Hypoxic witterings » fitness

Killing me softly

Aled — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:05:05 +0000

In an effort to really start shedding some of the spare tyres I seem to have accumulated over the last few years, I’ve stepped things up a bit.

Every morning I jog 2 miles, careful to keep my heart rate towards the lower end of the cardiovascular exercise range – around 65%. This ensures that I’m working my cardiovascular system and if it slows down a little I’m into the “fat burning” range, either way it’s good. It’s 2 hilly miles as well which gives me a few opportunities for a few sprints in there just to push things along a bit. So that’s 5 of those a week…

…at work, every Thursday, we play badminton for an hour. It’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s mostly aerobic exercise…

…today I started playing badminton a second time every week. So practice on Tues, play the league on Thursday…

…in the evenings I’ve started doing something – walk a few miles over the hill behind the house, a quick run, test my fitness using a multi-stage fitness test (aka bleep test), even cleaning the house which if you do it right can be aerobic exercise…

Throw into that the fact that I’ve cut down on my tea and coffee, replacing them with water and my eating has become a lot more healthy. Hopefully all this will work wonders and in a month or two I really will have lost some weight.

I do wonder however if I’m overdoing it slightly – I’m not sure if I’m tired today because I do too much, or if it’s because I didn’t sleep until late last night. Meh, early bed tonight I think…

Targets

Aled — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:59:01 +0000

I’ve got a route which I run. Not every morning – and especially not at the moment. Right now, if I ran that route in the mornings, by 9am I’d be collapsed in a heap of sneezing, runny-eyed, hayfevered mess. Pollen count si very high – kinda gets in the way of life really.

Anyway, I have been doing some figures. My morning run is just short of 4km (2.5miles-ish). I can normally finish that run at the moment in about 55mins. That’s a long time I hear you runners say (do I actually know any runners?). In fact, it is a long time…given the assumption that you’re running a flat 4km circuit. I, on the other hand, live in Wales. Flat is what happens when the valleys flood, and even then you can’t really run on it. Flat is what happens when you get to the tops of the hills. Flat is the one thing my route doesn’t have in it.

With a bit of map-reading, it looks like I’m climbing about 150m from the start point to the midway point before turning around and going back down again (via a slightly different route). Just over 130m of that is over a 500m stretch of the first km – yup, that’s one hell of a climb. So, some rough calculations using the amended version of Naismith’s rule, gives me an estimated total trip time of about 1hr 15min at 4km/hr. So, given some figures about the fitness level I want to reach, I need to be running this circuit in….umm…carry the one….31 minutes. Right. What?!

31 minutes. Owch. Best I’ve managed so far was about 47 mins and that was a while ago.

So, some work to do then…look out for a fitter, healthier, slimmer Aled near you soon…

Busy easter?

Aled — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:47:14 +0000

It’s been a quiet weekend in the house this easter. On Thursday, my man-flu was bad enough that I decided to head down to see the Doc, who diagnosed a chest infection and put me on some anitbiotics. Blech. That rapidly turned into tonsilitis by Friday night and so the last few days have been spent trying to swallow small quantities of warm and soothing liquids and trying to deal with a hypothalmus that couldn’t decide if I was too hot or too cold on a minute-by-minute basis. Indeed, I’ve spent much of the weekend staring wistfully at the glorious sunshine and wishing that I were on the Beacons somewhere.

I even missed our latest callout – we had an area call to a fallen walker just north of Rhayader yesterday afternoon. Not much detail on that one so far, but there’s a few pictures up on the team flickr site.

Today was the first day that I felt good enough to head out to do anything other than buy more Ribena and other throat-soothing items, so Sean and I headed down to B&Q for a quick browse. Lots of talking about kitchens and boilers – let’s hope that the legal claim I have in at the moment will come through soon.

So after a weekend of…well…vegging out, mainly, I’m back at work tomorrow. One good thing about being ill though – I haven’t had a single piece of chocolate this easter.

She’s missing…oh wait, there she is.

Aled — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:42:51 +0000

Just as I was walking out of the office door on Monday night, the pager went off. Missing elderly lady down on the gower.

I was very tired having spent Sunday night driving Sean home, getting to bed around 0130 and then getting up at 0500 to drive back to Cardiff from Sean’s on Monday morning. I’m also on a tight diesel budget. I was very tired. Oh, and I had the D&D group on their way around. And I was tired.

Did I mention how tired I was?

So executive decision made, I headed home. Traffic was heavy in rush hour and about 5 minutes after I got home, the standdown came out. Huzzah. In retrospect, very much the right decision, I was too tired to be of any use, and potentially would have been dangerous to drive.

Last night I went to WICC again where Lee gave me a few pointers and made me climb until I fell off. And then climb some more. Until the point came when I physcially did not have the strength in my arms to make a fist. Or undo my laces. This morning I’m aching less than I thought I would, but it’s all good. 2 and a half hours of climbing, excellent workout. So I need to work on my back – I don’t have the strength there that I should do – time to talk to a few friends about what exercises I need to strengthen the right muscles there then I think.

Back to the wall

Aled — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 10:52:59 +0000

So contrary to what you see, I did write a nice long update on the weekend, how I fixed the car with Malc’s help and drove up to Aberystwyth to surprise Sean (which I did) and how we both had a relaxing weekend snuggling and watching buffy. Unfortunately, it got lost. Wordpress so needs a better editor – already looking into that.

Last night, Mal and I went up to the Welsh International Climbing Center. I’ve been there before but it’s come under new management since then, and one of the lads on our team works there which is good because we get regular updates on what they’ve done to the place – which is actually quite a lot.

So we wentup and changed and decided to do some bouldering to start with…and just carried on bouldering. They’ve completely revamped the bouldering room which is great – there are some 40 or 50 puzzles in there now, each one graded and laid out clearly, each one, it seems, concentrating on a particular skill. We started on the V0 graded routes, which equates to around a 5a/5b (ish). Now I know that I have climbed a 6a before in this center, but that was on a longer route, and isn’t really comparable to bouldering problems, where it’s pretty much all technique. There may have been a single point where that longer route was a 6a, but the rest was quite simple. We tried 4 V0 problems last night, of which I managed to do 3, and think that I completed 2 of them cleanly – the third I needed a bit of a nudge to get started. The last one was a traverse under an overhang with some real jugs for your hands, but I just haven’t got the upper body strength to do that kind of manouvering yet. So that route is my goal at the moment.

There’s explanations of how bouldering grades works here and here.

WICC has had a major facelift in terms of the walls – they’ve got two of my faovourite walls out of action at the moment as they’re rebuilding them, and I know that the staff they have there now are excellent. They really do offer a whole lot more than just a climbing wall though, especially with their artifical cave which rocks. Looks like they’re on the right track anyway, so I for one will definately be going back there.

I would like to pop back to Llangorse now that I’ve got a bit more experience than when I went there before, just to cast an eye around. It’s too far to go regularly, especially with WICC just around the corner from me really, but it might be interesting as a different place every now and again.

Run Forrest, run!

Aled — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:10:41 +0000

After Sean came back from Canada and spent a week or two here, getting out of bed in the mornings and leaving him behind to go for a run before work seemed a lot harder. *grin* So my exercise regime has deteriorated somewhat since then, especially seeing as Sean gave me fresher’s flu (and also unfortunately gave it to Jon – or at least, that’s who Jon is blaming). So today was my first run after several weeks of little exercise beyond callouts – I haven’t even been out walking that much. On top of that all that, I was recovering from a cold.

So how did I do? Quite well, actually. Although I could feel the difference having not been running for a while, and the joys of coughing up what’s remaining of this cold, I managed my circuit in 48m28s – not bad considering I would be aiming for 45mins when healthy.

Hopefully, all this is going to pay off when it comes to Scotland in March. Woo.