Making progress

Today, I managed to put my knickers on without dropping them to the floor. Woo hoo! You see, ever since I spent an afternoon crawling around my loft fitting insulation and emptying the loft of loose breeze blocks, my back has been giving me a lot of grief. For the last two weeks I've either had to sit down to get dressed or step into one leg hole, drop my knickers to the floor, step *into* the other leg hole and then somehow stoop to pull them up. So doing it without going through this palaver is definite progress.

My foot, or rather my left ankle, seems fine now. I've not risked road running on it (apart from a few miles to do the timing for our club 5K the other night) but it seems just fine. My memories of my last stress fracture mean that I'm not about to assume that everything really *is* fine until it's been pain free for a week or two more. I've withdrawn from the "Run with the Wind" race in Strathaven which is a disappointment as it's a great 10K but it is predominantly downhill and all on tarmac and I really do think I'd be foolish to race it.

Still, I'm enjoying the running I am doing at the moment and am looking forward to the first training run on the WHW at the end of this month. Today's run was especially rewarding as I was running along part of the river Ayr way and as anyone who has ever run with me along there will confirm, I'm *always* looking for Kingfishers. Well today that vigilance paid off as an electric blue blur of wings skimmed down the river next to me, thumbing it's nose to the convention of drabness that seems to define so many British birds.

In a way I'm almost glad the all the other British birds are so drab as it heightens the pleasure of spotting such an outrageously colourful bird.