Happy 20th Kate!

A 50th for me yesterday, and today my little baby is 20! Happy Birthday to my darling daughter!

Most of today was occupied preparing for a dual birthday celebration tomorrow. Cleaning, cooking etc.

Kate is out partying tonight with friends, we’ve just collapsed on the couch with The Bill.

We decided we’d reuse the “Happy Birthday” banners and photo of me for tomorrows celebration, so I decided to scan and enlarge one of my favourite photos of my little princess – this is the one I chose!

74.8kg at weigh in this morning, only just squeaked in under the goal weight. No exercise today (unless you count the vaccuuming)

The Big Five-Oh !!

Fifty today.

I have been stressing about it for a while, but it doesn’t really feel any different. I don’t know why I have been worrying about it, but I have, you know thinking about your own mortality and all that fluff. I shouldn’t really, because I’m sure I’m fitter and healthier today than I was on my 40th or even 30th birthday.

When I arrived at work this morning, the window on my office was adorned with “Happy 50th Birthday” banners and a very much enlarged school photograph of me when I was about 8 years old. Now I know what the conspiritorial whispers were about between Kate and Amanda at lunch yesterday.

A 6km loop with Alyssa after work at just over 5:30 min/km pace.

Out for tea tonight with Adrienne, Chris, Kate and Carly to a nice little restaurant called Chartreuse in Niddrie.

I got some nice presents too, including a lovely limited edition framed Pink Floyd memorabilia piece from Adrienne.

Here’s to the next 50!

Physio number 3 …

I took all the team out for lunch today, and Adrienne and the kids joined us too, so that was nice. Beer and pizza for me I’m afraid, but the pizza was small and the beer was light, so does that make it alright?

Late this afternoon I had my first appointment with Katrina, the third physio I’ve seen since starting with Dr K. Katrina was lovely, and did a much better job of explaining to me why my glutes need loosening and strengthening, and what effect it has on my running, and why it is contributing to my knee pain. I have a few new self-massage & stretching exercises to do daily, and a new glute strengthening exercise as well. See her again in two weeks. Katrina also showed me what she thinks I’m doing when I’m running, so I can consciously try and stop doing it. She even suggested if I’m out running with someone, that they run behind me and observe my rear end – any volunteers? – I doubt it

Foggy run …

A great run first thing this morning with work colleague Deb. We left from work and ran an 8km (just over) loop that takes in some of the Moonee Ponds Creek Trail and some of the Western Ring Road bike path. It was cold, but not as cold as some recent mornings, dark and very foggy when we headed out at 6:45am. As Deb had not worn her contact lenses, and my glasses kept fogging up, it was the blind leading the blind. When we headed through Boeing Reserve in Strathmore, the conversation went;

Deb: “Which way do we go?”
Me: “We head over that bridge and turn left.”
Deb: “Which bridge?”

It was only 10 metres away!

Anyway, we survived in the dark, on the unlit path. A great run, much better than running alone! As you can see from the below elevation profile, not exactly flat either. A nasty little windy hill between km markers 5 & 6.

Showering at work is an ordeal as the new showers are so low-flow that you practically have to run around in the shower to get wet. I’m all for saving water, but when the flow is so bad you have to stay in the shower for three times as long just to get clean and wash off the soap and shampoo it is a bit ridiculous.

A successful day at work with a few meetings that actually went well and came to a decision! After work a few beers down the pub rounded the day off nicely.

Rest day

Today I choose a rest – no exercise at all – something I do very rarely. I feel like I need a rest day. The knee is a little sore, and I feel tired, so a rest day it is.

Yesterday I did the normal 6km loop at 5:27 min/km.

Nothing much else to report – it’s pretty boring around here.

Looking forward to an early morning run tomorrow with workmate Deb. It’s going to be cold and foggy again, so it should be fun!

A good cross-training day …

Started today off with a swim, completing the normal 2km (80 laps) in around 50 minutes. Then had a stretch in the spa, followed by a steam and a sauna.

Upon returning home I headed out to clean up the garden. The first job was to get rid of a pile of rubbish from our recent construction job. The pile consisted of sand, soil, quartz pebbles and other rubbish. Not wishing to waste the good soil, and the pebbles I decided to use a garden sieve and separate it all. Well, if you’re looking for a good core exercise, standing up and shaking loads of dirt through a garden sieve is it! After that, I cleared up a few other things, then mowed and edged the lawns.

This afternoon I headed out for a spin on the bike, planning an hour ride. IT ended up being just over that, a nice 27km loop down to Strathmore and back. It was quite mild when I left, but I decided to wear my cycle jacket in case it rained. It didn’t rain, but I’m glad I wore the jacket, because by the time I hit the halfway turnaround the sun had gone down and it got very cold, very quickly.

After tea my usual VMO/glute/core workout whilst watching those great old rockers, Status Quo belt out a few hits.

Feeling good!

A busy day …

My trip to the Victoria Market this morning was solo, leaving Adrienne to try and sleep off her cold she has. Consequently it was in, get what we needed, and out again, no coffee stop, so home earlier than usual.

Then I headed out to the library. We have a mobile library. It stopped calling at our local shopping centre a couple of years ago, but has just started back again on Saturday morning. So, I popped over there and picked up a Jeffrey Deaver and a Kathy Reichs novel to read, and did a bit more supermarket shopping.

The next job of the day was the one I been putting off for weeks. Cleaning the barbeque (so that it could be moved back onto the new deck). This is a horrible job I reckon, but when you are doing a “bigger than normal” clean, it is even worse. It took me a good couple of hours, is still not what you’d call spotless, but good enough! Then a bit more work in the garden, stopping only because my hands were refusing to work due to the cold.

Around 5pm I headed out for a consistent, if slow 6km run with Alyssa. Whilst not a fast run (5:41min/km), it felt very consistent. In fact I thought we’d run a negative split, but examining the data now, the first half was 5:39 min/km and the second half 5:42 min/km. Thinking about it though, it is as good as a negative split because the first half was largely with the wind and downhill, the home stretch against the wind and uphill.

Knee is on ice as I type, VMO/glute/core exercises will follow this post!

Dr K, a swim and a seminar

Today was my 9-day fortnight day off. It started off with a sleep-in (yay!) followed by a 10am appointment with Dr K. I sort of knew what she was going to say, because my knee has not been 100%, so it was not to be my last Dr K visit. Whilst she’s happy with the VMO progress, apparently I am still not “recruiting my glutes” and this needs fixing. So, I have to have a couple of visits with another (different) physio, and then see Dr K again in six weeks. I’m also back to only 6km runs for a while. I keep saying how good Dr K is, but today she surprised me again. Remember she is a sports doctor, who I’ve consulted about my knee pain. Well, after she’d finished the knee stuff, she asked me if I had a bit of asthma because she thought my voice sounded like I did. When I said no, but that I had had a bit of a cough and cold recently, she proceeded to get me back on the examination bench and looked down my throat, listened to my chest and got me to do one of those breath expelling tests (concluding by the way that there wasn’t any asthma). She really is very thorough, I’m sure most doctors would have not bothered with that.

After the doctors I went into the club for a swim. I expected it to be not very busy, being mid morning, but boy was I wrong. Three people in my lane for most of the 80 laps, as well as lots of kids mucking around in the adjacent “leisure lane”. Consequently, as well as dodging the other swimmers, there were a few balls and floaties to be returned too. To my surprise, at one stage I spotted a pair of board shorts on the bottom of our lane. I couldn’t see anyone who was obviously missing them though.

Then it was off to a seminar at the Marriot Hotel (diligent huh, going to a seminar on my day off!). The seminar started with a nice buffet lunch, which we’d almost finished when our host started handing around the wine list and telling us to order some bottles of wine because he had a minimum spend with the hotel, which he wasn’t close to, so we may as well enjoy ourselves. Well, you know me, when it comes to a nice red, I’m not going to say no! He even insisted we fill our glasses and take them back to the conference room for the seminar. As a bonus the seminar was great too!

After tea tonight a short VMO/glute and core workout.

Now it’s time to go watch Silent Witness (which I started watching again last week at Audrey’s recommendation and enjoyed a lot).

ACDC vs the AFL

Let’s do the maths – 60,000+ people @ $140 per ticket to a concert of the biggest Australian rock and roll band ever, or a handful of people to a game of Australian Rules Football in a pre-season competition that nobody really cares about. It’s a bit of a no-brainer really isn’t it? Just when I think with their insipid anti-drugs policy they couldn’t be any more stupid, the AFL hierarchy prove me wrong.

I am a self-confessed Excel geek. I love playing with Excel. It is always said that most Excel users probably only use 1% of it’s features, but I thought I knew most of them. Well, today I found out about some Excel features I didn’t know about, and it was the highlight of my day. I just wanted to tell everyone about it. Anyway, this is probably not the place to go into detail, but if you are an Excel geek too, did you know about dynamic range names?

Not much exercise tonight, just a short home workout. I’ve got to see Doctor K tomorrow so I didn’t want to break any rules by running two days in a row, I’m sure she’d be able to tell!

Brrrr ….

There is only one bad thing about being 40kg skinnier than I was a few years back and that is that I feel the cold a lot more. The last few days I have really been feeling it.

Yesterday was a pretty normal day. Exercise was a home workout, including some intervals on the treadmill.

Today I left work early as we had a tradesman coming round to give us a quote, so I had the opportunity to get out and run while there was still a decent amount of light. I admit I nearly didn’t run, I looked out the window to the cold and rain and thought about the couch and a cuppa, but convinced myself a run was required. It ended up being just over 8km at 5:32 min/km, struggled a bit in the last kilometre or so again – still, felt glad I’d done it afterwards, but really needed the hot shower!