Month: May 2014

Ups and downs.

Wendy is on the mend! Yay! She had her operation but had unrealistic expectations of how minor it was going to be. The operation itself was around 4 hours long, the woman preceding her took 45 minutes, so it mustn’t have been plain sailing. Then they have to fill you full of gas to inflate the guts so they can make room to move about. Her guts were sticking out a bit and she’d put on 8lbs. Devastated. Then her wounds were a bit manky. Started having green puss and puking up and such. I told her I’d had worse and to stop being a mardarse. She went to the doctors and they said it was “infected” and she needed “antibiotics”. Pah, nanny state. Doctors, what do they know? Anyway after that she soon started getting better. She’s on her feet now, did the shopping with me today and went to church. Her stomach was hurting a bit afterwards, but not crippling her like last week. She reckons she should be able to go back to work a week on Monday. This is good as last week I only got two days work. The two weeks prior I had two good weeks, a four day (with the Bank Holiday, 3 days at £17.52 p/h) and a 5 day. £600 a week take home. Then this. This is the exception, but it’s not good.  I am torn. Is it better to try for a regular job that won’t pay as much (even for a 60 hour week) but will be every week, and have holiday pay? I’ve seen two jobs advertising for full time drivers lately. Neither particularly good jobs, with only OK money (compared to my current pay rate) but it’s the guaranteed hours that appeal. And a better start time. Long term, if I could get a full time job where I am, this is the job for me. I’ll have to wait and see how much work I get.   In other news, my masterplan to get my fitness back is working. I bought new boots for work, new supportive trainers for running, ran every third day to give my legs time to recover and ran off road to stop the stress injuries. It’s all worked swimmingly. By which I mean my legs are still working. That was two weeks, now I’m trying to move it to running every other day for a few weeks. After that I’m back on for operation #10milesaday. It’s not all been good. I’ve been wearing a hat to try to heat condition myself. I hate the heat when running, totally kills me. So the sunny weather of late, with a hat, have been tough. Also my fitness is shagged and I’m a porker. The long and short of which being I’ve been struggling on some days just to keep going for 10 miles. Yesterday it was pissing it down, but it was a run day so I just donned a long sleeve […]

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Grip got.

It’s been a hell of a week. Operation #10milesaday has been a killer. It’s shocking how quickly you can go from ‘can I run a fast 20 miles?’ to ‘can I complete 10?’ My first ‘run’ was painful and slow, the second with my GPS watch merely quantified *how* slow by the third I’d buggered my tendon, it was stiff and painful, took me the first mile to loosen it up. It wasn’t enough to stop me so I did a third, while on my diet. I only had 300 calories then set out to expend 1,240. I crashed and burned like the Hindenburg. That was dreadful. Approaching 7 miles I was dying, by 8 I had to stop for a few minutes. I shuffled home in a very sorry state. Since then I’ve been having 500+ calories before I start. So far, so not too bad. My tendon has been getting worse, yesterday it was stiff as soon as I got out of bed and took me most of the day to loosen up. I did another run, my fifth, but the injury was worse afterwards so I’m resting it for a day or two. I went online to work out how many calories I need to eat to lose weight, I worked out my Base Metabolic Rate, timesed it by 1.55 (for regular exercise 4 times a week) which gave me 2,460 calories a day to maintain, therefore I’m trying to eat less than 2,000. So far I’ve lost 4 pounds in 5 days. I had actually lost that in 2 days, but then inexplicably put a pound back on. Still, as long as it’s moving and I’m not actually starving to death. The runs have improved in just 5 days. At first every step was torture, now, once my tendon is working, there are miles that are OK, where I can get into the rhythm and more or less forget about it. I was even pushing on a bit on my last run. In 4 (timed) runs I went from 1.27:47 to 1.23:46, but more importantly in the first run I had two miles over 9 m/m, and 5 others over 8:45 m/m, on the last run only one mile was over 8:30 (an 8:31, dammit!). I would normally be horrified to be posting 8:30’s, but this is now, that was then. Now I have to regroup, accept where I am, and build on it. I used to consider 8 m/m my all day plodding pace. The default pace I dropped to if I didn’t keep the pressure on or if I was too knackered to push on. *sigh* The other thing is, as always, my heartbeat. My watch records it and splits the results into zones; 1: Watching Corrie (minor), 2: Bit of an effort (maintaining), 3: Getting a sweat on (improving), 4: Grafting (highly improving) and 5: Taking the piss (overreaching) All of my training is in zone 5. I have no idea what I’m […]

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