Chaos

Apologies for the lateness of these blogs (especially to Matt). The reason for this should become clear forthwith.

I’m too busy for this training lark. That does not, of course, mean that I’m quitting. I’ve given up salsa already, but I haven’t stopped the socialising yet. This is difficult. I had some homework to do recently from Sal (her comment indicates she doesn’t remember this, but she probably just doesn’t remember that she referred to it as homework) which was to have a look at a race website and book myself into a 10km race in August. This was extremely tricky, because as I have already mentioned, I’m booked out, weekend wise, till the second weekend in September. Inclusive. However, I’m never one to avoid a challenge, so I’ve found a couple of Sundays where I might be able to rejig things and fit something in.

This weekend, however, is proving to be something more of a challenge. I was booked onto a train this morning at 9:45, which I thought would give me enough time to get to the swimming pool at 8 a.m., get my hour’s training in, and get home for just after nine to pick up my bag and head out.

That was before I spent Thursday night bottling apricot jam until 12:30. This was partly because I had such a suffeit of apricots, and giving them away to some people (like my coach) kind of meant that other people wanted some, so I ended up delivering apricots earlier in the evening, which inevitably took longer than I’d thought. I also had an unexpected delivery of eggs from a colleague that afternoon, and in a moment of blithe generosity, suggested to Susie that I make a quiche and bring it up with me. It would also use up some red peppers kicking about in the bottom of the fridge, and it really upsets me when they go off. I thought about the quiche at 12:30, and being insane, I decided the best thing to do would be to go ahead and make it. I got the butter out of the fridge, and smelled it – I don’t eat butter because of its general unspreadability, and I only buy it to use it in cooking or baking, which I hadn’t done for a couple of weeks. It smelled fine, so I gingerly tasted a bit. GAG. Rancid butter. Ack. I ran to the bathroom gagging, and practically drank a bottle of Listerine. Then I found two of the eggs had cracked on the way home, so there was no option but to have fried eggs for dinner. Oh, and in the excitement, I forgot to have dinner! And some asparagus that I’d bought earlier – they go surprisingly well with fried eggs. Who would have thunk it?

All told, feeling less like a domestic Goddess than Val had given me credit for earlier (I’m not sure how growing apricots makes you into a domestic Goddess, but apparently it does), I realised I had failed to tidy the house, which I like to try to do to save my embarrassment when Maggie comes round to feed the cat. It doesn’t really work, because frankly, no amount of tidying will ever make my house as tidy as a normal, or “tidy” person’s house. And Maggie does mention this to other people at not-quite-every opportunity, so sometimes I think, the hell with it, it’s staying messy. I posted a Facebook status message saying that I was not a domestic Goddess, I was in fact, an actual goddess, because I have a book of essays entitled “Messiness is next to Goddessness”, that a thoughtful and loving friend once bought me. Then I went to bed. At one thirty. Oops. Ignoring Sal’s message on my first ever post.

So, amazingly, I didn’t actually get up and go swimming at 7:30. Instead, I listened to my poor, abused body until half eight, made a second (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt at packing, and tidied the kitchen. I was still trying to find my camping towel at 9:30. “Shit, taxi” I probably vocalised, and called one. “About ten minutes, love, alright?” they said. They always say this, and always turn up in seconds, hence my desire to be ready before I call. They didn’t. It was about ten minutes. In one sense, I can’t blame them, because I used all of those minutes to throw more stuff at my bag. I missed the train. I missed swimming. I dropped the bag on my foot. It hurt.

The concern about being too busy doesn’t end there, however: I’m on my way to a(nother) hen party, where we are “glamping” at a festival called “Rewind”. The Hen, my lovely friend Susie, wishes us to dress as smurfs. You can go off people. Now, I (possibly) have packed my running stuff, and in a fit of optimism, also my swimming stuff – there is a pool in Perth, I checked. I could run there from Scone. At what point, however, I think I am going to actually do this, I do not honestly know. Although on the bright side, I should easily be able to fulfil Sal’s request to run up some hills, in Scotland, which is well-known for its hills. One thing I do know though, I’m not going to be very popular in the yurt if I don’t find a shower. I accidentally smelled my running stuff the other day, if I’d left it any longer before washing it, it might have started going running by itself. There’s an idea. I wonder if I could get it to wear the garmin?

It’s a plot

OK, there’s definitely something going on. I’m increasingly getting hooked on the garmin, which is wrong on a number of levels. I think it goes back to the quasi-scientist thing, to be honest. It’s a hook that keeps me interested in the whole “as long as I’m doing this exercise, I’m also getting fitter, which is scientifically interesting” way. It reminds me of back in the day when I was a student at Edinburgh, and they wanted some lab rats (volunteers) for an experiment on lactic acid in muscles before and after exercise. I really wanted to volunteer, but they specifically said “please don’t use this as an excuse to keep your new year’s resolution of getting fit, it’s very important that we have people who already are fit, to monitor the lactic acid in the muscles. If you aren’t used to exercise then this will change over time, which will bugger up our experiment”. So I didn’t volunteer, but all this time I’ve wondered how it would have changed the lactic acid levels before and after exercise. It was very narrow-minded of them not to run a third sample of unfit but getting fitter people. Mind you, half of us would have dropped out by the second week.

Anyway, back to the dastardly plot. So, I still haven’t got any heart rates from pace training. You remember the pace training, right? I didn’t do any last week because of the muscle tear (in hindsight, probably would have been worth skipping it this week too). It’s the one where I do a warm-up, then do 4 minutes fast (9 m/m) then 2 minutes jogging, and repeat that 4 times. Sal said she hadn’t increased it yet, because of the muscle tear. I’m not yet sure whether increasing it means the time I run fast for, or the speed I run fast at, so I am waiting with nervous energy to find out. I suspect the former, because Dave made a passing comment about doing pace training at race speed. This made me worried. Very, very worried.

Obviously I packed my running things and headed into work, carefully bringing the garmin charger as well as the thing itself, as I hadn’t recharged it yet. I picked up Chris’s email inviting Natural Runners out at lunchtime and realised I didn’t have my shoes. Or my towel. I went over. “I can’t come running today, I haven’t got my shoes”. “Oh, Emma!” said Chris; “Your NEW shoes?” asked Babs, adding “you’ve still got time to go back and get them”. I’m not entirely sure what Babs’ motives are in this. She herself does not engage in activities such as running, and regards her colleagues with a good deal of amusement, tempered with loathing, when they get back from a run and don’t go straight to the shower. However, she was right, I did. And given that my plans for the evening including picking as many ripe apricots as I could and making jam, as well as packing for Scone (the place, not the inedible bun), I thought that finding time for pace training would be pushing it.

So off I went, leaving the garmin happily charging at my desk, I cycled home, picked up the forgotten gear, and arrived back at the office. Shortly afterwards, Chris walked by looking cool in his shades. I rushed to get changed, and grabbed the garmin. I turned it on as I went downstairs. Or tried to. Nothing. I tried some more. Dead garmin. I had to delay our departure while I went up to get my phone – runkeeper is an app that keeps a cursory account of your pace, but more importantly has a timer.

We had a good 20 minute warm-up, then I left Chris and set off up the side of the river to engage with some speed. The only noteworthy things today were that beyond all odds, I managed to lose count of my laps; I didn’t even notice initially, I had to tot it up in my head later, because I realised I’d gone much further than usual up the river, but hadn’t finished by the time I got back to the gate. That was because I did 5 laps instead of four. Runkeeper was being useless, and I accidentally turned it off after the third lap, and it aborted the run, which was annoying (I still got to save it, but then had to start a new “event”. I think it basically just doesn’t use as many satellites as the garmin does, so my pace varies wildly between 6.30 and 11.50, when I am supposedly maintaining a steady speed. The only other noteworthy thing was overtaking a lady in a motorised wheelchair. I was feeling quite pleased about this, until I drew up with her, and realised she was giving her grandson a ride, and they were stopping to pick mummy some flowers. I had to pause mid speedy-bit to breathlessly let her know not to pick the nice yellow one. “Why not?” she wanted to know. “It’s ragwort,” I panted at her, “poisonous”. “Oh. Thanks” she said. I wondered on my way back to the office whether if I’d said it was incredibly rare, she would have taken umbrage at the suggestion that her grandson shouldn’t be allowed to pick it, or whether she maybe thought I was exaggerating my case, and waited till I’d moved off before letting the little tyke get on with it. I didn’t feel obliged to further the public service announcement by telling her that the poison in the leaves is cumulative, and that’s why council workers only pick them with gloves on. Sometimes I wonder how people survive without botanical skills. I’m forever wondering about the choices of shrubs people plant their gardens, without even realising that a warning to their kids not to pick them would be advisable.

Anyway, that’s probably why I lost count. On the way home, I got a blister on the arch of my foot. I’m keeping in mind the John Lewis guarantee, but I’ll try different socks before I give up on the Nike Pegasus, as they have been fine so far.

On the plus side, I googled “Dead garmin forerunner 305” and got a link to a blog which told me how to reset it. According to the 40 or so comments, she has been running a public service in how to reset garmins since 2007, when she posted the note. You have to press the “mode” button and the “lap reset” button for a few seconds at the same time. It reboots the system. You won’t lose any data, although you might still have to recharge afterwards. So that was a relief. Still no heart rate data for pace training though. Just think how good I’ll be when I finally get some!

Flexibility

 We had pilates today. Now I missed last week's pilates session, which was OK... I went to pay my respects to Iris, which is a good thing, what with her being what this is all about. Apparently, the subject of weights in pilates came up in my absence, so Richard brought his in today. He was either the only one who had any, or the only one who remembered. But we're a competitive lot, so there were a few jealous glances, and Anna said she had some she'd bring in next time (although admittedly her phraseology suggested that they were up for grabs because she wasn't intending on using them herself).

Oh, while I was messing about finishing off yesterday's, I went to play with the stats, which I have no idea what mean, but you get loads of graphs, which are always exciting to a quasi-scientist such as myself. You can get graphs per day, or per week, or per month, but they seem to have such totally different data in them that I find it a little disturbing. I expect my brother would find it a walk in the park.

But while I like looking most at the counter on the page (which tells me that it's had over 1000 hits! How cool is that!), I also have a passing glance, now and again, at traffic sources, out of interest. Bear with me on this, because I find it a little remarkable:


This is a genuine screen shot from my stats page. Now, how did my page come up in relation to this word search? I had to do some research here, so I put that exact term into Google, and scrolled through 25 pages. I am disappointed to report that I never found my blog, although pilates exercises were popular, and of course, I have mentioned both pilates and scissors, and the lack of manliness associated therein. (You don't find Dave doing pilates. Of course, we already covered lack of manliness). In all honesty, I was disappointed to not find my blog under that description, although not wholly surprised (and let's face it, only one person did - they were maybe very persistent).

Anyway, I digress. After yesterday's fartleks, I was feeling remarkably inflexible. We did the downward-facing dog today (I'm considering tagging that, I'm fascinated by what it could do to the stats), which we all enjoyed much more than the plank; in my mind I can't free the plank from the sailor's connotation of walking the plank, only one seems infinitely preferable (shark-infested waters notwithstanding). Still, for some reason, we all allowed ourselves to be guilted into doing the plank, even though Anita gave us the perfect opt-out (she's cunning like that, she knows how to play us). She said she'd save it till last, and if anyone didn't want to do it, they didn't have to. We basically all did it because we wanted to guilt Gav into doing it to, which worked a treat. And when we did butterflies, Richard lent me one of his weights, as he only needed one for that exercise. The butterfly (it may or may not be called that) is when Anita has made you do so many leg exercises that you contort into a ball of pain, and while you are lying like that, she suggests some arm-opening exercises, which you are too tired to resist. Also, they are pretty easy. However, with a two kilo-weight in the hand of the arm that's moving, it's a whole different story. It's not to say it isn't easy, it still is, but you do have to think about controlling the move (I thought I might put an extra hole in the wall, but managed to shuffle a sufficient distance away), and you can feel your abdominals engaging to take the effort. Which was very exciting!

I might do the downward-facing dog before bed. I couldn't get my feet flat on the floor in class, which I have been able to do previously: for some reason I wasn't being very flexible at all. Hamstrings like metal chains.