Wednesday 19 November 2008

Buying tights at £39.99


If the thought of going shopping for tights was bad enough then to find out that the starting price was basically £40 really took the biscuit. You see even though I had to wear lycra throughout rowing, especially tights in the winter and the England rugby team bound around in theirs nowadays it is, for a guy who grew up in the surf styled county of cornwall, still something of a bizzare concept, a fully grown man, who is engaging in a 'manly' sport to be wearing tights.

I finally got my head around it whilst rowing. Being on a river for hours in freezing temperatures at 6 in the morning you take every bit of help you can get. Tight shorts and tight tops I got; providing you are in shape they make you feel you can take on the world, but it took a while for the tights thing to be accepted.

Since uni I have lost them, and not hurried to replace them. Even now I wasn't in a rush until Monday night. On Monday I joined Kiwi's aerobic session around battersea park, lap followed by fartlek followed by another lap and so on, halfway into the second lap my calves and hamstrings were crying in pain, lactic acid burning and the cold temperature whispering in their ears, neigh begging them to seize up. I managed to get through it without them doing so, just, but they've been tight ever since, and in short it was enough said. So I can now welcome a pair of £39.99 underarmour tights into my wardrobe, to go with all the tight tech tops from rowing!

Wednesday 5 November 2008

Missing a big day

What was I doing when the first black president got elected? Made it through a crazy crazy day at work and stayed up really late to get a sponsorship deck done for a big big big blue chip brand we're meeting tomorrow about Everest. But still got time to say well done to Martin Luther King and everyone else who struggled with oppression and fought against the tide for their dreams.
Believe. Make it happen. Well done.

Monday 3 November 2008

Time to drop the hammer; keeping my room tidy

It is now many many months in? Hard to classify I guess, it is 7 since we presented to the original open day, but 13 since our first real planning meeting in the Antelope pub and who knows how many since vague discussions began, but it has really struck now that it is only 5 months to go. It may seem like a long time, but when Christmas is just around the corner and the trip is just three months after that, it hits home!

This whole process has been a wave of pulses, pushing hard then having to ease off for fear of burnout, and then back on, back off, but now it really is time to really push on all fronts. If I am going to get to the suitable fitness, knock this tiredness on the head, keep the management of the project on an even keel and keep my day job on track there is only one thing for it, to return to my military roots 24/7 and for this I am using my room as the barometer.

You see I find it impossible to keep my room tidy, but it is intrinsicly linked to my productivity, a tidy room leaves me switched on and alert, a mess and I act like a surfer dude, so from here on in it is a tidy room, shirts at work, I've had the hair cut too! It has been like this for 7 days now on all fronts and I think that is a record!

Where I'm really dropping the hammer is at the gym and my diet and I'll save that blog post for later in the week... you see the more posts I get in the more chance I get to win blog of the month!