Flight EI123 and the death of the Aer Lingus brand
Without exaggeration, my worst passenger experience in 36 years of flying. From Aer Lingus to Aer Sleazeus
Buckle up, this is going to be the rantiest rant I’ve written in years. It’s mostly about getting it off my chest as, based on our experiences over October 5th and 6th, it will have zero effect on the dire state of Aer Lingus.
Let’s do the timeline first and then dive into the death of once-well-regarded brand.
An early start but lots of excitement My wife, 5 kids and I woke at 4.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Monday, October 15, 2018
Alex Honnold free solo 360 video - Mind-blowing in Google Cardboard
If you don’t have a Google Cardboard, you can still get some sense of the scale of what Alex Honnold achieved this year when he free soloed El Capitan in Yosemite if you use the 3D controls in YouTube.
Free Soloing is climbing without any equipment or safety ropes. What Alex did is one of the greatest sporting achievements by a human ever.
I’ve no massive interest in climbing but after watching the Valley Uprising documentary last night (available to buy or watch or Netflix), I have a whole new appreciation for the mindset and philosophy of people like Honnold and John Bachar before him.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Saturday, September 29, 2018
Mario Fraioli on Eliud Kipchoge's performance in Berlin
Mario nailed it, as always, in his weekly newsletter. You should subscribe.
“I understand the disbelief and the need to explain what many deemed impossible without some kind of assistance. But what if, at the end of the day, as Alex Hutchinson wrote for Outside, it was all Kipchoge? What if we were simply watching the greatest distance runner of all-time painting his masterpiece in real-time? What if we were witnessing the greatest feat of human endurance in history?
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Tuesday, September 18, 2018
From NYC to Kerry, a wrap-up of my races over the past year
Apart from a couple like the Liverpool to Manchester 50 miler, I haven’t been keeping up on my mini race reports over the past year. Hopefully you’ll find them useful if you’re planning for next year. I’ll keep them short and sweet.
New York City Marathon I’m not sure whey I never did a full race report on this because it was an incredible experience. It overtook London as the marathon that emotionally impacted me the most.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Monday, September 10, 2018
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:
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, September 7, 2018
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.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, September 2, 2018
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:
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and men’s winner Xavier Thévenard:
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I’m hoping to spend time near Chamonix next year to finally check out those amazing trails.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, September 2, 2018
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.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, August 31, 2018
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.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, August 17, 2018
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.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Monday, August 13, 2018