Ah, so it's that time of year again ? November 2015

Finally Autumn realised that it wasn't supposed to be 16 degrees in November and the leaves finally starter to get blown off the trees a bit. We didn't cover any events this weekend and with no Running Show this year up at Sandown to hang out at, it was a bit of a slow one.

However, it isn't even December and pine trees are being put up all over the place, even at schools, let alone in the supermarkets (thank goodness for £2.50 deliveries!). As for American thanksgiving, jolly good, we have the Harvest Festival, which if you were paying attention - was quite a few weeks ago. As for "Black Friday", well, this is how it makes me feel, if any of you remember Johnny the Painter from the Fast Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIW9sL-Yf6Q

No I'm not about to go wading through the 40Terrabytes of our image data storage banks screaming "BLACK!!" with a raised camera monopod as I smash along the shelving, but you know, sometimes consumerism makes us all feel a bit like that doesn't it.

Simon and Terry in 2004 at the Preston Park Road Races working on inter-club relations

So, no, I'm not going to be going through the Archives with a blunt broadsword, and we will be having no last minute sales this Friday. No, the same prices we have had for - well years frankly, will continue unchanged until at least the end of the year. Just like the Bank of England we thought rates were going to go up at some point in 2015, but just like them, it turns out we were wrong.

Archives
But what if I did decide to go a bit "Johnny Painter" with the data drives here ? Would everything be gone forever ? What happens to the images once they are gone from the main gallery ? Well, we keep all the master data files here on racks of hard-drives, and then put them onto our archive gallery. It's our archive (and not our main gallery) because it doesn't let us do cool things like great value collections for £19.99, and it has data uploading restrictions that make it impractically slow to get images up for current events (anyone for a two day gallery upload?), but after three months - it does provide a long term safe haven for your images and races, even though it does cost us a fair bit of money for the amount we store on there - it is still there for you as your memories get more and more precious, and gain in sentimental value.

The 2015 Archive
So, for any events from 2015 that have been archived from the main gallery, can I point you in the direction of our archive here: http://bit.ly/SSP-2015-Gallery-Archive
It has been a massive task for Tony here in the office to get this archive going - and we are hoping that it enables many of you to come back and get those cherished memories that you didn't manage to catch earlier this year...

Who remembers the Heatherly 6'n'10 from May 2004 ? This was the first race start shot we ever posted

How about earlier years ? we still have full archives going back to 2004 for running races - but it is taking a massive amount of time to get these onto the archive. Also, disk technology has moved on - IDE hard drives are not the same as the SATA-III connections your computer now has - trying to get the data off the older ones can be a challenge.
We have barely been able to keep up with archiving events from this year, so we are considering our options. Getting the necessary infrastructure could be a solution - and gigaclear.com could be the commercial solution of the future - if only we can get them over here... and that's a plan for the next few years I think.

I wonder if Jacko remembers the 2005 Preston Park Road Races ?

Archive requests
Did you know we do archive requests ? If we can find your images (assuming your race number was showing at the time and it was catalogued) from a race we covered (full list here - scroll down) we load them onto the archive gallery for you too, have a navigation around and you can find those - just send us an email (to info@sussexsportphotography.com) with the race, date and race number (you can usually get that from the results) you want to see and we can pull those images from the main databank and make an archive for you.
We should (if we had any common sense) charge for that recovery service, but we don't at the moment, so best get your requests in now before we get hit with some kind of Archive retrieval tax from George Osbourne.

11 years ago at the start of the Brighton 10k in 2004 - didn't they all look healthy !

So that's enough wandering along memory lane, can you tell it's been a weekend off for us here (first one since April's Easter weekend and even then we were at events on the Friday and Monday Bank holidays). A week in the office of admin and year end accounts instead of post-race image cataloguing and PR emails can take it's toll...

Latest Memories are available and where you're making your next ones from:

So here's the current and next race galleries

Date	Event name	Event type	Gallery link
Sat-14/11/2015	Brutal Long Valley	XC - challenge	http://bit.ly/Brutal-LongValley-2015-Gallery
Sun-15/11/2015	Back 2 The Trenches	XC - challenge	http://bit.ly/B2TT-Race4-Gallery-2015
Sun-15/11/2015	Brighton 10k	10k	http://bit.ly/Brighton-10k-Gallery-2015
.	Coming soon - get entered	.	Link to event via Gallery
This Sunday-29/11/2015	ETL Molehills	Road/trail - entry on the day	http://bit.ly/ETL-Molehills-2015-Gallery
Sun-06/12/2015	The Hogs Back	12k-ish trail	http://bit.ly/Hogs-Back-10k-Gallery-2015
Sun-06/12/2015	Seaford Mince Pie	10m trail	http://bit.ly/Mince-Pie-Gallery-2015

and with news just in that the Grim Challenge on the 5th and 6th of December is cancelled/postponed due to MOD permission (more info here www.grimchallenge.co.uk) that makes your last chance for a muddy race in 2015 the Brutal at Longmoor on the 28th of December - go here to find out more - it's like the Grim, but more Brutal - Brutal 10

So enjoy the last weekend of November. Not seen a lot of "movember" action going on this year, perhaps it will be more obvious in December when I can see people's faces again ?

Until next time, train safely, keep warm and get your race entries in. No sorry I mean - buy your race photos before I go all "Johnny Painter" on the archives...

laters
Anthony