Teratoma

As ever, lots going on. Trina and myself joined the birthday celebrations for Ruth and Biff...an 80's themed party, that went to extraordinary lengths to recreate that decade. Bubble machines, thatcher, amazing grazing food, muzak, disco, you-name-it. A superb time had.

Also a mention for Jenn, who is leaving very shortly for gdr. Good luck, girl, we'll all be rooting for you.

Then we popped to london town, and caught up with our friend nonni who is leaving soon for finland, and will be back with a wee baby girl sometime soon. She is in fine fettle and it was lovely to catch up - its been too long.

We stomped around in the rain, and i was all too aware my good friend chipps was with good friends martin and chris up north riding in cloudless skies...ill direct you to some pics once they get flickerized.

Needless to say, there are plans afoot for riding as ive got 2 days off to go play in the hills, too. Unfortunately, the weather is dreich at the mo, so we are going easy today and will do a large loop from kinlochleven manana. Should be a goody.

The cat - well, the wee poppit had a bit of an issue. She was catsat by our downstairs neighbours while we were away and she managed to whisk a frozen chicken breast off the counter through sunday evening. She was a it peekie when we arrived late monday and yesterday she yacked up a hairball, lots of mucus and some meat and then produced a pool of slurry that took a pretty good sense of humour to clean up. Thank the dark lord for plastic gloves.

Ok - i need more coffee....lots of stuff on the horizon. Im going to do some playing around with a heart rate monitor over the next few weeks, as ill be doing the bulk of the races i will do this year, and it will be pretty interesting to see how close to a heart attack i can get.

Im trying to find out more about headsets, specifically bearing angles on the king versus others, and the results of that are going to be lead to another project...more soon....

oh, and the fitness test? 27 minutes with about a minute and a half of messing about aiting for machines to come free.

The stats:
1.5km cycle - level 6 - 2 mins and change
500m row - level 10 - 1.32 secs
then 40 lat pull downs to nips - 30kg - this was a killer
40 full press ups - minutes, arms lactated to buggery by the above
50 step ups onto a 2 foot step with 10kg in each hand. Again the grip killed me..my arms were fried
From there to 40 shoulder presses with 35kg. Same story...arms a mess
50 sit ups - ok - pretty quick
800m run at 8% on the treadmill - not as bad as expected - 5 mins 30 secs
bench presses with 25kg - sounds so little, but my arms were gone by now

Disappointed. i wanted 5 mins faster at least. It was interesting how tired my arms got, but i suppose although i work hard with the kettlebells, they are never single muscle group use, so i wasnt prepared really. Also i warmed up by spinning 24 kg kettles for 5 mins, running then rowing 500m as fast as i could, and then lots of stretches. That on top of a boozy week end probably cost me a minute. In addition i tried to do sets of 10 at each weight as fast as possible, then rest for 3-4 breathes - i reckon this was a poor strategy, as i slowed anyway, the breathers cost more time than they saved. Needless to say, i aint done with this one yet.

The pic? its either the cats vom, or me after the gym sesh...