[{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/kit/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Kit","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/oliver/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Oliver","type":"poets"},{"content":"Introducing Honey, my partner in crime on the trails — and the research on why running with a dog does something running alone can\u0026rsquo;t.\nHer name is Honey, and she has never once asked me how far, or how fast, or why I do this before the sun is properly up.\nShe just goes. Off the lead when the trail allows it, a black and white comma disappearing round the bend and reappearing, always, exactly when I start to worry. On the lead when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, trotting anyway like the rope was her idea.\nThe studies say what I already knew: that a dog on a run does something a watch can\u0026rsquo;t — lifts the stamina, lowers the argument in your head, turns fatigue into something almost cheerful. Something about oxytocin. Something about not running alone even when no one else is there.\nI call her my partner in crime, which undersells it. Crime implies a plan. She has none. She just runs because I\u0026rsquo;m running, and I run better because she does.\nSheepdog, no sheep, just me, and she has decided that\u0026rsquo;s enough of a flock.\nInspired by Mary Oliver\n","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-27-partner-in-crime/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Partner in Crime","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Poets","type":"poets"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Posts","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/rumi/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Rumi","type":"poets"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/runs/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Runs","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"New Non-stop bungee leash, first run today — more confidence on the downs, Honey joins the long run this weekend.\nFor years I kept her off the steep ground — Djouce\u0026rsquo;s shoulder, the Downs\u0026rsquo; loose scree, afraid her joy would be the thing that put me on my back. A fixed line has no mercy in it. When she surges, you go with her, or you don\u0026rsquo;t, and either way something gets hurt.\nThen a stranger ran past with an orange cord strung between himself and his dog, and I went home and read about bungees — rubber at the core, built for exactly the fear I\u0026rsquo;d been carrying: that the distance between two runners needs somewhere to bend.\nIt arrived the same length as the harness I already trusted, but stretched like it understood something the old lead never did — that connection isn\u0026rsquo;t the rope holding tight, it\u0026rsquo;s the rope knowing when to give.\nToday, on the downhill, she pulled and the line simply breathed with her, and I stayed upright, and something in my chest loosened too.\nThis weekend, the long run. Both of us, on the steep ground, finally — not because the fear is gone, but because now there\u0026rsquo;s somewhere for it to stretch.\nInspired by Rumi\n","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-27-the-give-in-the-line/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"The Give in the Line","type":"posts"},{"content":"My trail running story, ghostwritten by Yeats, Bukowski \u0026amp; more.\nTraining tips included.\nWicklow Mountains.\n","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"The Heather Mile","summary":"","title":"The Heather Mile","type":"page"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/trail-notes/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Trail-Notes","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"27 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/training/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Training","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"26 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/bishop/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Bishop","type":"poets"},{"content":"La Sportiva Jackal 2, four runs in — still new, still narrower than the Cascadias, already growing on me.\nFour runs in, and they still feel borrowed — a half-size of doubt across the midfoot, laces finding a new place to sit each time. Not new, exactly. More specific than that.\nThe Cascadias took years to become a fact about my feet — widest platform in the category, by every review, which only meant: room enough to stop thinking about the feet at all.\nThe Jackals don\u0026rsquo;t offer that yet. A narrower midfoot, an actual toe box instead of a spare room, and my feet keep noticing the difference — the way you notice a door moved six inches in a house you thought you knew.\nTwenty, thirty easy miles, the research says, before a shoe stops being a negotiation. Four runs is nothing. A handshake, not yet a friendship.\nBut something\u0026rsquo;s already shifting. Not comfort yet. Just less argument.\nInspired by Elizabeth Bishop\n","date":"26 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-26-four-runs-in/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Four Runs In","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"26 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/macneice/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Macneice","type":"poets"},{"content":"Glen of the Downs, today\u0026rsquo;s run — old Bellevue estate forest, now just vertical gain.\nA banker built this glen for pleasure once — La Touche, exotic glasshouses, a folly on a platform called the Octagon, and inside it, absurdly, a stuffed panther rigged on springs to leap at startled guests. Seventeen sixty-six. The joke outlived the money.\nBy nineteen thirteen the family had gone, the house left to itself, and itself is a slow kind of arson — no flames, just damp finding every room in turn, until nineteen fifty, when what was left came down for wheat and a golf course, tidier uses for a fallen estate.\nSomewhere in the paperwork the state took what remained for forestry, planted rows where hot-house orchids used to sit behind glass, and called it finished.\nToday it\u0026rsquo;s just gradient — sessile oak and conifer switching back on themselves, a dog somewhere ahead on the track, lungs working through what used to be a rich man\u0026rsquo;s idea of a view.\nThe panther\u0026rsquo;s gone. The springs are gone. Only the climb is still doing its job.\nInspired by Louis MacNeice\n","date":"26 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-26-the-panther-on-springs/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"The Panther on Springs","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"25 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/thomas/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Thomas","type":"poets"},{"content":"Kids back to school, mornings back in the dark — the IKO Core back on the head for the 5am runs.\nThe kids went back to school this week and the mornings noticed straight away — five a.m. now arrives in the dark, the trail gone quiet and unlit, so the torch comes out of the drawer again, seventy-nine grams, three settings, five hundred lumens at full reach for two and a half hours before it asks for rest.\nThe world shrinks to whatever the beam allows — a rope of light thrown down the trail, tree trunks stepping forward out of black and back into it once you\u0026rsquo;ve passed, the ground reduced to what\u0026rsquo;s directly ahead, which turns out to be enough.\nAhead of me, always a little further than the light quite reaches, the dog trots into the edge of the cone and out again, trusting the dark she can\u0026rsquo;t yet see, the way I\u0026rsquo;m learning to trust seventy-nine grams strapped to my head to tell me where the next stone is.\nSummer ran in daylight and didn\u0026rsquo;t think about it. Autumn asks you to earn the miles one small circle at a time.\nInspired by Dylan Thomas\n","date":"25 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-25-what-the-beam-allows/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"What the Beam Allows","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"24 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/bukowski/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Bukowski","type":"poets"},{"content":"New poles, still unused — working out the argument before Djouce settles it.\nTwo poles stood upright in the grass, teal shafts, black grips, price tag still folded somewhere in a drawer — planted like a question I haven\u0026rsquo;t answered.\nThe studies say: less force through the knees, a quarter less, some claim, and on Snowdon the pole-carriers came down clean while the empty-handed ached for days.\nThe studies also say: your heart works harder, your arms spend a currency your legs don\u0026rsquo;t have, and the two percent you gain climbing you\u0026rsquo;ll lose again if you never learned the rhythm — plant, push, swing, and stop thinking about it.\nSo here they stand, mid-argument, four points of contact against two, extra grams against saved cartilage, posture held a little longer into the miles where the legs stop negotiating.\nDjouce doesn\u0026rsquo;t care either way. Madeira has staircases waiting. Better to learn this on grass than argue it out on a mountain.\nInspired by Charles Bukowski\n","date":"24 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-24-four-points-of-contact/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Four Points of Contact","type":"posts"},{"content":"The trig pillar on Djouce summit — a fixed point since 1959, and still one today.\nNineteen fifty-nine, someone hauled concrete and shutter-boards up here, four feet of hand-cast stone, a brass disc bolted to the top — three arms and a hollow for a theodolite that hasn\u0026rsquo;t stood on this summit in decades.\nIt was never meant to last as a monument. It was meant to see: sightlines thrown to Tonelagee, to Kippure, to whatever stone stood next in the chain, each pillar patient, each angle measured and carried home, until the whole country was fixed to a single number — a low tide in Dublin Bay, April 1837, the sea\u0026rsquo;s lowest breath made permanent.\nSatellites do the job now, from further away than any theodolite could dream — a hundred reference points instead of thousands, the pillars retired but never removed, too heavy to argue with, too honest to pretend they were only ever decoration.\nI put my hand on it anyway, the way you touch a fixed point when you need to know where you actually are.\nInspired by W.B. Yeats\n","date":"24 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-24-triangulated/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Triangulated","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"24 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/yeats/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Yeats","type":"poets"},{"content":"","date":"23 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/heaney/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Heaney","type":"poets"},{"content":"B2B Weekend 2, Day 2 — 20.72km, HR 142, the morning after 33km on Djouce.\nYesterday the legs remembered Saturday — thirty-three kilometres still sitting behind the knees, a debt not fully paid, and out again anyway, quieter this time, twenty kilometres instead of thirty, the body choosing its own rhythm without being asked twice.\nThe numbers don\u0026rsquo;t lie about the trying: week on week, thirty-nine became fifty-four, thirty-seven percent more ground covered, and the heart rate didn\u0026rsquo;t move an inch — same effort carrying more distance, which is the only progress that counts out here, where nobody\u0026rsquo;s watching but the heather.\nFrom the ridge the forest drops away in one long green exhale toward the coast, fields stitched into patchwork, and beyond them the sea, grey and patient, going nowhere — much like this block, which isn\u0026rsquo;t going anywhere either, just further, weekend by weekend, until the legs stop asking questions.\nInspired by Seamus Heaney\n","date":"23 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-23-the-second-day/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"The Second Day","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"22 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/poets/frost/","section":"Poets","summary":"","title":"Frost","type":"poets"},{"content":"Aug 22, 2026 — B2B Day 1. 33km. HR 151. The engine was humming, end to end.\nA ribbon of stone through a sea of purple, heather leaning in like it knows something — that this body has been here before, that tired legs still remember the way.\nThe mountain holds its shape against the blue, indifferent and patient, the way mountains are when you\u0026rsquo;ve still got miles to go.\nFern and granite, shadow and sun, the valley dropping left toward the trees, and up there somewhere the summit waiting like it always waits.\nThis is what five hours looks like from the inside — not a finish line but a path that keeps offering itself,\nstone by stone, climb by climb, the engine finding its rhythm somewhere between the heather and the sky.\nMadeira is a long way off. But the mountain doesn\u0026rsquo;t care about October. It just wants to know if you\u0026rsquo;ll keep going.\nYou will.\nInspired by Robert Frost\n","date":"22 August 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2026-08-22-the-path-ahead/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"The Path Ahead","type":"posts"}]