Delayed by Merlin

I'm in training! My friend P had a neat way of dealing with requests or suggestions with which she didn't agree / didn't agree with her: "No thanks, I'm in training". It was a sufficiently disconcerting response than nobody ever asked "in training for what?".  

A few weeks ago, I started yomping up the hill behind our house as far as The Fork. 

This geographical feature (two tracks diverge on a heather moor not yellow wood) is very close to 2km due North of my sofa and about 220m further from the centre of the Earth. Let's call it a 10% slope; altho some of the track is more or less flat and so the steep bits are steeper.

About ⅔ of the journey is shared by Destination Fursey without the last 1:6 over 500m climb to St Fursey's Altar. This ~daily walk is not a stroll. I'm on a mission to build up stamina = the mitochondria in my leg muscles, so I can walk longer before collapsing in a wet whimpering heap. Also to break in my boots, so that they fit my gnarly feet better. When I started this regime, I could get there and back in just under an hour. Turns out that I take the same time going up as I do with gravity-assist on the way down. With younger legs and more reliable knees, I used to trot down the track where the footing was level and grassy. A peak-flow meter tells me (and my doctor) that I am a bit weak in the wind but I can trot along downhill for quite a while without running out of puff. The lungs aren't the issue even now; it's the lack of flex at ankle and knee such that a loose stone can send me sprawling . . . and sprawling at my age is unlikely to be bouncy-bouncy start off again.

After a couple of days performing this regime once (sometimes twice) a day, my time was down to 26-27 minutes = 10% faster. Last Sunday 18May evening, with a following wind, it only took me 24m. But that's surely the asymptote unless I run. I've clocked the GPS [Lat Long Elev] data from my phone and/or Barry Dalby's map. The GPS is captured by an app Location-on-Phone which I've used before. Generally if I'm outdoors the app is claiming accuracy of (3.22m = 10½ ft) but successive pics of our front gate over the last tuthree years gives {219 217 223 224 218 222 227 210 186 220 231 233}- average 219m;  range 186m - 233m. So take elevations with a pinch, but not a peck, of salt?

Last week, Dau.II came down for a tuthree days between shifts at the bain-marie shop. She arrived, through a spectacular sunset, on the last train from Dublin and desired that we would walk up to Stoolyen in the morning. That is a shoulder of Mt Leinster: 1km further from home and another 160m of elevation above The Fork. In other words it's a short but significantly steeper addition my regular regime. It was quietly wonderful to be pacing along with one of my favorite people. 

Maybe, not so quiet though? Because Dau.II has recently started paying attention to the birbs. Once your attention has been drawn to chirps, caws, trills and tweetles it is really hard for them to remain background white-noise. She has acquired the Merlin App and kept stopping to see what Merlin's best guess might be to ID a noticeable fragment of bird song. Turns out that we probably have ravens Corvus corax, hoodies Corvus cornix, jackdaws Corvus monedula and (even) carrion crows Corvus corone. The last is considered a visitor in Ireland having been inched out of their common ecological niche by hoodies. But Merlin was confident that they all were calling on the hill. That's just the big black birds, Merlin was also covering the, more difficult, little brown jobs LBJs which were invisible but vocal in the shrubbery.

Merlin? Magic! It makes it so much easier to make progress recognizing the birds with which we share this part of the planet. Of course, knowing the name of a bird isn't the same as knowing how it lives and breathes and makes its living. But it's a start - for which it is worth pausing the mission-yomp to pay attention.