Not a whole lot to report from my neck of the woods really. Keeping myself more or less in shape but haven't yet committed to a formal training plan for my next race, which isn't until Sep 20 and is only a 12km flat crowded fun run anyhow. But I would like to beat my previous time, so will have to get serious sometime soon.
Thus far I have evaded the swine flu outbreak, which has been particularly savage here (it being winter of course), and we're not into the worst of it yet. With I think a tad over 50 deaths and many thousands struck down, we've all come into contact with it and all know someone who has been quarantined if not hospitalised, so it's certainly fairly entrenched, and has impacted schools and work places quite dramatically, although the effect has been limited by pretty strict enforcement of quarantine and the insistance that people remain at home if they have even mild cold symptoms.
Adding to our misery has been Australia's pretty dreadful time of things in the sporting arena. Losing the first Ashes test was hard enough, but we also lost to New Zealand (our other arch-enemy) in the Tri-Nations Rugby and bombed out in the Tour de France, with Cadel Evans simply failing to fire at all. Thank goodness our soccer team qualified for the World Cup or we'd be totally misery city here.
Speaking of the Ashes, I was a little surprised to discover, when looking at a poster of the 2007 Aussie Ashes team, that only 3 players from that '07 squad (Ponting, Clarke and Hussey) were in the team that played the first test last week. Rather more annoying was seeing the number of "retirees" who, whilst no longer playing for their country, are earning vast sums playing in the IPL (eg Warne and Gilchrist, but they aren't the only ones)... hmm.
Oh well, plod on friends... there's greener pasture over on the other side of that there damn nasty big hill.
Swine Flu and all that.
