Category: Life

Things are progressing apace. Unnervingly some things are actually looking like they are coming together. Always a sign you don’t understand the awful truth of the situation, in my experience.

I went away to my jolly hols at the T.A. gulag. I was all psyched up for it. They’d said ‘this is where it gets serious’ at the end of the last course, so I was thinking of basic training. Being beasted from pre-dawn until stupid o’clock in the morning, mad infantry shit out in the field,being freezing, soaking, pissed off, morale destroyed barely functioning automatons.

Not so much.

Weapons drill, and lots of it. No screaming, a bit of speed marching, locker layout and room inspections (basic army stuff to maintain discipline and promote cleanliness and hygiene) one night, then one day and a night in the field. Not getting bugged out (where they wait for you to get settled in your sleeping bag beneath your hastily erected sheet then simulate an enemy attack so all hell breaks loose. Awful.) If anything I’d have to say it was too easy.

The ten days were ruined for our intake by an ex-reg (former regular army soldier) thinking he was still a corporal in the bad old days of bullying  newbies. The fact that it was a a five foot young lad and an eighteen year old girl he was threatening did nothing to endear him to the troop.

Anyhow, the corporals were all over that and he will be watched very carefully from here on in. Still, it left a sour taste in the mouth.

Cracked that then. Though with hardly any PT. I took my brand new trainers away with me thinking they would get broken in by lots of little runs. Nada. And we were expressly forbidden to do our own training in the (many, many) hours we had off at night. Apparently the fluffy new model army has the training specifically tailored to take civvies to soldiers, any further individual input would bugger it all up!

 

So, my fitness took a bit of a dive whilst I was away. Came back on the Friday, Sunday morning I was doing the Holmfirth 15. A fifteen mile road race around (you guessed it) Holmfirth. Which is near Huddersfield.

The smart people would perhaps have thought to check the terrain before upping their mileage. Never having been accused of being smart I did not. Thought, “it’s only an extra 1.8 miles more than I’ve already done, how hard can it be?”

So very, very hard.

It was not so much a road run as speed mountaineering. Mountain goats were tumbling past me. And my trainers (brand new, you’ll recall) were too tight, grinding the bones together in my right foot. It started really hurting at about three and a half miles. Not a good sign. Ten miles later the pain was so bad I just had to stop. I loosened my trainer right off, to the point I thought it would surely slip around on my foot and give me blisters. Started running again, no pain. Bastard! Ten miles of worsening pain for nothing!

I was hoping for a two hour time, but even driving to the start point I was doubting it. When we hit the hills on the run I realized the challenge was to finish the race. Even with the foot issues I did it in 2:10:24 . Not appalling. Seriously not great though. The joy on my face tells the whole story (!).

 

Later that Sunday I fitted my aero-bars to my racer. Those are the handle bar attachments you see the posh racer/ tri bikes with nowadays, where you lean right over the middle of the handle bars.

 

You rest your forearms on the pads (which are as far forward as your handlebars) and grip the bars. They attach to the standard racer handle bars.Still not tried them out though.

 

Today (Thursday) was my day off. I wasn’t sure what discipline to exercise in, but plumped for swimming as it was raining and windy. I went to the baths and started trawling up and down, trying to get my strokes and breathing right. I’d been going up and down for about twenty minutes to half an hour, with only about three pauses, when I suddenly realized I was O.K.. I wasn’t out of breath and I was keeping it up. So I started counting it out. Fifty (20m) lengths! That’s a kilometre by my reckoning, or two thirds of a mile. So I figure I must have swam a mile and half, easy, in that session! Chuffed to bits!

Last time I was at the baths I was chuffed I was getting the hang of breathing, this time I’m already at half Iron Man distance, the same as I can comfortably manage on the bike and run.

I really thought swimming would be my Achilles heel, but now I’m feeling it’s a matter of practise. If I can do half race distance off the bat, with a still pretty terrible swim technique, I can surely crack and polish it within seven months!

I’ve found a shop that sells tri wetsuits, and more importantly fits them. I was hesitant about spending on one though, with my poor swimming, but now I’m up for it! Get a suit, get in the sea and get swimming. Apparently there are good beaches off of Liverpool. Recommended by The Outdoor Swimming Society and the Marine Conservation Society.

  

Who’d have thought that?

 

Also today I joined the Warrington Rifles Club, and shot of five magazines of ten rounds each. My best grouping was a shameful two inch spread, but that’s why I’ve joined to practise and get excellent. If I do end up doing a tour with the army I would love a crack at sniper-ing!

Anywho, it’s all going alarmingly well. Obviously I’ve missed something!

Later,

Buck.

I have set my heart on my new challenge, the Iron Man (IM) triathlon. An aspiration that,  I might add, has earned me little but ridicule in most circles. The exception being the Runners World forum from the Warrington half marathon. Those chaps were again very supportive and have provided me with a list of generic IM distance triathlons. Of these, the one I like the look of is the Nottingham ‘Outlaw’ triathlon. Same thing; 2.4 miles swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run, but £179 (last year, tbc this) as opposed to £325 for the brand name IM.

I’m going for it.

I went the baths, did my first swim in fifteen years. At first I was struggling with two lengths of a 20m pool. Got my rhythm and managed ten lengths. The pool geezer, Ged, was watching me. As I got out he had a word. Said that he’d been watching me and that it was taking me, head-up, 27-32 strokes to do a length. He said my fitness wasn’t in question, but my technique was rubbish. He said he had proper triathletes who, with proper head-down swimming could do a length in 13 strokes. He has taken it upon himself to teach me!

Cool. Freebie lessons!

So I tried. Face in the water,blow, stroke,blow, stroke,blow, stroke,turn head, breath in a gallon of water, flounder drowning. Repeat. And again.

Two sessions of an hour each, still couldn’t get more than a few strokes without running out of air or breathing in water. I was beginning to think I was going to have to give up and swim it all head-up. I went for a longer session on my day off, and finally cracked it! Huzzah! I can manage three lengths now before I run out of air.Obviously not getting sufficient air still, but it’s a start. 

The  other good news is the money. I was looking at all the local baths, they all wanted over a fiver a session in the pool, and for lessons it would have been £22 a month, being on shifts I would only have been able to go to two a month, so £11 a lesson. The pools were only open 7- 8.45 am then in the evening, so useless for 2-10 shift. Then I stumbled across a local baths owned by the parish council. Open 12-4, £2.30 a session and I’m getting free lessons!  Serendipitous score!

Now I’ve started to get the breathing Ged is teaching me proper strokes, to be efficient and fast in the water.

So it’s a backward step on my overall distance in the swimming, but a proper starting point from which I should be able to really improve.

 

The other thing I said I wanted to try was a distance ride, followed by an endurance run. I wanted to get a benchmark time and test my fitness. The baths weren’t open early Saturday, so I just went for the 56 miles bike ride and the 13.1 miles half marathon (the distances of a half IM).

I got a bit lost at the end of the outward leg of my ride, so it was only a 51 mile ride, followed by a 13.2 mile run.

The good news is adding an hour to my time (maximum time allowed for the swim) and adjusting for the 5 miles I was short on the ride, I still finished 1½ hours inside the half IM time! First time off the bat. And I proved to myself I could eat and drink on the go and not throw up.

The bad part was the doing of it! The hills! The sweat! Then the run, I had breath and energy but my legs wouldn’t move faster than a shuffle. It took me 2:02, as opposed to 1:43 on race day. From the first step it was a matter of grit and determination that kept me going. At any point I could have easily thrown in the towel. There were two or three sections of a hundred yards or so where it wasn’t pure misery and I got into a stride. The rest was almost unbearable.

So, it’s a work in progress, but I didn’t die and I did finish. Then, a proper two times IM competitor on Twitter said, ‘ no, you train by doing a long bike ride one day, a long run the next, a long swim another.’ Bastard. Could have mentioned that before I went into cardiac arrest.

Then there’s the price of the kit; £99 for an entry level wetsuit, £140 for a pair of cycling shoes, £70 for the shorts/top combination suit they wear, £1,300 (starting price) for a tri bike, £150 for a helmet, etc, etc.

I’ve bought some bolt-on fancy bars for my push bike for £38, I’ll be wearing the same trainers, OK, so I need the wetsuit, poss the natty shorts/top combo, and a £12 Asda cycle helmet, but that’s it!

I’m still waiting for people to jump on the training bandwagon. 

*looks around* Just me then.

Buck.

That was a Black Sabbath quote, btw. Ozzy Osbourne? 70’s rock legend? *sighs at the yoof of today’s want of culture.*

Anyhow, Iron Man; I finished my first half-marathon on Sunday. It was epic!

It lashed down the whole time, parts of the course were flooded, others (due to the bloody hills they managed to find in Warrington) were more like streams. I seemed to be labouring up stream for thirteen miles. By the end of it I felt like a salmon on its spawning run.

Parts looked like this;

 

Lo-res, but you get the picture, as it were.

 

So, cracked the half marathon, in 1:43:38. Not too shabby for a 44 year old unfit duffer’s first attempt. Two days later, convinced that I was now a top athlete, I set out for an hour’s run. I had decided to do better, so was after knocking a minute a mile off my time.

Not even!

My legs were done-in for the first mile, had to force them to work, got into a ‘quick’ pace, then flagged almost immediately!

Ended up running 4.5 miles(in 30 odd minutes)! By the time I’d finished my legs felt like they were made of wood. I did knock 20 seconds per mile off though, so not all bad.

Then I started thinking that I needed something more challenging. Thirteen miles! Ha!

Then I stumbled across Iron Man. An endurance triathlon.

You swim 2.4 miles, on to a pushbike for 112 miles, then finish it off with a full (26.2 miles) marathon run. Obviously that in itself is a bit too easy, so they have time limits for each section, and stage it around the hills of Bolton to give you a bit of a workout.

As soon as I saw it I realized that was it; my new challenge. I have given a name to my mid-life crisis, I call it Iron Man!

There are a few obstacles,  such as being a crap swimmer. I have never been competent, and don’t think in my swimming ‘prime’ I could complete two lengths. 2.4 miles equates to 154.4 lengths of a (25 metre) pool! Nor have I actually been for a swim in about 15 years.

Then there’s the push-biking. OK, I can ride to work and back (which is 11 miles when worked out accurately) but 112 miles, after a swim, at race pace, around the hills of Bolton is a different kettle of fish.

The half-to-full marathon step up is said to be easier than the 10k to half, but even so it’s quite challenging.

 

The thing is; as soon as I started considering it I got a buzz of nervous excitement. As Mal said in ‘Firefly’  (the series that preceded the epic film ‘Serenity’) “We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty”. That’s how I feel. It’s next to impossible, the challenge would be heroic, but if you succeed…., that would be mighty, indeed!

 

The thing I don’t understand is; everyone I’ve mentioned it to has said things like ‘it’s stupid’ ‘you can’t do it’ ‘you’re too old’ etc. No-one has said ‘hell yes, that sounds awesome, I’ll train with you!’

Weird.

So here’s the plan; it’s my day off on Thursday, going to do a distance ride on my pushbike, get a benchmark time/ fitness assessment. Get down the baths see how many laps in what time I can actually manage. And I know my benchmark run time, 8 minute miles (which I intend to get down to  7).

Find a training programme and go for it. If it is looking at all feasible, I have the entry money (£325!) and there are still places available I will try and get in the June 2011 race, if not 2012.

Just heard off someone on the forum for the Warrington half marathon, that there may be generic extreme triathlons. If so I’ll do the cheap one!

In the words of the ‘Dead Ringers’ Kirsty Wark , “more on that story later."

Buck.

On the Sunday night, after my weekend of jolly T.A. training, I posted a throw-away remark on Twitter saying I was finding it hard to get my head back into civvy mode. This has attracted a few wry comments.

Allow me to explain.

What I wasn’t saying was that 48hrs of T.A. training had turned me into John Rambo, a steely eyed loner unable to adjust to civilian life. That would probably take a whole week. No, I was just saying that it is a totally different mindset.

I am a Liberal by nature and politics. I rarely get myself in a state of apoplectic rage and self righteous indignation because I can usually see the other chaps point of view and often will argue it out of contrariness.

 

With the exception of religion. That is a whole other blog entry. Many other blog entries. I could dedicate my life to writing nothing but the arguments against religion and still have spleen to vent before I died.

 

As I was saying, my default state is one of laissez faire. There are things that wind me up, but I can’t see them as absolutes.

 

BNP for example.

Easy to say they are a bunch of racist morons who should be sterilized, if not shot, for the common good. (Tempted to leave that train of thought right there.) But,….the thing is, I can see what made them like that. They feel disempowered, marginalised and afraid. They are probably not burdened with an excess of education, so can’t get the good jobs. They retreat into the solidarity of an exclusive white only world, and invent myths of a white only Britannia where scum-of-the-earth morons, who happen to be white, lived like kings.

The answer then is better education, more integration, better understanding of diversity (and maybe sterilization and shooting, let’s not take that off the table as an option!).

 

So that’s my civvy state. I reason. I empathize. I wring my hands and clutch my pearls.

 

Then there’s the army.

 

I had forgotten. It is not a job. It is a life. Let us not forget that I have already done three years and one war in the regular army. It is weird. I compared it on Twitter to a dream/ awake state. Both states seem real at the time, yet are inconceivable in the opposite state. It really is like that. For me, at least.

I was indoctrinated into army life at an impressionable age, and in a vulnerable period of my life. The lessons learned remain. Twenty years of being a civvy, all the freedoms you take for granted, work just being a job that you leave in your locker when you clock off. All forgotten in an instant. SLAP, and you’re awake. You live army, you think army, you are army.

 

The Captain who took us for one of our lectures was saying about that Daily Mirror story, where a ‘prisoner’ was shown with a potato sack over his head being pissed on by a British soldier.

He said that it was being handed out in Baghdad free on the streets. He wondered how many British soldiers had died because of that story. (The fact that I remembered the incident, but not that it was proven to be a fake, leading to Piers Morgan being sacked as editor, is also worrying.) He concluded by saying that in his opinion Piers Morgan should have been jailed for life for treason.

I couldn’t help but agree. Treason is one of the three crimes for which there is still a death penalty in this country, so consider yourself lucky, Morgan. You fucked us over, you deserve to die.

 

Now does it make sense?

Probably not. It’s probably one of those ‘if I have to explain you wouldn’t understand’ things.

Anyway, I came home and it was hard to get back into civvy mode.

Just so you know.

Buck.

How hard can that be? You go to the shop, they say blah blah, you say OK, delivered, job’s a good ‘un.

HA!

We went around four sofa shops, they were all advertising ‘buy now, pay nothing for a year, then three years interest free credit’. Found one eventually as the one Wendy really liked was too big, the others she liked one part of but not the entirety. Finally found one she liked, at a surprisingly reasonable at £875, geezer said ‘the credit terms are only on sofas over one thousand pounds, but I can put payment protection on to take it to over a thousand.’

I wasn’t having any of that. He said we could put one hundred pounds down as deposit and pay the remaining £775 in a year.  Better. I went back after I’d been paid and said ‘that sofa, one hundred pounds, do me now’. (Or words to that effect.)

Bint asked if I’d  seen someone about it, I said I had so she took my money, said it was OK, and told me to come back in when the geezer I’d originally seen was in work.

It wasn’t till I was at home I got to thinking that this was just for the geezer’s commission, I was having to make another trip to town for his convenience. Not a terrible hardship, but a piss take on principle.

I went back to the shop, (third time) and he said he needed two forms of I.D.! I’d brought them the previous three occasions, but as they had already taken my money, and not told me to bring it in with me, I didn’t think I would need it.

I lost my rag a tad, swore a bit and was ready for a fight. Stormed out and got my I.D. (Note to prospective customers; although the lad was on his break when I returned the other guy in the shop served me immediately!)

So that was undue stress.

Then Wendy starts saying we should decorate the front room before the three piece arrives.

Got the call on Thursday saying it was arriving today (Saturday) so Friday being my day off I trotted off to B&Q, under instruction to buy grey paint and white gloss. Piece of piss, I thought, how hard can it be?

Then I had to strip the front room. There are two book cases in there. I had to empty them, move them, then everything else, clean up, then start. Finally got to painting at about 1.30, Wendy got stuck in with me as soon as she got in from work at 4.30, and we were just finishing  putting the room back together, still covered in paint, when the ‘phone rang for a family emergency (which I don’t want to go into on here.)

Apparently there is a reason people pay painters and decorators!

Anyway, the sofa arrived today! Yay! End of problems you might think. Wrongly.

They didn’t take the old sofa, but have no fear, I have a plan!

Armed with little more than a faulty hammer (head kept falling off, hitting me twice!) a dinky chimnea and an appetite for destruction I set about burning the old sofa.

Epic fail.

Kudos to DFS, in passing. Crappy woodchip and cardboard material inside, but the build quality was awesome. If we ever get the three minute nuke warning, screw trying to take your door off and huddle beneath it, just find a DFS sofa and turn it over.

Though, in all honesty this did work to the detriment of my master plan. That took me over three hours to break down and burn, and I’ve still got the cushions, springs, foamy and cover to take to the tip.

Half way through I was getting really pissed off, thinking next time I’m hiring a transit van and taking it to the skip. Then I remembered our council run a free collection of bulky waste goods service! D’oh! D’oh! D’oh!

Anyway, it’s been hellish, but here’s our new sofa and freshly painted front room;

Note the scratchy thing for the cat. If it rags this sofa I’ll be showing it the video of cat-bin woman.

The moral of the story is ‘sit on the floor’.

Buck.