The second Ashes test kicks off in a couple of hours here in Adelaide, but I just dropped in to post a quick note and see what was happening...
Managed to get out for a slow, gentle 12km leg loosener yesterday. It was quite challenging however, as the temperature was 30 C at dawn, and hitting 35 by the time I got out into it... a helluva contrast to the icy winds and sleet of Mt.Wellington just 5 days ago.
Still, draining though it may have been, it was good to get the legs moving again, and was enjoyable enough for me to realise I am far from burned out by the race and actually revving up for more, albeit after a bit of a break from serious training. Never the less, I don't want to let all that hill training just fizzle away, so I shall be endeavouring to maintain one weekly hill session just to keep the incline fitness simmering.
I'll be getting some expert medical advice on Monday re the knees, but my intent at this stage is to re-introduce a weekly proper training run and ever so slowly ramp things up. The way I feel at the moment is that I sense a major race still is definitely a possibility, but the training will have to remain 75% race walk to 25% running for a few months yet. These things never work out as planned of course, but I really do feel much more confident, even now in the cold hard light of day and with all the post-race euphoria long evaporated.
Never fear, MLC Man will attempt to remain that shining beacon of optimism that I am convinced comes from a healthy balanced diet comprising the four major food groups: beer, wine, spirits and miscellaneous. Oh, and a bit of lunch helps too.
Must away ... the start of play (and beer #1 for the day) is close at foot.
I'm surprised that it's 30 degrees at dawn over there. When I went out for my early morning run today, it was also around 30F. So y'see, we're not that much different after all. We feel your pain.
My advice is to wear an extra layer under your tee shirt, plus a woolly hat. Also, have a hot drink just before you step outside. Final tip: if you listen to music, wear headphones with big, furry ear-pieces to keep your lugs nice and toasty.
You sound like you've got a great post-race attitude, MLCM. Much much better than mine.
What's this about "sensing a major race"? Almeria 2008. What could be more major than that?
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As for the Ashes......
Nah.
I remember where my opinion got me last time.
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El Gordo
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
I feel, nay I know that 2007 is going to be the year of the health kick for MLC Man. A visit to the doc to receive news of recent blood tests was not exactly encouraging, the long and the short of it being that I have to work hard next year on (1) exercise - maintaining and building on what I've achieved this year, (2) diet - going to the extremes in terms of healthy eating, and (3) cutting down on alcohol
This is in addition to medication to overcome what shall be best described as an over-enthusiastic liver. Where we had hoped that exercise and a healthy (but not fanatical) diet would be sufficient, in fact things only got worse, so it's time to bite the bullet and tackle it hard.
But not quite yet ... I'll get through the Christmas period first and then become St. MLC Man in the New Year. Not that Christmas is normally a gorge-fest for me in any case, but it definitely isn't health-farm fare either.
I was somewhat despondent about it at first, but it's actually going to be so much easier to do now that I've attained my current fitness level, and I've been contemplating cutting down on the booze for a while anyway. And despite everything, I still have a persistent gut that won't quite evaporate, no matter how hard I hit the treadmill, so I've been contemplating hitting that too. And it gives me extra incentive to plan a couple of other races into the schedule... so look out world, here I come
But just to rub torment and irony into the wounds, my son gives me a really nice present to agonise over (see pic)...
Soooo, I'm scanning cookbooks and the internet for a whole bunch of yummy appropriate low-fat salad recipes (etc) and gut-busting exercise routines, and maybe one or two races to slot into the calendar.
But first I have to negotiate the mine-field that is silly season with its vast glittering array of Christmas lunches, BBQs, DAWFNARs* and the like. Dangerous, but fun And that's not to mention all the associated imbibing to go with the endless summer of cricket of course. I tell you, it can be hell to be an Aussie in the summertime
Anyway, I've been prescribed this awful-tasting liver-cleansing tonic thing called water or something, and I have to drink litres of this gunk; not a teaspoon at bedtime, or made into a tea you can sip slowly with a nice brandy, but litres and litres of it... this might actually be tougher than I thought
Oh well, I'm getting used to crunch time. It'll be fun, won't it? Hello?
Until the next exciting instalment...
MLC Man.
*DAWFNAR = Drinks After Work For No Apparent Reason
Forgot to mention what the doc had to say about my knees...
Well, to tell you the truth, he didn't say anything about them because I refrained from asking him After the bad news re liver function tests et al I was buggered if I was going to give him another opportunity to rip into parts of my body; what with his knowing sideways glances, rueful tut tuts as he looks at pathology results and cautious hmmmphs as he prods aforementioned joints with a tool which looks suspiciously like an anal probe those big-eyed aliens used in a 'B' movie I saw a while back...
Anyhow, just to prove to myself that all is in pretty good order patella-wise, I hit the tready for a flat-out, gut-busting sprint this evening - just a couple of kilometres, but boy it was good! Pretty bloody easy, too. And if my knees give me any grief tomorrow, I'll actually be very suprised, as everything's in good shape just at the moment (apart from the liver, that is). My recovery time was outstanding - I was mesmerised afterwards watching my HRM's pulse rate indicator dropping like a stone - just soooooo much better than even a few months ago. But I won't be an idiot about it. I'll just do as I said before - one run a week for a couplke of months at least, to see how we go.
But I did manage to scare myself this evening calculating how many kilojoules (calories for the chronically imperial, such as Mr. Andy Farenheit above) there are in basic food stuffs like beer and coffee. I didn't dare look at things one eats with beer and coffee like bar snacks, biscuits and grain-fed animals.
Suffice to say, whilst I doubt I'll become one of those sad kilojoule-counters (OK, I admit, calorie-counter has a better ring to it), I will have to make some adjustments to my gob-stuffing regimen, especially since I discovered just how much of my energy intake sometimes comes from beer Just one frightening thought made an impact; namely that to burn off the kilojoules in one Aussie stubby of beer (375ml) requires a solid 2 kilometre run... or about nine and a half weeks of office work. So to work off a six pack of beer requires a hard 12km run.
Cruel, I think.
Oh well, I must go and drink some more of this water stuff the doc prescribed for me.
Really annoyed with myself - I managed to drop my HRM and crack the LCD, rendering it utterly useless. I'll take it to a sports store on Monday and see if it's repairable, but I fear the worst
On a more positive note I managed to cover 15km of training today, including 6km of hill climb I've also done well diet-wise, eating well below my usual calorie count without feeling in any way hungry. I've even managed to avoid the calorific hazards of end-of-year departmental BBQs and farewells. Plus, I've not had any alcohol for 3 days. The difficult Christmas period is of course going to ruin this good work somewhat, but I'm trying to build a bit of calorific and training credit ahead of time.
I have only vague ideas about race goals for next year, but for the moment getting my weight and body fat down to ideal levels (where they haven't been for many years now) is incentive enough. It also means I can vary the training to keep it interesting, so no problem there.
Well I haven't reached my calorific limit for the day yet, so I'll go and agonise over whether to have that nice cold beer in the fridge or plump for the tuna salad...
Sorry Antonio to break the news, but I had the first unavoidable Christmas set-back to my new lifestyle - a huge steak, the best part of a bottle of an excellent Coonawarra cabernet and two pieces of Christmas cake
Not to fear though, I should have a clear week from here on to work it off before the next Christmas function next weekend.
[SIZE="1"][/SIZE]Inspired by your sacrifice I forwent the obvious opportunity to hammer the Guinness on my last day in Cape Town, choosing to join my local agents for a cultural excursion . . .
. . . to the Spiers Wine Farm in Stellanbosch.
Buckets of Cab Sav all round!!!
Hi
[SIZE="1"]Beamed live from the slightly hazy departure lounge at CPT [/SIZE].
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph
Sweder Wrote:Inspired by your sacrifice I forwent . . .
. . . to the Spiers Wine Farm in Stellanbosch.
Buckets of Cab Sav all round!!!
This is my cab sav of the moment... actually never had a bad vintage of this (going back over 20 years). I'm sure it's available in the UK, and it's not expensive, and bloody good stuff. Do try it if you can.
Many moons ago ... 1982 in fact, Tasmania was beset by a behemoth outbreak of bushfires. Being young, unemployed and living quite close to one of the major outbreaks, I did what many did and undertook some volunteer duty fighting the fires. I was assigned to a "mopping up" operation, which basically required voluntarily killing myself slowly and painfully in ridiculously agonising ways for the greater good.
These days I mercifully work in an airconditioned "essential service", so when bushfires are raging, as they again at the moment, the worst that happens is that I lose my voice through countless phone calls and get a little dizzy running back and forth when such methods prove more effective than the phone system. Such was the case today.
And I tell you all that merely to explain this evening's incredible thirst. A day in such conditions renders me almost incomprehensibly desirous of strong beer. And today's strong beer of choice was Chimay Cinq Cents (Chimay White). Such a beer simultaneously renders one incomprehensible to anyone within earshot and satisfies the need to shut down one's brain in a pleasant "smother me to death with a tantalisingly bitter/sweet-aftertaste, but also bludgeon me with a high alcoholic content" kind of way.
I really shouldn't drink Chimay. Chimay is the closest thing to alcoholism I have yet encountered, and I suspect it's only the exorbitant price of the stuff that rescues me from the inevitable. Erm, actually that kind of negates my argument ... let's just say that there is a remarkable and quite natural self-regulating system that keeps me from attaining the nirvana of beerdom... which raises some really interesting relativity questions regarding nirvana and all things paradisical (if there is such a word). I feel quite sure there is a theology in alcohol if I could only remain sober enough to investigate it with sufficient thoroughness...
Anyway, I mention all this only because I can't auto-correct slurred speech, but the software does a half-reasonable job of auto-correcting my typos, and ever since I learned how to shut down the auto-grammar correction, almost (but not quite) completely and utterly fails to pulverise my syntax.
So, that's my excuse for not doing my scheduled run this evening... a superbly fantastic beer got in the way, and given the savage loss of property and the excruciating impact on the lives of those poor bastards in the path of the fires, which by strange and in largely torturously incomprehensible ways impacted my own life today, meant that the treadmill lay cool and quiet, in direct conflict with the schedule I had assigned it and myself for this evenings apres emploi quotidien.
For all their faults (and we won't mention the Congo), the Belgians make superb beer... and that is enough.
I must go ... the room is spinning too crazily to type.
Chim-Chim-ay, Chim-Chim-ay, Chim-Chim Cheroo . . .
Yes that is a fine brew. One bottle still lurks amongst the Guinness cans in my office 'fridge, saved up for a post-plod celebration over Chistmas.
There are so many seasonal distractions around here that your fall into blissful intoxication after a day saving lives seems veritably noble. I fear that many of us are running against an inexorable tide of chocolate and alcohol, the ground proving slippery and treacherous beneath our sliding feet. Lets hope we all manage to stay on course, even if, like a swimmer struggling against a viscious riptide, we end up swallowing way too much.
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph
could be my last chance to jump online until after christmas - we're full on into family christmas prep here and the real debauchery starts tonight. i don't expect to see full and complete sobriety for several days, so i will bid you all a fond season's greetings and hope everyone has a fantastic time ... and could someone please buy me a working shift key for xmas?
p.s. despite pre-xmas feasting, i've been working so hard getting the outdoor entertaining area up to scratch that i've actually lost a little weight - so all is looking good. catch youz orl later.
Another Christmas has come and gone. This one was a beaut, with much consumption of appropriate culinary and vinous fare, but also much toil and sweat, chiefly involving preparations for, and participation in entertaining, as well as numerous traditional table tennis tournaments - we have a nice outdoor arrangement of BBQ, table tennis and swimming pool which makes for a very pleasant way to pass those long summer evenings.
Somehow Mrs MLCM didn't get the message about me cutting down on the alcohol in the coming year, and she bought me a rather nice dozen bottles of fine South Australian shiraz, although she pointed out that it would require ten years in the cellar to peak, so it's a kind of present elect, awaiting maturation.
Speaking of cellars, ours was badly in need of cleaning and sorting (the cleaning on account of a slight mishap with the racking of a recently fermented batch of beer), and that's where I was when Shane Warne took his 700th test wicket during the Melbourne test match. Fortunately I had taken the old, nay antique black and white portable telly into the cellar, where to my great surprise we discovered fabulous TV reception and so watched the great event unfold in between updating the wine cellar database and cleaning up the home brew mess. One to remember I suspect...
But this year's festive gorge-fest has also been tempered with some physical labour (mostly cleaning, but also a fair amount of table tennis and even some hill climbs) which has stopped the middle-age spread from swelling quite so much. But I did have one or two "farewell" flings, the last one yesterday rather incongruously being a tremendous slab of baked cherry cheesecake which I ate in a German patisserie in the Barossa wine region run by a Thai family who also do Thai take-away! So with your apfel kuchen, you can also order a Thai green curry and a glass of shiraz if you wish. I settled for the cherry cheesecake and a coffee, the wonderful taste somewhat tempered by the knowledge that the coming year will be bereft of such luxuries
Now, down here it is only a few hours from the New Year, but my celebrations are all over as my reward for taking the last two weeks off work is to start back on New Year's Day at 6 a.m. Therefore, an earlyish grogless night is in order
Oh well, they tell me someone has to do it. I'm not convinced, but hey, that's life all over I guess.
Anyway, hope you all have a great New Year and I'll catch you in 2007.
December December
And that's not to mention all the associated imbibing to go with the endless summer of cricket of course. I tell you, it can be hell to be an Aussie in the summertime 
