Nothing Much Too Talk About (Again)

Life here is bumbling along as it has for the last few days, with efforts to get healthy and save money have both been relatively successfully with the only thing suffering slightly being my sanity.  The biggest victim of the newish regime has been sleep – going to be without any alcohol does seem to be a problem, but not for any alcoholism problems as you may imagine, but from the volume of replacement liquid which causes a disrupted sleep pattern and several trips to the smallest room.  Still, it can’t be doing me any harm physically !

One of the reasons I’m having to drink more (water) is because of the step up in the exercise routine.  I’ve spent a couple of weeks getting acclimatised again, and generally getting over the flight and three months lounging about at home, and have now stepped up the regime.  I’ve also spent the last couple of weeks trying to lose some weight so that when I do step up the regime I’m not trying to lug quite so much around.  This has been quite successful (even if I do say so myself) as I’m currently weighing in at 14st 3lbs (or 201lbs for our American cousins, or 91kgs for those of you determined to join the European Union !).  This is pretty much as low as I’ve been since a teenager (as far as I know) and certainly as low as I’ve been in the last 9+ years – I say 9+ because we only started weighing ourselves after my daughter was born and we went on a strict “get rid of the effects of having a second baby” diet which resulted in both myself and Tracey loosing 2 stone plus.  To put it into perspective, weighing in at 14st 3lbs means that I’ve lost just over a stone in a month, and most of that in the last 2 weeks.

It must be doing me some good because last night I did a hard 10km on the bike in just under 18 mins followed immediately by 2.5km on the treadmill.  It’s the first time I’ve ever really gone from one to another immediately and is all part of the preparation for a triathlon, where you obviously have to do that twice, first from the swim to the bike, and then from the bike to the run.  Practicing the other “transition” (T1 as it’s known) from swim to bike may be a bit more difficult in the big city but it should be easier when I get to the desert and can get out of the pool and straight onto a real bike – only time will tell.

Anyway, apart from feeling like my calves were going to lock up at any time for the first 1000m (almost to the metre…..) the only issue was the blood returning to my nether regions and we’ll leave that part of it to the imagination if you don’t mind !  So the point of all this self-congratulation was to lead you back to why I have to drink so much water – it’s because I’m sweating like a horse most of the time, and what with long car journeys at either end of the day (and therefore trying not to need to stop) I tend to have to back end load at the end of the day to get hydrated again.

Tonight’s designated activity is swimming where I’m continuing to build up my endurance to a minimum of 750m of front crawl.  I’ve been following a sort of training principle (intervals) which for those of you that are interested means that I’m swimming 50m, resting for 30 seconds and then another 50m, and so on.  I’m doing this until I can swim the full distance but with rests (30 lengths of our apartment pool) and then you either/or reduce the amount of rest time or increase the amount of metres between rests.  I’m currently up to 500m (10 x 50m) and adding 2 lengths (50m) each session.  I’m generally doing one session of swim, bike, run or gym during the week with two sessions on a Friday and Saturday and a complete rest on Sundays.  The aim is to be able to swim at least 750m, cycle at least 20km and run 5k…….one after another !  This is the Sprint Triathlon distance and is probably the best one to start with.  Next is the Olympic distance which is twice as far in all three disciplines – and a good aiming point but some distance away from my attainment at the moment…….but time and availability is on my side at the moment !

Other than all that I haven’t got a huge amount to tell you.  It looks like I’m off to the Tilal Liwa in Madinat Zayed next week for 4 days of interviewing my staff but it’s all swilling around in the atmosphere at the moment cause the hotels not confirmed and we’re not officially allowed to talk to the people who are supposedly going to work for us yet.  Still, I’m kind of excited to be going back in a lot of sad ways – I’ve decided that the big city is a very lonely place unless you have friends and money on tap and that if you haven’t got that then you might as well be enjoying some of the trappings in a quiet place !  I’m quite looking forward to running and cycling in the desert again as well, as sad as that sounds (to some of you at least).

Right, that’s enough rambling for now – as far as the inventory goes, I’ve drunk nothing, spent nothing, cut right back on cigars (I’m looking forward to my body catching up with reality on that front…..) eaten nothing of note (although we are about to go and explore the local area cause I’m bored with wasting a fiver every lunchtime in Costa Coffee !), exercise has been covered more than adequately above and the weather is what it is (foggy in the morning, which adds a little spice to the Road of Death – have to stop calling it that by the way, it’s worrying Tracey……).

The only other thing of note is the fact that today I had a haircut.  The fire alarm went off so I went for a wander up the road to see what was there and found a barbers.  Women ill not understand the concept of just wandering into a barbers and asking for a haircut (and some “men” I know come to think of it…..) but it’s fine and it cost me AED20 so it can’t be bad – well, it looks OK so that’s about all there is to be said really………