Final Christmas photos

Two final photos from Christmas which I found stuck in my email. Here's us prepping for last week's extra special parkrun. I wisely decided to limit myself to a santa hat. The others went for the full rig; an ensemable that proved far too warm for the clement Xmas Day conditions:


And here we are on the eastern end of the beach at Exmouth. It's very similar to the other photo, except that Blitz' hole is a little shallower and I'm waving — rather unconvicingly and self-consciously — at the camera!

Fiftieth parkrun

Successfully completed this morning's run in a reasonable time, joining the Parkrun 50 club in the process. Since I started in late October 2015, that means I've only missed around ten runs in that period.

I missed a couple when I was away in spring and more when I was in Greece in fall. I missed one when I had a nasty bout of flu back in February — and I clearly wasn't fully recovered when I started back again, recording my second worst time every and my worst time for an event where I actually showed up in time for the start! I also missed a couple of months in spring when I had an ITB problem in my left knee that refused to respond to anything other than rest, but some of that overlapped with when I was away, so I wouldn't have been around to run anyway.

And the trends have also been positive over the last year. Ignoring the outlier that was this year's Christmas Day run, which I went into in a state of near-exhaustion, every run I've done in the last six months has been under 21 minutes with a general trend downwards in recent months. I managed to put in a couple of solid sub-20 minute runs in the summer, finishing tenth out of 245 — a real achievement!

Bach's Widerstehe doch der Sünde

Motivated by this morning's Record Review, which played excerpts from recent versions of some of Bach's cantatas for alto soloist — both Iestyn Davies and Phillipe Jarosky have new recordings out — here's an unashamedly old-school version of Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV54.

The performer is Marga Höffgen accompanied the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Kurt Thomas — Bach's many-times-removed successor as Thomaskantor.