FEARGAL SHARKEY

I'd like to dedicate the next paragraph to my father.

Anyone who has looked at my J---athon history will know that I tend to try and knock out roughly half marathon distance each day. Typically not in a single run, but if I'm short of time I'll knock the lot out in one go. It gets pretty tiring, I'm getting old and my times are nothing to write home about. And so today was a bit of a leaden plod; a good half these days is hard to find.

I'm sorry; it happened a few years ago. I became my father. I don't blame him. He lost his father when he was very young, his mum, my grandmother, never remarried. So he didn't have a strong male role model to tell him that puns are fucking atrocious. So my brother and I grew up in a household where puns were always laying about. They were normal to us. I'm trying to break the cycle of comedic abuse before it is too late for my daughters.

So today. Up at stupid-o-clock to get some work started and then it was the normal dog-walk before getting home in time to take my youngest, H, to kinder-gymnastics. This does require me to walk on all 4 like a tired old wombat and fly around the gym like a bird; can I count those activities towards Juneathon? Home - via a coffee stop - for a bit more work and then out again to take H for a swim. Saturday morning is kid duty. Mum looked after AJ, who had a haircut then went to soccer. A light lunch, the girls went off for a sleep and that was my opportunity to do a run.

I was feeling a bit bleugh and low on inspiration so decided to my normal beach loop but at the end of the bike path a couple of hundred metres from I'd turn around and do it in reverse to get back home. That should give me around 22km, and it did. The double was 22.3km. The legs felt quite leaden and it was almost 14km and well into the return leg when I got into any sort of rhythm. Which was a real pity because it was a cracking day today. Mostly blue skies, around 20degrees.. A cracking winter day. There was a surf comp taking place that would probably have benefitted from some slightly larger waves, loads of people ambling about, just enjoying the day.

When I got home the girls were all awake and Sal cracked the whip; get ready, we're heading out to Vivid tonight. It's a magnificent thing, I suppose, but on the final Saturday night with a 4 and a 6yr old in tow it was one of the circles of hell, straight out of Dante's Inferno. But the kids loved it, I look the same 17 shite photographs everyone else has taken and we did have a nice dinner in the Mercantile Hotel in the Rocks. Bangers and mash and a pint of Guinness for me, watched the girls do a little dancing to the Irish band. Probably best I don't go into any detail about Sal and my thoughts on the enjoyability of (most of) the rest of it!

And I'm spent.

Juneathon so far - 123km.