Oh! I am so so so so so so so so proud! And here is why!

Following more than four years of “manual handling” without any sort of a “risk assessment” I just successfully completed the online course in manual handling, getting a 100%. I can now look forward to the onsite course tomorrow (10-16, six full hours) for which my new certificate is a pre-requisite.

I am really tempted but I won’t list some of the questions I had to answer to get me through this course. It would be too embarassing….:)

Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt.

Here is one thing that has stayed with me from the marathon (apart from the blisters on three of my toes:). At some stage during the last kilometres there was a man standing on the site of the road calling out my name (the names were all printed on the numbers runners had clipped to their shirts): “Reinhard! Ganz locker bis durchs Ziel” which translates into something like: “keep going, really relaxed, through to the finishing line”. It clicked and that short, simple piece of wisdom and advice kept me going. I learnt that pushing myself as much as I could, trying to keep up the pace from the first 30+ kilometres, trying to speed speed speed, was not going to work. I learnt from this incredibly wise man on the side of the road that in order to get this over the line I had to relax my mind and body and just keep it going in a nice and easy pace. Switching from a tense, pushing-forward mode to a relaxed but steady mode made all the difference, and got me where I wanted to get.

A bit of a life-lesson.

It was good to be back home again, to see Pádraig and to share with him the experience of that ‘run’. He was smiling most of the time when I was telling him about it, and left me wondering what he was thinking.

Finally – here is a quote I really like, because it gives reasons to continue: