An Sean Madraí

For those readers that don't know about Parkrun here is a little background. Back in 2004 a runner who was nursing an injury decided to give a little back to his community by organising a timed run in his local park. He with 12 friends ran the very first Parkrun. Since then it has grown just a little. The current numbers for the total number of people who have completed a Parkrun are 1,354,849. Collectively we have covered over 64 million kilometers. Not bad for a free event. That picture on the left was taken on January 9th at Marlay Park Parkrun where I, pictured left, and my daughter on the right got to meet the man behind Parkrun Paul Sinton-Hewitt. It is a measure of Paul that when being interviewed later on RTE radio he was introduced as being effectively Parkrun. Paul immediately corrected the interviewer saying he wasn't Parkrun. The thousands of volunteers and participants are Parkrun. Parkrun Ambassadors from many Parkruns at Marlay with Paul Operation

On and off I have been commuting to work using the M50 on a motorbike for just short of 9 years. This does not make me an expert and I would leave getting instruction to the real experts but I can give a little friendly advice. I have never crashed the bike on the M50 but I have received penalty points for my riding "style". Therefore take everything below with a grain of salt. Traffic The reason I use a motorbike is because of the traffic. When working in Parkwest Business Park it once took me 4 hours to travel the 27km from Swords by car. At that point I decided to change my mode of transport. I couldn't afford a helicopter so instead opted to buy a bike. This was at the time that they had started the work to expand the M50 from 2 lanes to 3, work that would continue for years. Once the work was completed we had the happy occasion of a major recession. Combining these two facts meant that the M50 was the easiest route to commute. Now that the economy is pick

I came across a tip on creating widgets in Twitter and thought I would experiment. The following is the list of Tweets that I have marked as favourites. Some alcohol may have been consumed for some of them! Favorite Tweets by @PeterTatDell

Courtesy of SwordsToday.ie One of the goals I set myself this year was to complete my first 10k run and I managed it to do it when I completed the Fingal 10K. Was it easy? I was expecting it to be a bit of a challenge but it ended up been much more of a challenge than I expected. As per usual I had great plans for building up my training over the previous weeks and like all my personal plans they came to nought. Well not completely nothing but certainly not the level I had in mind. I ended up with the plan to put a couple of big runs in on the Tuesday and Thursday before the event and even this plan came a cropper.  When it came to Tuesday I roped in my son, Dave, to go for a leisurely 8 or 9k and I went really well. We took a new route down through River Valley park which was beautiful in the haze of a summers evening except maybe for the midges of which I managed to swallow quite a few. Once down into village proper the plan was to follow a bit of the planned route for the Fing

This is a long old tale and I am sharing with you mainly to get it all down so I can read it myself in years to come because it was without doubt an epic weekend. It all started about 4 months ago when my good friend Eugene McLacken pinged me an email asking if I was up to see the group Television play a gig in Glasgow. Go look up Television on Youtube. I remembered them completely wrong and had visions of an ultra punk group so I immediately said yes. The main thing was I hadn't seen Eugene for a few years and I always enjoy when we do get together. Roll on to last week and my darling wife who I love dearly, agreed to us babysitting our newest grandchild on Friday night. This would normally be great but I had a 6:30 flight in the morning. I was not going to get much sleep. I had also set my sights on taking part in the Glasgow Parkrun. This was renamed the Pollock Park Parkrun because there are now 4 parkruns in Glasgow. However Pollock was the first in Scotland and one of the f

Introduction Most people who know me, also know I use an eCigarette. As a result I am frequently asked on how to get started and I have frequently put together an email with details of where to buy and what to buy. In order to avoid re-doing the same email over and over again I am going to put it all here and just keep this updated. I am not going to go into the rights or wrongs of eCigs. I use them and I have no intention of giving them up. I have not had a real smoke of any kind for nearly two years. Where To Buy If you are a bricks and mortar type shopper then I would recommend the Kix shops. There are a growing number of them and I use either the one at the top of Talbot street or the one in Malahide. To find all locations have a look at their website - http://www.getyourkix.com/ If you prefer, or you don't like the pricing there are lots of alternatives. The one I use the most is  http://www.thebestshop.eu/shop/ . As shops go through stages of business the qua