Author: awmalloyadmin

This is a little bit of Malloy history.

My dad ran a stationery shop for over 20 years, Ted Malloy Office and Art Supplies (55 High St, Shepparton, and bugger, I can’t remember the number; that’s going to annoy me). Anyway, underneath the glass topped counter was a space and this device lived there. It held a large roll of brown paper that was used to wrap goods.

It lived at my sisters for a while and a while ago it moved here. We’ve repurposed it for the kids who can now grab drawing paper whenever they want.

I bet dad never thought that 40+ years after it was first used it would be still going strong.

We thought the boys needed a little help so yesterday we left them out in the summer rain to grow a little.

When Frankie chose us as her new family back in April we were happy as her colourings meant she’d make a perfect outdoor cat. So we brought her home, settled her in and after a while opened the back door so she could explore. Which she point blank refused to do and it didn’t take us long to realise that in Frankie’s mind, she’s very much an indoor cat.

So it was with great excitement today I saw her sitting at the front door, checking out a bird hopping around our drive. I opened the door, expecting her to run back to Moo’s bed but this time, no, she decided she would have a sniff around ouitside. It was only for five minutes, and she never strayed far from the front door but it was quite the adventure for her.

She’s back on Moo’s bed now, and should recover from her exertions in a week or so.

I still can’t run thanks to this damn planter fasciatis. I’ve kept up my cardio by hopping on the bike at the gym and kept up weights but today I decided I shold prep myself for returning to running, whenever that may come. I was going to talk to a trainer about doing a core session ‘cause it’s an area I neglect and one that’s important for runners but then I realised I know enough about the gym and I have other resources.

I remembered seeing a 20 minute core workout for runners on Runners World the other day so I’ve made that in to a Sway and it will be my guide tomorrow.

Here’s what I’ll be doing.

I’m a freelancer, and most of my client base are in Sydney so every time around this year I begin to suffer from FFFW – Freelance Festive Festivity Withdrawal. My social media feeds are full of people attending work do’s and skiving off early for a beer or two with workmates, suppliers or clients.

It gets you down after a bit so today I took myself out to lunch. Okay, it was a working lunch and a quick one at that but at least I got out of the office for a bit.

I went to visit Moo in her classroom today, it’s always fun to be greeted with cries of “Hi Kennedy’s dad” and then have 20 kids yell “Kennedy, your dad is here!”.

Two things gave me pause this afternoon though.

The first was a young boy who was busting to talk. We began chatting and he told me ‘I do drawing at dad’s house. He doesn’t live with us any more, and that’s okay.’. The look on his face told me he thought otherwise.

The second one I couldn’t believe. Moo has a friend in her community, they are both 8. Part of the presentation they did was to list their goals. This friend, a perfect little girl, had the goal ‘to lose weight’. At 8. I was speechless.

A couple of weeks ago I was running with Robin down along St Kilda beach. Right on the 5k mark I felt this ping in my leg and that was it, I hobbled on for 20 metres but couldn’t run any more. Back at the car I couldn’t raise my leg to get in. Hmmm, that couldn’t be good.

The next day I felt fine, but I thought I’d take the week off just to be on the safe side and didn’t run until last Tuesday night, which is Point Cook Community Running Group. The 3k warm up was fine but 5k in to the speed work something wasn’t right. Not painful as such, but definitely not right. I finished my sprint and opted out of the cool down jog.

I decided that I probably should see someone about it, maybe get a massage and all would be fine. Hmmmm.  As it turns out there’s  a specialist sports physio attached to my our gp’s practice so I rocked up there on Saturday morning, all ready to be given the all clear. That’s not quite how it turned out.

After one legged squats, some balancing, measuring, bending and poking the news was not good.

I have a pretty good strain of the iliopsoas, the hip flexor muscles, and if all goes well it will be 3 months until I can run again. Hopefully I’ll be back to in December so I can get some kilometers in while the weather is still good but this timing really sucks. Good news is I can cycle at the gym, as this uses different muscles, so I won’t lose any fitness but I’m going to miss City 2 Sea and a couple of other spring races I had planned. There’s lots of gentle stretches and pretty uncomfortable manipulation ahead before I start on a gym program designed to build up my left side.

Not quite the spring fitness campaign I had planned, but if I do everything right I should be back on the track, better than before.

I ran my second Run Melbourne yesterday and looking at the results I’m pretty happy.

My official time was 25:21.8 (down from 28:07, 2:46 faster than last year)

I was 215th overall, last year I was 544th.

33rd in my age group (40-49).

162nd male, up from 344 last year.

Still room for improvement and, despite my best efforts, I was still caught behind slow runners at the start. It’s frustrating that I couldn’t actually get a clear run until the 800m point by which stage a quarter of the race is almost done. I guesstimate this cost me about 20 seconds on my time.

Any way, results are motivating enough to have me aiming for 24:00 next year.

The most popular post I have written in terms of page views would have to be my rant against disappearing Oddfellow peppermints. It still gets hits to this day.

I love these mints, they are just perfect and they serve another purpose now; they remind me of my mum who fell in love them too when I introduced her them to her. To this day Peter still keeps a bag on top of the microwave so you can imagine my horror when I woke up this morning to the news that Allen’s were stopping production of a large range of their lollies – including finally killing off my Oddfellow mints.

Of course the first thing I did was jump on to Twitter and complain, which appeared on my Facebook page. There’s not much else I could do.

Just over an hour later I received a comment from Allen’s – Oddfellow mints are safe, despite the reporting on web sites. Now the ABC are reporting it too – Sherbies and Oddfellows safe. Just goes to show that Oddfellow mints are still at thing of great importance.

Today’s Park Run was my 23rd

I was 23rd across the line.

I was the 23rd male to finish.

Sadly I didn’t run it in 23 minutes.