Introduction to the tort of negligence

Introduction to the tort of negligence

New chickens

Having sadly lost Speckledy chicken last weekend when her hernia ruptured we noticed that the remaining two were in real disarray, they had lost their leader who kept them all in check. We decided that the best time to introduce new comers would be before the existing ladies had settled back down.


We went to the chicken farm and brought home Comet who is a copper black maran and Dart (named for her tendency for darting about at the slightest provocation).


We initially set them up in the broody box below with some green garden mesh to keep them apart but the big ones, Brownie especially, kept on trying to barge their way through to get them so we swapped it for some heavy duty metal bars. Judging by the reaction of the big ones, I think it's going to take a while to get them to integrate.

Poor Speckledy died

Couch to 5K - week 5, run 3

Run 3: brisk 5-minute warm-up walk, then 20 minutes running, with no walking.

It's quite normal for me to go months without blogging and now I'm writing two posts in two days.

I wrote yesterday about how worried I was about doing 20 minutes of running without stopping. I felt a bit sick the whole day worrying about it and I was hoping and praying that my running partner wouldn't want to go out. When we did go out the warm up was awful, I'd been and done a gym class earlier in the day and I felt stiff and uncomfortable, and I was aware that we were walking much slower than we really needed to for an effective warm up. I was very tempted to turn around and walk home without even starting to run. Eventually we got to our normal starting point for running and I felt completely hopeless, there was no way I could possibly do 20 minutes constantly without stopping so there was no point in trying. I decided to run as slowly as I could to the mouth of the park on our normal running route, I'd done this before in a free practice and I know that this is about 10 minutes away. I'd also decided that I wouldn't check my watch until I got there. So I kept running, aiming for the mouth of the park but before I got there Laura on the C25K podcast said I was half way through. This confirmed that I was running surprisingly slowly. So I decided to keep on going to the mouth of the park, as I had originally planned. I checked my watch at this point and found I was 12 minutes and 30 seconds in heading in to the really difficult park going up hill over longish grass. I then decided to run through the grassy bit and then review. Part way through it said that I was 15 minutes in and only had 5 minutes left. This was the first point at which I acknowledged that I could actually complete this. I had a slight mishap at this point when I tried to go down the gully way out of the park but there were some people going the other way, running partner had already gone through so I got a bit stuck running up a path in completely the opposite direction to the one I needed to go, but I managed to run a small loop so I could keep going and the whole thing was quite a useful distraction. We ran up to our normal cooling down stretch and the app told me that we'd made it.

I don't think I ever really considered stopping. It was a fantastic experience, before I set out I was sure I couldn't do it but once I got started I quietly decided that I was going to do it and I did. I know that today was make or break, if I had stopped to walk it would have knocked my confidence and been the first time that I hadn't enjoyed running so I'm so pleased it worked out well. Now we get to graduate onto week six.  

Couch to 5K - week 5, part 1

Week 5

There are three different workouts for this week. They are as follows:

• Run 1: brisk 5-minute warm-up walk, then 5 minutes running, 3 minutes walking, 5 minutes running, 3 minutes walking, 5 minutes running.
• Run 2: brisk 5-minute warm-up walk, then 8 minutes running, 5 minutes walking, 8 minutes running.
• Run 3: brisk 5-minute warm-up walk, then 20 minutes running, with no walking.

I honestly thought I’d read this week’s couch to 5k schedule wrong.

Run 1 - that’s possible

Run 2 - that’s challenging but possible

Run 3 - surely in the wrong week. That can’t possibly be run three of week five!

I don’t understand why run three is so much more challenging than any of the others. It’s more than double the time I’ve run in one go before.

We’ve now completed run one and two from this week without any real issues. I enjoyed both of them and I suggested to my running partner that maybe we should do these two once more each to get up more into running for an extended period but he said we should just go for it. My worry is that I’ve never actually given up on a running section and walked and this is something that I prize highly, I don’t want to give up on this but I just don’t think I’ll be able to keep going for the full twenty minutes. I think it’s important to note that my running partner stops to walk (and sometimes stops completely) quite regularly, he tends to do a sprint section and is then exhausted, so stopping holds no shame for him. Part of me wishes that I’d stopped for a walk in one of the earlier runs so I could experience the failure of giving up earlier and then gone out the next day and smashed it. I’m pretty sure that’s cheating.

I’ve been trying to sort out strategies for this big run. I’ve got my new running shoes, which are really successful and I’ve got one of those handheld running water bottles because I’ve found being really thirsty distracting in previous runs, I know that you’re not supposed to need water up to 5k, but I’m hoping it will at least be a reward I can give myself. What I’m not sure about is a strategy during the run. I’m planning on going as slow as humanly possible whilst still not walking (I do still run slower than I walk at times, but I don’t stop running) but I’m yet to decide whether to “allow” myself some walking breaks, how many and for how long.

I’m ready for the physical side of the run, but I’m yet to figure out the mental part.

via GIPHY