Dear Diary: The Eternal Ramblings of Trevor Watson

I bought this Yes album on vinyl when it first came out back in the 70's, and played it all the time on my wreck of a "stereogram" - usually through headphones because I liked it loud and my parents didn't appreciate loud rock.

The album didn't get played much through the latter half of the 80's and early 90's and was finally dispatched to a second-hand vinyl store when I decided that CD was the way forward.

I somehow never got around to buying the CD of Going For The One, though. It wasn't alone - I think the Human League's: Dare album was one of the very few I actually replaced with CD.

So, to last week, when I splashed out on Ebay and bought 3 Yes albums on CD, including Going For The One. From the moment the album started playing on the iPod, I was hooked again! Just hearing the intro to the title track sent little tingles down my spine, and Jon Anderson's vocal work in this track is nothing short of superb. Whilst the other tracks too are excellent, I think the title track epitomises everything I loved about Yes' later work, and now I can't stop listening to it.

Rock On!

I mentioned on Friday that my iPod had a hissy fit on Friday and refused to respond to commands, simply spinning up and spinning down the disk. Well, it appeared to fix itself, so I put it down to the intervention of a cosmic ray (if you ever worked in technical support, you should get this ).

However, all was not well. Whilst listening to Green Day's American Idiot on Friday evening, half way through a track, the iPod stopped playing, stopped responding and started its little game of spinning up and down the disk. I reset it, plugged it back into the power connector and then left it to do its own thing.

Yesterday morning, I had some time to kill after my run, so I sat down to appreciate "Close To The Edge" - one of the Yes albums I bought last week, and once that finished, another chance for American Idiot.

The iPod got around 2/3 of the way through the second track on American Idiot (which seems to have 5 or 6 titles), and then repeated its problem

I tried to reconfigure it using the iPod updater software on the PC, but that could only manage to complain about "Service Error" when trying to establish contact with the iPod. So, I think there's something not quite right with the unit.

So, I think it's back to Apple with it now as it is getting a bit annoying.

It's odd, isn't it, that I now regard a 10.5 mile run as "short" ?

As part of taper week in preparation for next week's Sheffield Half Marathon, I decided to cut down my mileage to just the 10 mile "short" run on Sunday. Of course, it was still intended to be an easy run, but I felt so good when I got out there in the cold yesterday morning that I decided to try and run it at around half marathon pace (well, at least some of it, anyway).

I made the first 2.6 miles at spot on the pace I'd like to run next weekend, and it didn't take too much effort either. However, given that the majority of this 2.6 miles is on a slight downhill gradient, maybe I was being a little over-optimisic. The next 2 miles were done in an average of 4:20/km, which is just outside target pace, but it was mostly flat with maybe a slight uphill gradient in the last km. I didn't measure the middle section of the run, because I don't have an accurate distance for it, but I did the last 3.2 miles in an average of 4:38/km, which is way off pace, but I'd just run up a hill over a mile long, which won't be in the face itself, so I'm not too put off by that pace.

I finished the route in 1hr15, which chopped a massive 6 minutes off my previous best for that run!

Next week's race rises a couple of hundred feet overall, but thankfully, most of it is spread out, and the last 5 miles are downhill or flat, with a 20ft rise just before the finish. My target is to run a pace of just under 4:15/km (6:50/mile), which would give me a finish time of 1hr30. However, I'll be happy to get under 1hr32 really, and 1hr30 is my goal for this year, so I think I can just about fit in a few more races before then