An hour in the gym (including 30 minutes of intensive cardiovascular) and 3 hours gardening yesterday. Sandwich for lunch, salad for evening meal. Result? A weight gain of 2 pounds. Explanations gratefully received. And it’d better be good…
The gym has been neglected recently. The plan was, and still is-ish, that Thursdays and Sundays should be gym days. The Thursday session to follow my run, rounding off the week’s activity before the rest day and the weekend long run; and the Sunday session would be the hour of cross-training required by the programme to drag me back to life after the previous day’s exertions. But like all the best plans, this one has little to do with reality. Let’s face it, a plan is often a substitute for action, not a preparation for it.
Though I do have a good excuse for last Thursday. It was bad enough that there was a tube strike in London, forcing me onto the slug-fast Waterloo-Reading train, rather than the sleek, clean, air-conditioned, eccentrically populated Paddington one. But just outside Twickenham someone decided to kill themselves, and stepped in front of the train.
An hour and a half later we were still sitting there, by this time bored with the show. It had started off promisingly enough, with 2 air ambulances, several ordinary ambulances and fire engines, half a dozen police cars and a TV crew, but the excitement soon waned. I started phoning M after half an hour, hoping to persuade her to come and collect me but I couldn’t get hold of her. Instead the situation became increasingly more chaotic and absurd, until eventually we were led off the train and down the track back to the station, amidst what seemed like hundreds of rail staff and police people who’d been enticed out of the pubs and the cafeterias with the promise of an opportunity to be bossy and obstructive.
The incident disrupted the entire network, resulting in an evening of weary frustration. British public transport was shown at its slapstick best, the highlight of which was the shuttle back and forth between Hounslow and Staines, victims of staff who had no idea which trains were going where. At one point, a harrassed station manager at Staines shouted along the platform: “Please board the next train to arrive. We don’t know where it’s going but you might strike lucky”. The train that arrived broke down before it could leave the station. The next one had no air-conditioning and the windows were bolted shut. It was like walking into a greenhouse. Everyone’s glasses were steamed up which was quite amusing, and we had to remove most of our clothes. The train was noticably chattier than normal – in typical crisis fashion.
Eventually I got to Reading at 9.40 pm only to find that there was no onward train because of track maintenance. I wearily wandered outside and found a bus, getting home just after 10pm. I’d left work at 4.45pm. What a nightmare. Ironically enough the tube strike had played no part in the chaos. Anyway, that was why I didn’t get to the gym on Thursday.
