I hope by today you are feeling improved. The funk was definitely your body telling you the virus was fucking it up. After you get well, I’m betting that you’ll be itching to train/run/move about.
I am feeling better - not really well enough to train yet as I’m still expectorating like crazy (ugh). I have my boyfriend here on one of his rare appearances (he’s got a business meeting and wanted to stop over - we went to a nice Japanese restaurant nearby that I’d been itching to try. Mmm sushi). Tomorrow I’m going to Thorpe Park (an amusement park just outside London) with a friend. Hopefully I can be back training properly at the weekend.
Ohh…the bf and an amusement park! Lots of thrills your way. Good on ya 
between the boyfriend and the coasters i hope you got plenty of rides in.
those, and rest, are so underrated.
you’re old enough to listen to your body… if youre not motivated to go to the gym, dont go, but foam roll instead, with a hot shower/bath.
oh, and, go do something different. a shoppe you wouldnt normally visit, a food you wouldnt normally try, a show you wouldnt normally see. looking at something from a different perspective helps you be a lil more objective about your own, and that usually helps me snap out of a funk.
or, just go look at fat people.
glad you are feeling better Cal. some good advice going on here, particularly miss bear.
for those of us over a certain age and who have been training consistently for years and years, i think it’s natural to hit a funk now and then. shit, i don’t even think the age has much to do with hitting a funk, it’s more of the length of training time that we experience cycles of killer training and then maybe some not so good. it’s a journey, not a race to some pre-determined finish line. (if you don’t in fact have some competition or something you’ve got to accomplish by X date)
if you have aches and pains that are limiting, (as we both do!) we’ve got to find a way to improve them and/or work around them. i know there was discussion in nikki’s log about what her focus was, too much volume, whatever…and my thoughts are if one is young enough and isn’t injuring themselves, then take advantage of it! for those of us juggling school, careers, family, age, injuries and such, you’ve got to take what you can get. and that includes dealing with these funks that come along and get through them in the healthiest way possible.
that may mean a focus on different training, like your running. or a different perspective like Claire is suggesting. just remember you’ve been at this a long time and you certainly aren’t ready to quit.
at any rate, have fun on ALL the rides and enjoy the time with the beau! 
[quote]CBear84 wrote:
between the boyfriend and the coasters i hope you got plenty of rides in.
those, and rest, are so underrated.
you’re old enough to listen to your body… if youre not motivated to go to the gym, dont go, but foam roll instead, with a hot shower/bath.
oh, and, go do something different. a shoppe you wouldnt normally visit, a food you wouldnt normally try, a show you wouldnt normally see. looking at something from a different perspective helps you be a lil more objective about your own, and that usually helps me snap out of a funk.
or, just go look at fat people. [/quote]
so what you’re saying is go shop at walmart?
Ooh I love Walmart! Heh. When I do my coaster trips to the US we always try and stop at a Walmart at least once. It’s like a big treat.
You probably find that hilarious but we don’t have 'em in the UK. I bought a load of cheap sportswear there when I was stateside in June.
Anyway, yes. Agree with all those. Once I’ve kicked this cold into touch I’m sure I’ll find my enthusiasm again.
Glad to hear you’re feeling a bit better and have some fun planned for the next couple of days. I’m sure the break from the gym will do you good when you get back in there.
I love Walmart too, and they’re all over Canada… cheap basics, what’s not to love?
P.S. I still can’t get over your back in your avi, it’s too delicious!
Not a Walmart fan. The Target, however, is good times.
I was a cashier at wal mart during my student days. Only job I developed a crazy eye twitch and warts on my hands.
enough said.
Well the Thorpe Park trip didn’t go so well. Rain was forecast so we hoped that would keep the schoolkids out of the park, but it was still pretty busy. We grabbed a couple of rides on Stealth (a launched coaster - if you’ve been to Cedar Point or Six Flags Great Adventure, it’s like Top Thrill Dragster/Kingda Ka but half the height) as it was at the back of the park and the crowds hadn’t got to it yet, then rode a couple of non-coaster rides. Then it started raining a bit, so we went in search of lunch, along with every other sodding person in the park. Had to queue for a table in the bar.
Now, one of the guys I was with hadn’t ridden Saw, which is a piece of shit coaster themed to the movies of that name (see photo - which was taken on a nice day in July, not Wednesday). The park bought a cheap, rubbish ride and spent all the money on the themeing, so it looks nice, but it’ll beat you about the head (something that generally happens on older steel coasters, but this one is only in its second year).
So reluctantly, we joined the queue, which had been at 1 hr 50 according to the sign, all day. It was raining a bit more now so we hoped the queue would have gone down. It hadn’t…but as we were about five minutes in, an announcement informs us that Saw has technical difficulties and an engineer is on his way. People started leaving the queue so we decided to stick around and moved up a fair bit as a result. A little while later, the ride started testing again, and then reopened. Then another announcement: it had broken down again. An engineer was called again. By this time it was raining quite hard (this so called barbecue summer the Met Office promised us only lasted a few weeks…it had pissed down pretty much the whole of August). We had been in the queue for an hour and five minutes at this point, and were pretty wet. And then they announced the ride was irrevocably broken and they would be evacuating the queue line. We would get priority passes for another ride, instead.
So we headed over to Nemesis Inferno (a nice enough inverted coaster) but seems that most of the Saw queue had gone there as well and the fast pass queue was HUGE. We were cold, soaked and tired, so we said fuck it and went home.
So that was my day at Thorpe Park. Yay.
It was marginally better than my previous day at Thorpe Park where I went with an Aussie friend, queued for Saw only for him to announce he wasn’t feeling well and abandonned me at a busy park on my own. (Being in queues is bearable if you have friends to chat to. On your own, not so much).
Anyway…that was me with a cold, getting cold and wet. I’m surprised I haven’t go pneumonia.
I’ve still not been to the gym. I did meet up with my guinea pig to go through my exam routine last night, only to be told by that gym that course students weren’t allowed to use the gym in the evenings. So I’ll have to go back and do that on Sunday (exam is on 13th Sep, so have a few weeks left).
Did some mobility work in my flat today and swung my kettlebell a bit. That resulted in me coughing up guacamole (or that’s what it resembled, anyway). Mobility work seems fine. Lungs clearly aren’t ready for more just yet.
Thing with not having had a cold for two and a half years is that you forget how ill they actually make you, and how long it takes to get over them. Grrr! I feel reasonably fine sitting down and such but my chest’s still tight. I’m sure it’ll be fine by next week.
ah man! that’s mostly why I don’t enjoy the parks - standing around all day to enjoy 4-5 rides. Glad to know your buddies didn;t ditch you this time. that’s too rough.
I made myself go for a run yesterday. Just the 3 miles (well, 5K or so). I coughed a few times but felt alright. I didn’t die. So I guess I’m ready to resume training, at a steady rate.
I took my ex-colleague to the gym where I’ll be doing my trainer exam for a runthrough. That seemed to go OK. I had to change a couple of exercises to suit her but otherwise it was all fine. I’m pretty confident I’ll do OK with the exam. Two weeks to go now. And also two weeks until my next 10K so I better do some more running to get my lungs back.
Oh and my friend made a nice video of our visit to Thorpe Park last week…
Hehe cute movie!
Hope you get back to ‘normal,’ soon. I’m such a baby when I get sick.
I’m really impressed with this training course you are doing!
I’m glad to hear you are feeling improved. Do you have a plan to implement this new certification when (of course) you will pass the exam?
Well, I’ll try and find a job, yes. The problem is gym jobs pay minimum wage, pretty much, but if you can put up with that for a while, most will pay for you to do additional training.
I did get back in the gym yesterday, to do some deadlifts. Warmed up with the kettlebell and then did a few sets of 3 with 60kg then 70kg - light compared to what I could do before but it actually didn’t feel all that light. I was trying to go for form. I found I’d lost some general strength and fitness because I haven’t done this for so long. Obviously I’m also post-viral (and still coughing a bit) so I should cut myself some slack but I’m a bit horrified at how much strength I seem to have lost. I tried 80kg and that was hard. I couldn’t lift it conventional, but I could with more of a sumo stance. Hrmm.
Did a few squats as well (nothing more than 30kg) and found those hard too. Ugh.
I am going to have to take this really slowly and be patient, I think. And I’m not a patient person. I don’t want to aggravate my back, though. Once you get over 40, those kind of injuries don’t tend to go away.
Going incremental is not only your best bet, but it is the only thing you can do. Without my fractional plates to give me an extra 1/4 lb. here and there, I’d be nowhere.
I hit the gym again, mainly to work on the deadlift form. I did some OHP (working up to 3 sets of 6 with 30kg - not much compared to what I was doing before but it felt like hard work). After each set (including the warm-ups sets) I did a set of 10 rack pulls using the same weight just to warm things up.
Then I set set the bar up to 60kg and did a set of 5, then a set of 5 with 70kg, then went to 80kg. Did two sets of three (I reset between reps, to ensure I was pulling properly) then went for a third but it didn’t feel right so I stopped there.
Did some dumbell rows to finish. Took nearly an hour just doing that.
With deadlifts and pulls I find it hard to remember to do so many different things: keep my abs tight, my arse back, the weight in my heels (not forward), shoulders back, chest up…Christ. Being a bit dyspraxic as I am, it’s hard to do all that stuff at once. But I have to, the same way I learned to snatch a kettlebell (which seemed like voodoo the first time the instructor showed it to me).
I’ll get there. Baby steps. Yup.
[quote]Cal Jones wrote:
(which seemed like voodoo the first time the instructor showed it to me)
[/quote]
HAHAHAH! All those Olympic type lifts do seem to be kind of magical…
Btw, i had to look up dyspraxic - new word, thanks for that!
Awesome trip despite the rain! And i love the little cartoon. Too cute.
Patience is key when getting back into the game (and for newbs like me), so I think you’re being really smart about your training. Especially considering the back issues.
So let me just ask, what are your plans in terms of training. I know you’re looking to start working in the gym again, but are you going to be training towards any specific goals…just curious (sorry if I missed this somewhere else in the log).