I’ve just finished a four week exercise program that I found in Men’s Fitness magazine. It’s not designed to work any of the major muscle groups directly but works some of the smaller muscles that often get avoided in the more common exercises. It’s all meant to be conditioning work to prepare the next four week cycle. I’m someone who likes to keep track of my exercises. Well, not so much “like” to as absolutely need to. You’ll always find me down the gym with my A5 black ‘n red book trying to keep track of what I’m doing. It’s useful because a) it takes all the guess work out of working out what weight I should be using next and b) I can’t just do a weights session without a plan. If I do, then I just end up wasting time not doing any exercises properly. Plus it’s also a very good way of seeing progression. For example, I started on one exercise using an 8kg dumb bell and after four weeks was able to do the same set using a 14kg weight. It’s encouraging (apart from the one exercise where I just couldn’t manage to increase the weight much at all.)

The routine was identical each week and, fortunately, didn’t require any complex gym equipment that the gym didn’t have. It went a little like this:

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Training has not been going well.

I went for a 70 minute run yesterday afternoon and managed 25 minutes. Just. Heavy legs, sore back, absolutely no motivation whatsoever. I feel overweight and out of shape. I haven’t really run since a race a couple of weeks ago. That went okay but could have gone better. I’m not sure what time I had because I didn’t have my HRM with me. My plan to use motivational music feel by the wayside because of a messed up playlist on my player which, rather than play the music in order, started off with the faster tunes that I planned for the end of the race. And I made the mistake of starting near the front and pegging it up the first hill far too quickly. Still, I know my time was roughly about 44 minutes, perhaps less, which is comparable with my time last year.

Since then my shin and achilles has been aching so I’ve laid off pounding the tarmac in favour of starting on some weights.

I was ready to give up a four week programme after two days.

I don’t know why I feel so lethargic. I do know that I’ve really got to sort out my diet and my drinking habits because I’m sure I’ll feel better in doing so. It’s not that I eat particularly badly, it’s just that I eat too much. And I definitely drink too much. It’s getting to the point where I shouldn’t keep either cheese or wine in the house as I can’t resist them when they’re around.

I know already that I’m going to talk myself out of doing the half marathon in three weeks when really, the only thing that should be stopping me is illness or injury. So today I’m going back to the weights and I’m going to book in a massage and an appointment with the chiropractor. Positive steps to alleviate the depression of feeling over the hill.

Not a great training week last week. I’ve been sciving on my stretching and am paying the price with aching left shin. I also went out on my first outdoor run which is the course of the race I’m doing next weekend. I felt heavy and lethargic. Then again, it was post lunch and I had imbibed a beer or two. Not sure how it’s going to pan out this week - need to sort my legs out.

Sat 15/04 Run, 55min, 710 KCals
5.5 mile x-country run. (Roughly equivalent to running at 9.5kmh)

Tue 11/04 Treadmill, 15min, 350 KCals
Pyramid run:
5 mins @ 14kmh
4 mins @ 14.5kmh
3 mins @ 15kmh
2 mins @ 15.5kmh
1 min @ 16kmh.
0 degree incline
Distance: ~3.75km

Mon 10/04 Treadmill, 30mins, 640 KCals
20 mins @ 13kmh
10 mins @ 14kmh
1 degree incline
Distance: 6.2km
2 x 25 Sit ups
2 x 25 Press ups

Fri 07/04: Treadmill, 30 mins, 580Kcal
12kmh
6km distance
0 degree incline

Thu 06/04: Treadmill, 40 mins, 800Kcal
5 mins @ 12kmh
25 mins @ 13kmh
10 mins @13.5kmh
0 degree incline
8.6km distance

Wed 05/04: Treadmill, 30 mins, 600Kcal
12.5kmh
1 degree incline
6.22km distance

Seven days until Tough Guy.

I don’t feel very fit!

.oO(Wonder if I can persuade Briggy to do it instead of me? He seems gullible enough to get talked into things!)

What is it about Mexico that attracts all these reports of UFO sightings? Bored fighter jet pilots perhaps?

Then again, they were on a routine drug traffik busting mission and maybe they’d just caught a couple of smugglers. I can almost hear the conversation now:

INT. MEXICO DRUGS SQUAD JET COCKPIT - NIGHT
PILOT 1
Eh! Pablo! Ees a good theeng we ran into Don Montoya back there an’ seized his stash, no?

PILOT 2 (PABLO)
(over intercom)
Most certainly Paulo! Our supplies, they were running low.

The sound of Paulo taking a hefty TOKE of a joint is heard over the intercom.

PILOT 1 (PAULO)
And thees stuff, it is the good sheet, yes? Don’t be smoking it all before we get back, amigo!

PILOT 2 (PABLO)
(over intercom)
Of course not, compadre. I’ll save you un poco!

They both laugh raucously!

PILOT 2 (PABLO)
(over intercom)
Hey Paulo, have a look at your radar. Ees some weird, crazy readings.

PILOT 1 (PAULO)
Radar? We don’ t need no steenkeng radar. Look outside at all the lights, amigo.

PILOT 2 (PABLO)
(over intercom)
Woah!

PILOT 1 (PAULO)
Si! Is definitely some good sheet, man!

The self congratulatory praise I gave myself for successfully finding a way to import blogkomm comments and match them to the correct posts has been undermined by the fact that I put the entry date into the database in the wrong format. Which means that some of my commented are shown as being entered in 1969. A little while before I was born, let alone this blog.

Ah well, gives me something to sort out tonight rather than spend time bonding with wife and walking the dog. No problem normally - empty the table and reimport. Except that there have been comments made today that I don’t particularly want to lose just yet.

UPDATE @ 20:51
Well that sorts that out. Turns out that not only had I got the date format the wrong way around, but when I upgraded blogkomm last month, it reversed the dates again. So I had to do a double import after exporting all the new comments and importing them back again after the import of the blogkomm comments.

There’s been so much importing and exporting around these parts I’m expecting HM Customs and Excise to knock on the door any minute!

I wasn’t too impressed with the changes made to Bleugger yesterday. That’s a lie. I couldn’t give a damn one way or another but it seemed like a good chance to finally switch over to using a new blogsystem, namely Wordpress.

I’ve been messing with it for a while (every since Lyle mentioned it) and thought I’d give it a go. Just to make it a little easier, I made sure that the look and feel of the blog stayed the same although there’s another stylesheet in the works as previously mentioned. Much time was spent adjusting the template, learning the functions and then writing an extra piece of code to import all my old blogkomm comments into the system. But everything seems to be there.

So why Wordpress and not MoveableType? The main reason is that WP doesn’t require Perl and is a straightforward PHP/MySQL based system. And I have full control over it.

And I get to do this…

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Today is the feast day of St David, patron saint of Wales, who was born and grew up on the west coast of Wales in what is now known as St David’s, located in the county of Pembrokeshire. St David’s is the smallest cathedral city in Britain and was officially made a city by Queen Elizabeth II in 1995. David died there in 589, having established a monastery on the site of the present cathedral.

Here endeth todays lesson. Happy St David’s Day.

What a marvellous weekend for rugby it was.

Wasps 27 - Rotheram 20
Wales 23 - Scotland 10
England 50 - Italy 9

Only marred by the fact that the builders in our kitchen kept on having to turn the power off to put new sockets in, so I missed the second half of the Wales game. But, aside from the Irish loss to France, a good weekend all round.