And that’s a fact!

The Blenheim Palace Fun Run was one of my favourite races last year.

The whole event has a brilliantly relaxed, feel-good family atmosphere and, of course, the house and grounds are stunning.

So when Mandy asked a few months back if she should sign us up again this year, naturally I jumped at the chance to do it all over again.

That was until I injured my knee.

Whilst it has improved slightly over the past couple of weeks, it’s not back to normal just yet. Given that it was still far from 100%, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would have to skip this year’s race and cheer everyone on from the side lines instead. That would certainly have been the sensible thing to do.

But after being struck by a serious case of FOMO, I made a last-minute decision to go for it. After all, this was just 7k. What harm could it do..?

So, bright and early on Sunday morning, the family and I (along with a few welcome extras in the form of my daughter’s friends) piled into the Buzz and made our way to Oxfordshire.

The race itself was every bit as good as last year. The weather held out, the atmosphere was brilliant, and the grounds were just as impressive as I remembered.

Everything was great…

Except the knee.

I may have convinced myself that 7k was manageable, but unfortunately my body had other ideas. That’ll teach me!

On the plus side, I have been able to access treatment for my ongoing injury through my Vitality healthcare insurance. Excellent news, you’d think. Except my supposed “treatment” has so far only consisted of online physio sessions.

I genuinely struggled to get my head around that concept at first. Here I was with a knee that clearly needed someone to prod it, twist it and say things like “yes, that’s very tight”, and instead I was invited to sit in front of a laptop discussing it over Zoom!

The first appointment involved lots of conversation and absolutely no physical examination whatsoever. By the second session, I was eventually given (virtually of course) a handful of basic exercises to attempt at home. None of which has worked, I might add.

I am not a dinosaur. I do understand why so many services are moving online and, in many cases, this approach works perfectly fine. Better even. Banking, shopping, and paying taxes are prime examples.

But there are still certain things in life where technology simply isn’t a substitute for another human being sitting opposite you in the same room. Physio is one of them.

Wine tasting over the phone would be another. You can discuss “notes of blackberry and oak” all you like, but if you can’t actually taste the product then what’s the point!?!

Haircuts would also struggle online. We all witnessed enough questionable lockdown trims to know how that story ends!

There’s no getting around it; sometimes you need to see a real human. In the flesh.

It’s something we believe strongly in at Trellidor as well. By meeting with a potential customer in person and actually walking around their site, we can gain a better understanding of the challenges they’re facing and how we can help. In my experience, you learn far more from doing this than you ever will over a Teams call.

It’s also one of the reasons we’re excited to be exhibiting at Retail Risk – London this year. The conference is always a great opportunity to meet retailers in the flesh and hear first hand about the realities of what they’re up against.

As for my injured knee, you might argue that I should have known better than to run a race I really should have sat out.

Then again, sensible decisions rarely make for interesting stories…