Conor's Bandon Blog

Running, Food and Local stuff from a blow-in

This week's most motivational videos

Love them or hate them as a company, but wow Nike knows how to make amazing ads. It’d almost make me buy a pair of Epic Reacts to balance the redneck backlash in the US. And these selfless people just blow my mind:

The Kerry Ultra 50K - Go on, sign-up for 2019

The Kerry Ultra 50K was somehow not on my radar but luckily my wife spotted it recently. We decided to do it barely a week beforehand. Unlike a lot of ultras over in the UK, this one was all on-road and mostly self-supported. There was a small table every 10K with water and Redbull only. We went down to Tralee the night before to make the race briefing. Brian O’Shea went into huge detail on both the 50K and 100K which weirdly made me more stressed than if I’d known nothing.

Damn that was an exciting UTMB. Well done iRunFar on the coverage!

As always, amazing coverage from the iRunFar crew who deserve all your Patreon support. I was thrilled to get some of their stickers in the post this week. I also wear my iRunFar t-shirt as often as possible. Their interview with women’s winner Francesca Canepa: . and men’s winner Xavier Thévenard: . I’m hoping to spend time near Chamonix next year to finally check out those amazing trails.

I finally watched Breaking Glass 38 years later

As a 12 year old kid, the ads for Breaking Glass looked amazing. Somehow I never watched it until tonight. It hasn’t aged well. From the general cheapness to the ropey writing, acting and directing, it should be awful. But it isn’t, it’s lovely. Hazel O’Connor, Hazel’s songs and Hazel’s voice remain utterly unique. The movie is also a reminder that no matter how bad things are now, they aren’t half as bad as the late 70s and early 80s.

Excitement building over UTMB

The organisers of UTMB (Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc) do an amazing job of the coverage every year. Head over to their site at 5pm Irish on Friday Aug 31st for live footage at the race start. In the meantime here’s a lovely video by Salomon of brilliant ultra runner Ryan Sandes and his buddies doing a tour of Mont Blanc.

Test of my new email-to-hugo blogging tool

I have created a simple new tool which enables me to send blog content via email. The emails are converted to Markdown files and then uploaded to a Hugo source repo on GitHub, along with any inline images. CircleCI then automatically rebuilds and redeploys my blog to S3. I’ll post full details and source code over the next few days.

Walking away from Facebook after 11 years.

Removing List Feeds was the final straw.
I’ve been meaning to write about giving up on Twitter since last November. I think I’ll now wait until I’ve been off for 12 months. I kept threatening to walk on Facebook too. I’d like to thank Facebook for killing the List Feed feature today so they made the decision for me. I’m done. My first two posts on Facebook were in 2006 and 2007. I was complaining about it even then!

Castlefreke is exactly why all State lands must be immediately be removed from the hands of logging company Coillte

Ireland loves nothing more than institutionalised conflicts of interest. Coillte is the fox guarding the henhouse
Let’s get straight to the point. Coillte is a logging company with a commercial mandate. Having it in charge of 440,000 hectares of state lands is so idiotically Irish, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. All state lands should be transferred to a hugely expanded and reformulated National Parks and Wildlife Service immediately. The NPWS can then licence Coillte to plant and harvest trees in a strictly controlled fashion on a limited subset of those lands.

From Liverpool to Manchester - Conor does his 50 (miles) before 50 (years)

14 hours in terrible weather was not what I'd planned. But I did it!
Last March I decided I wanted to run a 50 mile race before I hit the big five oh in May of this year. On Monday, in spite of freezing rain, hail, sleet and snow, I somehow managed it and I can’t stop randomly grinning. As always, have no fear, this won’t be a mile-by-mile race report. I’d fall asleep writing it :-) Speaking of which, one of my ultra-running top tips is “Don’t listen to the audiobook of ‘Why We Sleep’ on miles 30-40 of a 50 miler if you want to avoid getting verrrrry verrrry sleepy.

I'm more excited about Eoin Keith doing the Barkley Marathons than I am about my first 50 miler

Whilst we're having a gentle run from Liverpool to Manchester, Eoin will be fighting through Frozen Head State Park
Like many people I’ve been enthralled by Eoin Keith’s Ultra running exploits since I first discovered this crazy sport. Whether it’s his Spine Race wins in crazy weather or his FKT from Mizen to Malin, he makes you want to push yourself and try things. My wife and I are doing the Liverpool to Manchester 50 Mile Ultra very soon (oh god it really is very very soon) and we flip-flop between terror and huge excitement over the adventure.