consolidation and consistency

that seems to be the name of the game with my times and performances on the ergo at the minute. 6:49.4 last night just 0.6 seconds behind my best time since coming back from illness. i was annoyed i didn't get the best time but i was close to it so its not disasterous by any means. big improvements will come its just a matter of time. might do an easy 40 mins on the machines this morning dependent on how i feel, followed by a trip to ashton gate (first of the new year) to watch the mighty reds thrash barnsley 5-0. well hopefully anyway.

back on track

after so long out of hard training once you get in to the really hard stuff again, its a bit like people say about going back to work, in that you don't really feel ike you've been away only a little bit worse because you're not used to the lactic acid and more specifically the hydrogen ions which are a bye product of lactic acid which is what really causes the pain associated with intense exercise. and i certainly had a large dose of that tonight with my second 2000 meter time trial post illness which which was a marginal improvement on the one i did on monday (6:49.6 compared to 6:50.1). by comparison i think it was marginally less painful (i wretched about 10 times after the one on monday) and slightly quicker so obviously i'm fitter than i was then although its hard to quantify some thing like that without doing a test in laboratory conditions. i am though still not close to my all time best time, 6:39.8, but i reckon i can beat that within a couple of months. still a nice easy day at work tomorrow in pill, no manager there its an SPDO, a nice stroll around easton in gordano. well its quite a long hilly walk with a lot of steps actually, but being an out and out country boy that i am i enjoy the rural deliveries. easton in gordano is a name that martin might recognise from his john o'groats to lands end jaunt, just after what he described as the low point of his journey in what sounded to me like the lawrence weston suburb in bristol. talking about low points i've just heard that scott has got drunk and thumped a prostitute.....again.

a change of plan

having stated in my last entry that i would not be doing any 2000 meter time trials until at least next week i promptly went and did ine last night-and i did ok. 6 minutes 50.1 seconds a full 10.3 seconds off my best time but no where near as bad as i expected it to be. i was thinking i would do well if i broke 7 minutes but now i have set the benchmark and i have to beat that. the first 500 meters were ok physically and mentally. psychologically the worst bit for me is always the middle 1000 meters from 500 to 1500 while physically the hardest bit is the final 1000. its always the same in that regard, but you do get a little bit of an energy boost for the final 100. i felt good before hand but it sure was a shock to the system having to work at that high intensity again after a couple of months in the wilderness, but now i am officially free from running and totally free to concentrate on where i want to go with rowing. like i said a couple of days ago the first step is to get the ergometer times down to some thing a bit more respectable sub 6:30 being the initial target and then we'll see how we go from there. fundamentally though i wont be doing any thing different to what did when i was running for the while a least i'll just be doing it on the rowing machine.

same old same old

i've not been on here for a few days but thats precisely because i have nothing to report. rowing wise i am building up my fitness levels slowly but durely and i have now finished the course of anti biotics that were prescribed to me by the doctor. steady state stuff but i'm enjoying it and i feel like i've had a new lease of life. for the moment the days when i would wake up feeling like an old man because my joints were so stiff have gone. i've put on about half a stone in muscle because of the upper body work that i'm doing. i'm still jogging once a week but thats all it will be for the while. the aim is to get my 2000 meter time on the ergometers down to under 6:30 before i join one of the local rowing clubs, then go there claiming i've never rowed before and astonish them with my talent, which is only strictly true in the sense that i've never rowed on water before. i'm planning to do 11400 meters steady tomorrow and the first hard 2000 meters will probably be the week after next.

apartf from that there is very little going on at the minute with no competition and work feels quite dead by comparison to the long days we had in december and i'm now very much looking forward to the summer and the lovely weather we will hopefully get and one thing i certainly wont miss is having to train on the track and the monotomy of having to churn out endless 400's 500's 600's etc running past the same markers time after time after time. whilst i still run for pleasure i thought that i would have real difficulty giving up running competitively but that has not been the case and i really feel like i have made the right decision

getting fitter-finally

after months of frustration and heartache i'm finally moving in the right direction fitness wise. the course of penicillin is working it's magic and aerobically i'm significantly stronger than i was before. i managed 10800 meters on the ergometer today in about 40 minutes at a reasonably steady pace about 41 minutes in total so i'm progressing steadily towards the target of 12000 meters per steady state row (i started off at about 9000). i'm already starting to feel a change in my body shape, i can feel the extra muscle on my chest and i have really been working those muscle groups hard-i had to ease off temporarily today for about 10 seconds as i could feel a twinge coming on in my right bicep. mark the gym owner was getting a bit annoyed with me as i stayed on the machine past the gym closing time and he wanted to get home understandably but there was no way he was shifting me from that machine until my workout was complete.

training on the rowing machine

its now official-i have for the while at least decided to quit running competitively in order to pursue other interests. in all honesty it was some thing that was on the cards for a while as my enthusiasm for training was on the wane. i have though not stopped running competitively and i am now building up the mileage on the ergometers and playing squash for fitness (i have even considered entering some tournaments) and i will sooner or later be joining a rowing club and possibly portishead squash club. so there you have it. official. the only problem though is that i've been getting blisters on my hands. if anyone has any suggestions on how to stop this then pleas feel free to write a post in the comments section on this blog.

the idea on the ergometers is to build my steady state aerobic training up to about 12000 meters at a time once i have finished the course of antibiotics (penecillin) that i'm on before i start doing any of the hard 2000 meter efforts on the machine that will help build up my anaerobic fitness. i do though intend to take a fair sizeable chunk off what my time would be currently, before i join any of the local rowing clubs. so it's rowing 6 days a week and running on the saturday just for old times sake and to give me a bit of variety in my training as well as playing squash 3 or 4 times a week.

back on the subject of running i was sad to read the interview with local bristol runner and olympian and friend of mine kate reed about her experiences post beijing this year before during and after the games and the way she was treated by uk athletics inparticular. it brought back memories of the post race interview i saw with her where she lamented the fact that she was forced to do a time trial before the day before the race in order to prove her fitness. she was also falsely accused of being a drugs cheat and had her room searched when she was supposed to be resting before the race. i know kate has never been one who's particularly good at avoiding scandal and for this reason she doesn't get any help from uk athletics (note she doesn't get any lottery funding in spite of the fact that there are athletes who performed far worse than her this year who will get top tier funding next year) which to my mind is a rather uneven handed way of treating people and is hardly a recipe for success for uk athletes. the jist of the interview published in both the bristol evening post and the clevedon and portishead mercury was that a)she had learnt a valuable lesson that you can't please everyone in life and b) she currently never wanted to run for great britain again and c) she was thinking of selling her gb olympic kit on ebay because it held so many bad memories for her and she hated putting it on for official functions and she kept it buried at the bottom of her drawer. knowing what i know about the way she was treated over there i can hardly blame her for feeling that way and it puts life in perspective in a way. people think that with success comes happiness but this proves that is certainly not always the case. being happy and feeling good within yourself is far more important than anything else in life and success will follow but only if it is the path that you're destined to take

i've been using the rowing machine!

i'm back on the ergos and i'm slowly building my mileage up to make it some thing like i was doing before when i was fit around about september time. i will start doing some 2000 meter time trials in about a couple of weeks time or may be a couple of weeks later depending on how i feel my fitness will hold out. for now though it is a question of concentrationg on the endless long sessions that build up your basic fitness. the difference between running and rowing though is you can work at a much higher heart rate as a rower because and recover quicker because the muscle and joint damage sustained through exercise is significantly less. whilst it is a wrench to give up running competitively, no matter how good you are at any one thing no one has infinite amounts of talent, so you have to accept your limitations. but remember that as one door closes another one opens, and i'm starting to view this as an opportunity to better my self, once i can shake off this throat infection, which touch wood is in its death throes. i have looked at the cost of joining rowing clubs, and it is quite extortionate compared to running but i see it as a investment in my future if it is some thing that i am going to be good at. in the mean time i have discovered scrabble on the facebook website (go to the search engine on the top right hand corner of your home page once you have logged in to your account and type in scrabble and it should come up) and if any of you fancy a game i'm more thn up for it!

getting nearer the truth

after a visit to the doctors on tuesday i finally seem to be getting closer to the truth about what has been wrong with me for the past couple of months. he took a quick peek inside my mouth and very quickly diagnosed a throat infection which has caused my glands to swell up. you can imagine my relief that its finally been confirmed that its not full blown glandular fever because if it is that could wreck the immediate future of my sporting career. so i have been prescribed some antibiotics to take for a week or so and hopefully that will be that with this chapter of my career and things can look up again. whilst i'm typing this though i'm clutching on to a humungously large piece of wood as i don't want to put the kiss of death on any chance of improvement. i went for a run this evening and managed about 7 miles at a fairly steady pace which is more than i have been averageing, so that is a sign that things are moving in the right direction and i felt quite comfortable even running up hillside road, thats about 3/4 of a mile and about 1 in 3 in parts. not the most viscious hill in portishead but still fairly steep by comparison to some parts of portishead. tomorrow i will give my self a go on the ergometers for the first time in about 2 months and see how i get on with them. it wont be an all out workout just a steady 45-50 mins at a reasonably brisk pace its still going to be a couple of weeks before i think about having a bash at my best time for 2000 meters, but for the first time in a long while i feel optomistic about my prospects, so lets build on it but not get too carried away. i'm currently lisening to katherine jenkins on cd and that has helped to sooth my mood no end.

the latest news from scotland is that young isaac smith is now crawling (only a little bit) and has uttered his first words. at 8 and a half months that is quite young to be making any discernable noises or moving unaided