hurling, blarney and monday.

This weekend I needed to do my longest training run of 22 miles, this would take nearly 4 hours so I wanted to try meet up with a local running club.
Eagle Athletic Club had sundays listed on there site. They do a 13 mile run and Blarney is 10km from my place so should all work out pretty well. (dont even tell me about mixing miles and kilometers!)
I planned my route and wake up time so I arrived in Blarney 9:20 ten minutes before they depart from the Church car park. Which works fine giving me 10 minutes to find the church. Now I assumed the church would be pretty obvious to find, which is was not and aware of only having 10 minutes to find the place. I asked a local. He was defiantly a local and could even had slept in the park that he was cleaning. Hi, sorry to bother you can you help me? Im looking for the church. I decided not to bother about the running club as he clearly was not a runner.
So he says, ¨Which one would that be the Catholic or Protestant.¨ Then adds with a gloating air ¨The Protestant one closed down ages ago¨, implying like a capitalist that it just could not compete with the Catholic church and was forced to close. Not wanting to enter into any kind of religious debate or mention the fact I had a British passport I thanked him and headed off to find both car parks empty.
This sucked, so I waited until I saw the first runner come past and just followed him thinking we would be meeting them or know a decent route. He was clearly on a very short run cos I could not keep up with him so I just did my own thing, getting 1 mile from Ballincollig, then coming back along Sundays Well road next to the Lee river. I even drank from the little cup at the Well I presume, how fitting I thought.

In the afternoon I headed off with Tim and Nicole to watch our first live hurling game at Pairc Ui Chaoimh. I was totally stuffed after my run and was looking forward to sitting in the stands with an icey dark beer, crazy as it is to think they dont sell alcohal at the stadiums!