Last chance to win Premium tickets to the All Ireland Quarter Finals

The early entry deadline for the STIG for CF Ireland Prize Draw is this Saturday night. Anyone who hasn't reserved a ticket before this date will miss out on a chance to win 2 Premium tickets to an All Ireland Football Quarter Finals double header in Croke Park on Saturday the 9th of August.

The winner will be announced through a video which we will post in the next edition of The Sunday Column. This means it will likely go up on Monday the 4th seeing as my internet connectivity as of late hasn't been smashing.

We will still be selling tickets after this Saturday and everyone who buys a ticket will get a shot at the big prizes which are listed here.

Tickets cost €25 and can be bought by emailing emmetryan@gmail.com

The Sunday Column - Stick with the day job

"Ooh a 99," I say. No, not the ice-cream. I was expressing my delight at breaking 100 on a pitch & putt course, where par is 54. My cohorts were little better. My flatmate shot 86 while my coach and training partner for the marathon covered the 18 holes in 80.

Not one of our tee shots finished on the green, the closest amusingly being one by myself that was about a foot off. Even that was a fluke taking a wicked hit off a tree.

Here's the scary part. That's our best combined performance since we started semi-regularly playing around a month ago. Needless to say none of us will be getting called up to the PGA tour anytime soon.

The real race training steps up a gear this week. I can confidently say that there is no way it will be as embarassing as our performance out in Sandyford. It might still be dire and woeful but not on the same level as my short game.

Check out my guest post at Creative Writing Corner

I recently guest posted on teen writing at Blair Hurley's Creative Writing Corner blog. In the post I take a look at the impact the internet is having on the writing habits of teenagers, referencing a recent Pew study that found the positives largely outweighed the negatives.

I found Blair's blog around 9 months ago and have been regularly following it ever since. She's a very talented young writer that is currently studying in Princeton and her blog is well worth checking out.

Keep an eye out here on STIG for CF Ireland for a guest post from Blair in the near future.

The Sunday Column - Back on the road

Around 5pm on Sunday the American Football season ended for the DCU Saints. For me this was the end of one regimen and the beginning of another. At around 7.30 this morning it was go time. The pads were put away for the summer and out came the runners, shorts and t-shirt.

As with any programme I’ve got to begin lightly but there is the added pressure that as I’m behind I’ll need to ramp it up a bit to be ready for the half-marathon in September. This morning was only a half hour jog around Ranelagh and into Rathmines. Tomorrow will likely be similar but soon, very soon it’ll be longer. It’ll be harder and it’ll be faster.

It will also likely not feature any knocks to my noggin, at least none that are deliberate. I gave a few of the lads a bit of a scare yesterday when I spoke rather butchly about the dents in my forehead following the Cork game on Sunday and how they likely explained the killer headache I had. They dents were a result of the force of impact and not due to the helmet’s tightness, I knew it was too loose to be anything other than hits. I’m sure the other guy looks worse though.

Having thought nothing of it myself (I’m well used to getting knocks to the head at this stage, it comes with the territory) I had gone about my day normally, after all I had work to do.

After a bit of coaxing I eventually agreed to go to see my GP about it to make sure I hadn’t got a concussion or anything else. My regular doc wasn’t in so I saw the other one in the clinic who isn’t used to my regular visits about my litany of injuries. As a result she was taken aback about my unconcerned attitude towards the aforementioned dents. It turned out that I was grand and hadn’t suffered any damage.

The visit did at least give me the opportunity to share war stories with Lucy, my GP’s receptionist, about various knocks we’d both received on the playing field. She used to play hockey and had taken some nasty hits from a hockey ball a few times, and trust me those things are like rocks.

Neither of us however could claim an injury as unfortunately amusing as Anna who used to be in Commerce International with me. She got hit in the face with a hockey ball shortly before our exams in second year. The result was extensive bruising that covered around both eyes and her nose. Those of us who didn’t know she played hockey immediately thought she had been beaten up and she had to repeatedly tell people that she was not the victim of an attack.

Well that was all a bit of a tangent. Anyway as I was saying the real training is underway. I’ll keep you all informed of the early progress over the coming weeks.

Getting in shape and giving away prizes

As the video shows I've a bit of catching up to do if I want to be in shape come November 2nd.

A much closer date to keep in your diaries is the 2nd of August. That's the day we announce who has won 2 tickets to the All Ireland Football Quarter Finals. The tickets are for the Premium section of the ground and are for a double-header on the 9th of August.

The big match tickets are part of the STIG for CF Ireland Prize Draw. Only 200 tickets are being sold in all at €25 each.

On top of the GAA tickets we're giving away a €250 voucher for Brown Thomas, a €200 voucher for Nue Blue Eriu, a signed Dublin Gaelic Football jersey, a signed Tipperary hurling jersey and a Motorola MOTOKRZR K1 red handset.

The main draw will take place in September but any tickets bought before the 2nd of August will also be entered into the draw for the Premium ticekts, giving you a chance to win on the double.

All the money raised will go towards our 2008 STIG for CF Ireland campaign.

Just another day

“Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

I can’t find an adjective. There is no simple way to describe it. In the 24 hours from 10pm on Monday through to the same time yesterday I did a whole lot of living and I nearly didn’t realise it. It’s not that it was wholly interesting, it wasn’t unless you lived it, it’s just that it’s the type of stuff you tend to not acknowledge.

I had to take an early night on Monday. Having just come home from a great night meeting Dundee United fans at the UCD game I needed some rest before my flight to London in the morning.

Unfortunately for me the garden next door had other plans. The rowdiness coming from Garret Fitzgerald’s backyard just wasn’t welcome. I always figured it would be the former Taoiseach that would take umbrage with my shenanigans some day. Instead there was a gang of young ladies in his garden shouting and chatting until well after midnight.

Yeah I sound like an old fogey but my alarm was set to go off at 3.45 am. This was the next part of the tale. It was the earliest I had been up in 7 years. That I even remember is odd but I remember why. It was the day I first moved to Aberdeen in 2001 and I had to get up early because there were huge delays in the airport due to the post 9/11 chaos.

It was that year in Aberdeen that led to my even caring about Dundee United visiting UCD on Monday but this story isn’t about Zen. It’s about noticing stuff.

You see I was up so early as I had to catch a flight to London where Lenovo had an event on. You might remember them as the company whose laptop I killed. Well the dude that gave the green light to that experiment was there and it’s fair to say it was a little frosty.

I was back in Dublin by 6.30pm and home by 7.10pm. It’s easy to forget that most people don’t travel as much as I do in my job but rather than think about that all I had in mind was dinner. So off we, at this stage Ciaran my flatmate was in tow, went to McSorley’s.

In my life I do a fair bit of flirting and eat a decent amount of soup. Neither of these points is surprising but it’s rare the two coincide. Yet here I was having some banter with an American barmaid because they were serving a concoction as odd as carrot and orange soup. The barmaid meanwhile turned out to be an ex PR person and I had spent the day largely in the presence of PR folk but to avoid me going off on another Zen tangent I want you to stop and think about this.

All these two foodstuffs, that’s orange and carrot for those that got distracted, have in common is colour but somehow it worked. I mean, how often does soup genuinely surprise you? I don’t get genuinely surprised by anything all that often so why not by soup I suppose.

And that’s how the story ends. With soup and a mixed view from Ellen the barmaid about my plans to grow a fro. In truth Ferris Bueller said all that I needed to say at the start of this post but I’m glad I said it anyway.

The Sunday Column – The drawbacks of success

This coming Sunday I play what will be the most important game I’ve played since I took up American Football three years ago. It’s also the cause of a substantial obstacle to my marathon preparations.

While I am delighted to be on a team in the playoffs I have noticed the difference in my fitness over the past few weeks. I’m in optimum condition for football but that is not necessarily the best shape for running.

Last Saturday should have been the first preparatory race for the New York City Marathon, the Adidas 5-miler in the Phoenix Park. Due to the extension to the football season I had to give this a miss as I have with much of my running based training. I’ve bulked back up slightly, which is necessary for the upcoming game or games, but the challenge will be to drop this again after the season ends. There is an upside, strength-wise I’m doing fine and frankly don’t need to build up on the power front any more for the race. While crushing people generally isn’t an important part of marathon-running, this part of my preparations should still translate well on the stamina front when I start back running again. Still it will take my body a couple of weeks to adjust.

The knock on effect is that with a 10-miler ahead in August I’ll need to ramp up the early part of my resumption of training in order for this race to be of any real use.

Essentially the biggest drawback is that I have to shuffle matters around in order for the half marathon in the Phoenix Park in September to be at the point in preparations that I need it to be.

If I had the choice would I change any of this to be able to prepare earlier? Not a chance in hell. New York can wait; I have business in Cork to attend to first. The Admirals are my only priority for now.

Maynooth and Sligo students take eco-friendly approaches to driving

I mentioned in the Sunday Column that I was in Paris for the Imagine Cup. The competition is basically the World Cup of Science and my video reports are now online so you can find out more about the great ideas these students have.

AcidRain from NUI Maynooth have developed an engine that runs on cooking oil. Yes it's been done before but this one is way more efficient. The lads find out tomorrow if they've won the World title.


Sligo IT's ParkIT meanwhile have developed software that informs drivers about the availability of parking spaces. The team hopes to bring the product to market next year.

The Sunday Column - Imagining victory

The column that refuses to go up on its intended day arrives early for once this week.

I'm over in Paris this weekend to cover the Imagine Cup, essentially the World Student games of Innovation. I'm here with fellows hacks Marie Boran and Karlin Lillington.

The Irish sides competing have put in a good showing. Acid Rain from NUI Maynooth drove all the way here (well they went on a ferry as well) from Dublin in a cooking oil powered car. The Opel Astra used is demonstrating a new technology aimed at making it easier to use biofuels in cars. Despite being the only team to make the judges stand in the rain, the Maynooth boys did enough to progress to the final. They have a legit shot at the world title when the winner is announced on Tuesday.

Sadly there was disappointment for Sligo IT's Park it team. The students from the North West had designed software to aid people when looking for parking. Despite putting in a solid presentation, Sligo failed to make it through to the semi final.

Congratulations to both teams on making it to the final. As a cheesy tribute here's an aptly named ditty by Belouis Some. I opted against a certain John Lennon song as it's just too obvious.