Although January is a symbol of a new year, and you can essentially wipe clean the slate and start over, it is still one of  my least favorite months. Luckily I live in a place without snow or extreme cold, which means I am still able to go outside each day to run or hike, but for some reason, I am always a little bit glad when the month is over.

Running: The month started off great, with a New Year's day run with friends, a marathon Fat Ass on the first weekend, and many other great days out on the trails. Since I am training for a few upcoming races, I am supposed to be running roughly 50 - 60 mile weeks, and I was on track for that. Unfortunately, mid month I sprained my ankle and was unable to run for the last couple of weeks of the month. I ended up with about 189 miles for the month (out of approximately 275 total planned miles).

Reading: Due to not running as much, it allowed me to step up my reading game a bit. In January I read 5 books. Actually, all of them were pretty good! My favorite was probably The Tipping Point (4 stars). The other four were:

China Dolls (4 stars) 
Little Big Lies (3 stars)
Goodnight June (4 stars)
Astray (4 stars)

Traveling: I went up to visit my parents for MLK weekend and had a great time hiking and exploring and playing board games with them. I even took the dog and she had so much fun running around off leash, acting like a dog. We also had a salamander hunt, ate Mickey Mouse waffles and ran a few miles on the snowy PCT. In addition to that, I went up to Sonoma county to see the Styx in concert. I haven't seen so many cougars in spandex pants all in one place in a long time!

Exploring with Mom, Dad and Emi

Misc: I was dogsitting a lot in January, so in addition to my running miles, I probably walked an additional 20 miles just by walking the dog twice a day. Also, since I could not run, I took advantage of a sunny day and took a really nice long bike ride around town. It was a lot of fun, although I may need to buy some of those funny padded shorts if I am going to do long rides in the future! My tush was sore the next day!

Alameda bike ride

How was your January? Did it go by quickly or slowly? What is your least favorite month of the year?

Well yes, for a few days, is the broad theme of a Huffington Post "exclusive" today.  The piece is an interview with former Lib Dem Defence minister Nick Harvey, who speculates that if David Cameron decided to resign as Conservative leader following a poor showing in the election, a hung parliament could result in coalition negotiations taking place with Nick Clegg holding the fort as interim Prime Minister.  Far-fetched?  Absolutely.  And we still have three months or so of wild speculation making headlines as news 'fact'.

The problem for Clegg, anyway, seems to lie closer to home.  I've always maintained that if disillusioned Lib Dem voters voted Labour, as a protest against the Lib Dems' willingness to be in coalition with the Conservatives, then many of their seats would actually fall not to Labour but to the Conservatives, from whom the incumbent MPs took the setas in the first place.  Clegg's Sheffield Hallam seat is one example - once a Tory stronghold, he seized it from them in 2005.  However, a Survation poll of the seat, reported on Labourlist, puts Labour ahead of Clegg in that seat.  If there is a momentum towards the Labour candidate there, then it certainly seems likely that the anti-coalition vote might be able to coalesce around him to the extent that it takes the seat and deprives Clegg of any further involvement in negotiating new coalitions.  Nevertheless, it is still worth remembering that the seat is a prosperous, and actually quite rural one; certainly not natural Labour territory under a left-wing leader.  I wouldn't write off either Clegg or the Tories just yet.

CORRECTION: I have said in the post above that Nick Clegg won the Hallam seat in 2005 from the Tories.  In fact, he succeeded Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan, who won it off the Tories in the meltdown of 1997.

Nick Clegg has also now gone on record to ridicule the Survation poll findings.

  

Short post this, really to highlight an interesting piece by Catherine Gegout on the Nottingham Uni politics blog about the new Italian president Sergio Mattarella.

For all those who thought Italian politics had no chance of ever not being mired in corruption - Gegout notes that Italy is the most corrupt state in the EU - the choice of Mattarella seems to mark a turning point.  His election as president by parliament also represents another piece of anti-Berlusconi manouevring by current prime minister, Matteo Renzi.  Well worth heading over to the article and getting a bit of quick immersement in Italian politics.   

There is a long history - dating all the way back to the 1970s in its modern form - of Commons sketch writing, which is to say reporting the proceedings of the House of Commons and our noble representatives as they sit debating our best interests within it, and doing so in a humorous fashion.  Andrew Alexander possibly started it in the modern newspapers, Frank Johnson and Edward Pearce have been masters of the art, and Quentin Letts keeps the satirical bile flowing today, amongst others.  It's almost as if these collected writers believe that either the Commons isn't funny enough on its own merits, or that the ludicrous pomposity of the inhabitants we have sent there needs exposing on a regular basis.

There is no better forum for such scathing wit than the weekly Prime Minister's Questions.  I'm not sure whether this regular bun fight has ever provided much illumination, but it has certainly been operating several stages below the average playground brawl in the hands of the current incumbent and his opposite number.  And Cameron was the man who once piously announced he would do away with "Punch and Judy" politics.  Honestly.  Politicians and their promises.

Anyway, I mention all this, in a rather long-winded way, to flag up the Spectator's brilliant Lloyd Evans, whose report of today's seemingly dire PMQs is, frankly, a masterpiece of richly comic observation.

His description of Cameron as a man who is "slipperier than a jellyfish emerging from an oil-slick" has an almost Wodehousian quality to it, while he describes one Labour backbencher as "a floppy haired Scouser who looks like an angry Beatle".  His greatest description today, though, is of the SNP's Angus Robertson, of whom he says "the stars that twinkled at his birth allotted him a superhuman store of charmlessness".   There's every chance we come away from chortling over Evans' sketch rather more wise in the ways of PMQs than if we'd simply watched it.

Business leaders like Stuart Rose of Marks and Spencer have been leaping in to the political arena to attack Labour's policy proposals, but it doesn't look as if this is doing much to shift the Tory position.  It has been flat-lining at around 32% for a year now.  Admittedly, Labour too has failed to shift things, remaining a mere 1% ahead of the Conservatives in the first month of this year, despite the high-energy campaigning.

It is more than probable that despite the attention being focused on the election - still over three months away - in the Westminster village, few ordinary voters are taking much notice. The biggest electoral trend has been the increase of the SNP's position in Scotland, which is likely to act to the detriment of Labour, but could cause a significant problem for all of the English parties when it comes to getting English legislation through parliament (a difficulty highlighted today by William Hague's inability to unite the parliamentary party behind his English laws proposal).

The Conservatives can draw little comfort from Labour's position in Scotland.  They remain under threat from UKIP, but more importantly have failed to move their opinion poll position despite concerted efforts to do so and the running of a narrative that seeks to confer on Cameron the benefits of incumbency whilst targeting Miliband as unfit to be Prime Minister.

Adam Bienkov has a piece on Politics.co.uk today analysing the polling situation, and he has this cutting but on the nail comment about the Tory party:

After a year of strong economic recovery and declining trust in Labour and Miliband, any other governing party would expect to be sweeping up support by now. The fact that voters would still rather plump for almost any other party instead, suggests that the Tories have fundamental problems they are simply refusing to face up to.

There are occasionally signs of realisation. The party's continuing low support among the young, ethnic minorities, working class voters and indeed anyone outside the South East of England, have been repeatedly raised by some figures on the fringes of the party. Occasionally these concerns are listened to. Usually they are ignored.

In fact rather than face up to these problems they have instead retreated back to the same electoral comfort zone that has failed to win them a majority for over twenty years. Endlessly banging on about immigration, Europe and welfare have failed to win dividends for the party for decades and yet they continue to do it anyway.

They say madness is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Well the Tories have been doing the same thing for almost a quarter of a century now and yet still they stand back in amazement when the opinion polls refuse to budge.

This absolutely encapsulates the Tory problem, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post.  Their failure to reach out to a wider electorate remains their Achilles heel, and yet they persistently look to the wrong answer - the belief that they just need to be more right-wing.  How many election defeats will it take for the moderate right to re-group and form a genuinely popular centre-right party?

My earlier post suggested that the Labour party had had a pretty dire week last week, so by way of balance here's some good news for the would-be Labour supporter.

First off is the report on Labourlist that the party has increased its membership.  Once you acknowledge Labourlist as a cheerleader for the party, it is nonetheless the case that they have produced figures that would give some cheer to Ed Miliband as he looks at a membership rise that appears to be beating the Tories (at 194,000 Labour members to just under 150,000 for the Tories).  Mind you, the Tories' Grant Shapps also claims a number of 224,000 if you include non-paying 'supporters', which seems like a very dubious calculation.  None of those figures, by the way, is particularly cheering for the parties, representing as they do somewhere around 1% of the electorate.

If that isn't enough to cheer the Labour leader, he might also want to gloat a little at the results of a Lord Ashcroft focus group poll, reported by Guido, that has most voters likening David Cameron to Dick Dastardly when asked to compare party leaders to cartoon characters.  Not that Miliband's cartoon alter ego - Elmer Fudd - is much more encouraging.

Miliband has also been doing a Q and A with younger voters, and while his answer about his life experience outside politics might have been wanting (he noted he had been a Treasury adviser and a lecturer at Harvard - lecturing about politics!), the Spectator's Isabel Hardman reports that he generally came across well.  All the more effective for being so regularly lampooned as a sub-human weirdo.

And then there are the people who "really, really, really" like Ed Miliband, which is good news for students like my school's mock election Labour candidate, who maintain that Ed Miliband is in reality a visionary and articulate leader who will wipe the floor with Cameron.  Well, it turns out Tom is not alone, as the Spectator's 'Steerpike' discovers the tweets that rave about Miliband's amazing quotes.

Finally, it seemed that Conservative Home had ventured into popular culture when I noticed the sub-heading "A replacement for Merlin - at last".  Could this be a reference to the BBC's tortuous road to finding another popular family fantasy programme, after the cancellation of "Atlantis" in only its second series?  Alas no - the Merlin in this story was a rather prosaic voter contact database, now being replaced by the less ambitiously named "Votesource".  The BBC's search presumably continues.

This weekend kicks off a new season of racing that I thought I was ready for but now I am not so sure. (You thought I was going to be talking about football, didn't you?) Last year, I started off the season with the same race as I will this year, the Jed Smith 50k. I remember last year thinking after I had finished that I was, "never going to run this race again." It is roughly a 5 mile loop on pavement that you run 6 times in order to get to 50k (31 miles). However, it's amazing what 9 or 10 months will do, because I signed up again this year. However, I have been nursing an ankle injury, so I may just go sit on the sidelines and cheer.

In addition to Jed Smith, there are a few key races I will be doing this year that I am really looking forward to.

- Gorge Waterfall 100k: This race is close to Portland, in the Columbia Gorge area near Cascade Locks. I have been hiking in the area before and so I know that it is beautiful. The course has a ton of waterfalls on it as well; you can see them in this video by the Ginger Runner (go to about 2 min. to see the course). It is an out and back with about 12,000 ft. of elevation. I am looking forward to it, as I am traveling up there with some friends and we have rented an airbnb in the Hawthorne district of Portland and we will stay for a couple of days in addition to the race. I am really hoping it does not rain though! 

- Lake Sonoma 50M:  This race is one of those that always brings the big names. It is an out and back with about 10,500 ft of elevation gain. It is also a Montrail Ultra Cup race, meaning that the top two men and women qualify for an entry into Western States. Last year the top men were Zach Miller, Rob Krar and Sage Canaday. This year there are some good local boys such as Alex Varner and Dylan Bowman. These men will finish in about 6 hours, whereas I will be hanging out about 4 hours behind them. However, it will be fun to be part of such an important race. (This is a good video of the 2014 race by Billy Yang).

- Tahoe Rim Trail 100M: Yes, I did it; I signed up for a hundred mile race. Am I nervous? You betcha. I know I can finish, unless something goes horribly wrong, but I would like to do well. I know it is my first hundred, so my goal should really just be to FINISH. However, I would like to finish well under the 35 hour cut off time if possible. This will be a great race; I have done the 50M before, and the 100M is two 50 mile loops starting at about 7,000 ft. with a max elevation of about 9,500 ft. and a total gain of about 20,000 ft. There will be literally dozens of people there who I know, which I feel will be good motivation to keep moving. This race will be like a huge all night party with all of my friends.

In addition to these, there will be smaller, local races thrown in the mix, as well as times when I will be crewing and pacing friends for their big events. All in all, it is shaping up to be a great racing season and I cannot wait to kick it off!

Do you have any big races on the calendar this year? Will you travel for them or do you normally stay closer to home? If you are not a runner, what big plans do you have for weekend trips this summer?