value (1600). Obviously then all the photos I took that morning were grainy and very noisy, I only realised what had happened the moment I transferred the photos to the PC. Idiot.

Well, at least it is getting better quickly – hopefully I should be back on the water/saddle/running track over the next few days. But I have to take it easy… 🙂

And another parkrun!

Manuel Marques May 16, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , ,

CPR 16 May 2015

Already integrated in my Saturday morning routine, that’s for sure! Having a bit of fun and trying hard to get to that sub-20′ time (this week I’ve beat my previous best time, with 20:17. Still 17 seconds to shave out, but I’m hoping by the end of the Summer I’ve managed to do it!). Those last two hills are terrible… looking at my laps one can definitely see a big decrease in the split times for km 3 and 4!

Many thanks to all the volunteers who painstakingly show up every Saturday morning to help out in this event, marshalling the course and taking lots of lovely pictures with which I can fill up my Facebook albums! (I think people by now are quite tired of seeing photos of me running with varying degrees of brightly coloured running gear). I really need to give back, but at the same time I don’t want to give up a potentially great training session, it is a bit of a dilemma! 🙂

And in this event I’ve met a few more familiar faces – one of my co-workers came to run the full course with his two under-10-year-old children. Slowly but steadily the “running-mania” is arriving in Canterbury and, more particularly, at our own Applied Optics Group. Beware… 😀

May 3rd, 2015

Manuel Marques May 3, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , ,

CPR 2nd May 2015

Today the “photo of the day” is not actually mine because I’m featuring in it! 🙂 I’ve been doing these parkruns in Canterbury on and off since January (and when I say on and off I really mean it, as we are already in May and this is only my 5th parkrun!), they are a wonderful opportunity to do a high intensity training (timed 5k run at maximum speed, with 4 hills to conquer!) and meet interesting people too. In this particular occasion I managed to beat my PB and lowered it to 20:27. One of my goals for the year is to go under 20′  – but that is going to be painful as I have to sustain an average of 04:00/km throughout the 4 hills in the course! 😀

I really like this photo because not only I’m having a half-decent expression and my running form is actually not that bad, but you can see the sense of fun and quirkiness that goes in these events – indeed that is someone pushing a buggy down there! (we actually have two regulars doing that every Saturday!) We congratulate ourselves at the end, smile a little bit for the cameras and get cheered by the fantastic volunteers along the course (I will volunteer soon too, I really need to give back to the community!).

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