Ace

Gwent league #2

The second round of this season’s Gwent league will be held on Sunday the 2nd November at a new venue — Leckwith Athletics Stadium. The race will incorporate the South Wales x-country championships and all eligible runners will be entered by the club as a matter of course. If you plan to run, please let myself know for the men’s teams and Sue Neal for the Ladies.

Posted by Simon at 03:56 PM

Home and Away

A message for all club members (or anyone that knows us). As you know, Eero and Sara and Family have been visiting recently, and it’s been great to see them again after five years. They’ll be returning to Oz later this week. If you fancy a last chance to say goodbye, and maybe a meal and a drink or two, they’ll be in the Old Arcade pub (that’s just off St Mary Street) on Tuesday night (28th) from 7.30 PM onwards. The venue is, of course, symbolic, it’s our spiritual home, since the club was conceived in that pub in May 1980. You may fancy a meal, a drink, or both or neither, or may just want to drop in to say "Hi". See you there!

Posted by Mick at 10:23 PM

Atlas Drugged

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been asked if Paula Radcliffe is ‘on something.’ “Too many people think we’re all at it” she told the Guardian in 2001 after she held up a signing reading EPO cheats out at the World Championships in Edmonton.

Apart from Radcliffe, British athletes’ performances have been disappointing, so no one has been asking awkward questions of the rest of the British squad. Even those who know better have presented drug-use as something restricted to Johnny Foreigner. Now, though, we have a drug scandal close to home.Chambers needs to come clean to have any chance of competing in Athens, according to the Telegraph. IAAF council member and Telegraph journalist Sebastian Coe, calls for no holds barred in the fight against cheats. The Guardian reports on the discovery of the designer anabolic steroid, THG. (‘Designer’ here is not a compliment to the drug’s efficacy, but its erstwhile indetectability.)

I don’t think that elite distance runners should be complacent. It’s not in the interests of a major marathon to announce that a prizewinner failed a drug test, but it is in the interests of the ‘clean athletes’ that cheats be outed and banned. Most big race competitors have moved up from track events, where they were regularly tested. We now know that testing procedures in the sprints were far from perfect.

We know that we can expect a few familiar faces to be missing from Athens next year. Will the same be true of London or Berlin?

Posted by Dave at 07:43 PM

We’ve got the runs...

The first of our group social runs took place yesterday, and I hope I speak for everybody when I say that it was a very enjoyable run over Caerphilly mountain on a beautiful Autumnal morning. Despite hot competition in the form of the Torfaen half marathon, we managed to attract around 17 runners.

Carol has kindly offered to guide the next run around the beautiful coastline of the Vale. The run will take place on Sunday the 16th of November at 10am from Llantwit Major leisure centre. I’m sure that car pooling can be arranged for those who require a lift. If you are interested in coming along, can you let either myself, Carol, Jemma, or Andy know at the club, or post a reply to this article.

See you on the trails!

Posted by Simon at 04:42 PM

Got Your Number

At last, David Bedford is suing “The Number” over the “Mystery Runners” (118 118).

The beleaguered directory enquiries company is already under pressure from regulators and the press over allegations that staff gave out wrong numbers and cut callers off to earn bonuses. The Number is a UK subsidiary of the US based InfoNXX, Inc, and are counter-claiming that the runners are based on Steve Prefontaine, the Oregon based 5000m/3 mile runner who died in 1975.

They’ll be lucky. Prefontaine (see link above for pictures) was built more like a traditional miler, certainly thin but noticeably muscular. Bedford was more the stringy, sinewy long-distance type, as the models are. Prefontaine’s moustache was quite neat and confined to his upper lip, while Bedford favoured the three-sided look reminiscent of Asterix. Then there are the vests: being white they resemble UK international kit; Prefontaine is remembered for either wearing Oregon’s yellow, or the blue of the USA. Lastly, as Mr McGeoch will tell anyone, Bedford, being a rebel, always wore red socks. Prefontaine didn’t. The mystery runners do.

We hope Mr Bedford has regrown his trademark facial hair after shaving it when Shona Crombie-Hicks won the 1000-mile challenge, and will have his day in court with his flocculent head held high.
NB This thread is now closed. When/if it goes to court, we will publish a new post.

Posted by Dave at 10:59 AM

What Is That Stuff?

One or two of you may have noticed the RDF and RSS buttons on the front page and the links at the bottom of the main Ace page.

You may even have wondered what they are for. Each are different formats of news feed files. The ones on the home page were the product of an experiment at generating such files, and they just fell out of the ‘recently updated pages’ script.

That should give you a clue that they have something to do with pages being changed recently. Instead of having to visit the site to see what’s changed, you use either the RSS or the RDF file.

Fine, but how do you do that? Most of you aren’t going to ever want to learn XML, even if looking at either format in most browsers should be almost self-explanatory. The solution is to use a program called a ‘feed reader.’

The most accessible article on ‘feed readers’ is this Guardian piece. (There is a more comprehensive list on the Open Directory.)

You might be surprised how many sites now have these. The BBC feed is a fine example, recent news items are encapsulated by a headline and a single sentence. I have yet to find a newspaper with one, but they will come.

If I could find a connection between Paul Tergat and George Bush, I can find one between this and the activities of the club. Ben Hammersley, who wrote the Guardian article, is running the Marathon des Sables in 2004. (I just found it on his website.) Dick Brewer and Terry Caveney are attempting it in 2005. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me if Andy changes his mind and does it again in 18 months.

Speaking of long runs, Alex Meredith who comes down regularly on Thursdays is running across Cuba for Children in Need.

Posted by Dave at 06:40 PM