Radical Face

Pork pie wedding cake

Early in our plans last autumn we decided we wanted a pork pie wedding cake. Various local butchers either didn't seem interested or capable and as we were about to wonder if we could get what we wanted Stef found reference to Tony Woods the self-styled home of the Guiseley Growler on the internet

I gave Tony a call and he was immediately delighted to help. The day I went in to discuss what we wanted a batch of still warm Growlers had just been taken into the shop and they were superb (I had a brace iirc). The photo above taken by Michael is of Tony's son Ben, who cooked a belting pie for his own wedding Ben and Tony are smashing guys and our cake was superb (it didn't last long after the race!)

The Oh Hello's

Alex Miller

I'm planning a series of posts thanking people who helped us with our wedding. Alex Miller was recommended by some friends of his when I approached them to take wedding photos. We didn't meet up before the day but Alex was very keen to chat on the phone, by email and text, and on Skype to understand what our wedding would be like and what we wanted. He was excited by the rural setting and the idea of our fell race the moment they were mentioned to him. On the day he worked quietly but consistently hard, and produced some amazing images I'd be more than happy to recommend Alex to anyone, especially if they want genuine raw emotion capturing rather than boring, staged images. The above picture of Alex at work was taken by my brother David

Roo Panes

Married!

Me and the missus on the Beacon, half-way round Fells and Bells

Third finger left hand

Easter plans

My plans for Easter involve hopefully having a bit of down-time prior to my stag night next weekend, and our wedding the week after. With reports of pied flycatcher and common sandpiper arriving in the local area along with wheatear and golden plover I'm very keen to do some bird-watching walks. Roding woodcock is a possibility because outings might have to be early or late if the weather is good. Ring ouzel is another target bird, especially if we venture further up the dale at some point

Fells and Bells Blonde

Fells and Bells Blonde is labelled and ready for our big day 

Sub-Eight

It was eight weeks to go until our wedding on Saturday. Most of the bigger things (church, dress, rings, hotels, my cuff-links) are sorted now and we're largely down to fine-tuning and sorting our wedding day race

We spent the weekend in Devon and should have been running the Grizzly yesterday. Around the middle of last week we decided we are in no kind of shape to do a mostly runnable 20 miler so we spent the day with Stef's lads instead

I'm running out of time to lose some weight and my training is still all over the place with decent weeks logged then weeks when I get out once at best. Last week was a 'one runner', albeit a very enjoyable Wednesday head-torcher

Too fat, too long

I've been fat and lazy all winter. Wedding planning has been a convenient excuse for not running, but wasn't really ever all invasive time-wise, and is coming along well now with around nine weeks to go before our big day. Therefore my pre-wedding streak started on Monday. I have long enough to (a) shift some lard and (b) beat my previous longest effort. Two short road runs have been done and my Hope is fully charged for tonight's headtorcher. Streak on!

Fells and Bells

Entries are now open for our wedding day fell race up the Beacon. Details including a route map and how to enter are here

No Lakeland 100 for us this year

Stef and I have been struggling to find time (and commitment) to train and in spite of doing some running and making a degree of progress with healthier eating / weight loss we've decided there's no way we can prepare properly for this year's event. We've volunteered to marshal and at the moment I'm not sure we'll be doing any 'serious' running this year; certainly for the first half six months or so