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Weekend Rendez Vous Monday, Mar. 17, 2003 Saturday morning at work was pretty good. I did what I had to do and got home by 1.30pm. Too late though to watch the lunchtime soccer in the pub. As AM was away for the weekend we thought we'd take TBG to the pub for lunch. We wondered whether Arsenal would be on TV at 3pm, but concluded that they weren't. In a miscalculation of gigantic proportions we ambled to the pub at about 3.20pm, only to find that a) Arsenal were indeed on TV, but on a different channel, and b) that they'd stopped serving lunch at 3pm. So we stayed and watched the rest of the match (Arsenal lost by the way) and eventually after some debate ended up eating somewhere else which turned out ok in the end. Sunday morning was the half marathon. We got out to the car over 30 minutes later than I wanted and then I had to run back inside twice, first for a bottle of water and then for safety pins. When we got there Old Annie looked at the crappy map that we'd been provided with and decided that we'd already passed the place. When I looked at the map I worked out that in fact we hadn't passed it at all and that the place was just up the road, as indeed it was. 1-0 to the boys! Then we found that the road to the start was closed to cars, and on reading the literature provided with the map discovered that there were loads of car parks not far away and we had to park on one of those. All the runners assembled near the start. There must have been several hundred in the field. A brass band led the runners to the starting line. The local residents must have loved it. A brass band playing outside their windows and hundreds of runners and hangers-on at 10am on a Sunday morning. At least it's only once a year. My target was to do it in less than 2 hours, which works out at 9 minute miles or thereabouts. At every mile marker I'd calculate my pace and I found that I was going well, at about 8.3 mins per mile. At about 8 miles I was caught up by a guy in my running club who's much faster than me. I expressed surprise that he was so far down the field. He told me that he'd run from Chelmsford to the start of the race! It must be 10 miles at least so in the end he did nearly 23 miles, and that's if he didn't run home again. I continued more or less at the same pace and finished in 1 hour 52 mins which was great. I saw Old Annie near the finish as I came down the road. By a kind of telepathy that can only exist between true soulmates she'd gone and got me a bottle of orange juice which was what I was craving during the last couple of miles. I think that more than made up for her terrible map reading earlier. We went home and picked up TBG to go for lunch. The usual problem: where to go. I thought we could try a pub in what can only be described as millionaires' row, a village with big houses and woods and a river flowing through it. It might be expensive but the food should be good I thought. WRONG! Old Annie order the duck, which she said was cold. TBG and I being traditionalists went for the roast dinner. Our dinners were ok. the meat was nice and there were plenty of vegetables. They weren't cooked to mush, but actually had some flavour. However we didn't get any potatoes. None. Zero. Non. You just can't eat a main course without some sort of carbohydrate, say rice or pasta or potatoes. The elderly couple near us also had roast dinners, and they had potatoes. Roast potatoes. TBG's favourites are roast potatoes. But the couple near us were complaining like crazy because they obviously wanted their vegetables cooked to tasteless mush. They sent their dinners back and got replacements. But these were the same so they just got up and left. I felt sorry for the waitress who had to apologize like mad for something that's not her fault. How is she suppose to know that they like tasteless mush? Anyway we never did get our potatoes, and after all the fuss those people caused I just didn't have the heart to complain. I never complain about things like that. I just never go to the place again and tell everyone I know about it.Not much else to say about the weekend really. Old Annie and I killed the last couple of hours before AM came home in our local, so at last I could drink with gay abandon. And I did.
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