Category: Diary

If you have the misfortune of following my Facebook feed you’re probably getting sick of my check-ins to Derrimut Jetts. I’m using Facebook to track my visits and I’ve been aiming to go every day.

Yesterday was a bit of a breakthrough day. Despite the effects of this cold I’ve had for over two weeks I completed my program and felt fantastic afterwards. I also completed all my pushups without failing and didn’t collapse when I hit my  target on the rowing machine.

Then when I hit home I checked my weight. I’ve snuck below 92kg so I’m aiming to break 90 by my birthday.  What started out as just a desire to get a bit more fit seems to have blossomed in to a full on lifestyle change. It’s become so bad I dreamed about better techniques for push ups last night. I’ve improved my diet, stopped kidding myself that ‘just a bit more’ won’t matter, cut out a whole heap of junk and am pushing myself to do better.

So what’s made the difference? The first is having a trainer. I can’t overstate how much of a help Adam has been. He pushes me just enough and doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s got in to my head too, I can hear him saying ‘Posture Anthony!’ Every time I slouch at my desk.

I’ve also stopped kidding myself. No one else is going to make me better, if I want to improve myself it’s up to me. Eating junk will make me feel blah, doing no exercise is bad for me. It’s simple and obvious but tough to admit after you have been deluding yourself most of your life.

There have been a few inspirational women along the way too. Ren, with her amazing transformation,  opened my eyes to what you can achieve when you put your mind to it and Kim from Met Fitness,  what she said made sense and changed the way I thought.

And finally there is my amazing wife who hail, rain or shine drags herself out of bed every morning at 5.00am to go to the gym. She is doing so well and is so committed to what she wants to achieve you can’t but help be inspired and want to work as hard as she does.

Now if only I could turn this new found motivation towards lawn mowing..,.

Two heat and dollar related issues today.

Just wondering if we are the only family in the world who don’t have a clothes dryer. It’s a conscious  decision on our behalf, they just suck money out of your wallet and as good as we think we would be we know we’d probably end up using it every day; not to mention a certain teenager who would probably hand wash one pair of socks and then put them in the dryer for two hours before walking away,

Out frugality came back to bite us on the bum this morning though. Mr Albert, generally Mr Reliable, has gone and lost two of his school jumpers and the one remaining is sopping wet on the line. Of course I only discover this at 8.00am. He’s gone off today out of uniform. I’ll go through the lost property boxes this afternoon and hopefully one will turn up,

The other heat related issue is heating. I’m home alone now during most days, just me in the office and it’s getting bloody cold. I don’t want to turn on the central heating just for me and no matter how many jumpers I put on my fingers and feet are freezing. Any advice on the best (ie most cost efficient) method of heating a smallish office? When I defrost this evening I’ll check the comments.

Mr Henry wasn’t feeling too well this morning so he was with me in the car today as I was driving along.

“Dadda".

“Yes Henry?”

“I know how we can make it the olden days again.”

“How Henry?”

“It’s easy Dadda, we just have to paint everything black.”

I think it’s been about two weeks now since I started at the gym and can’t remember taking a day off in that time. I’ve had three sessions with a personal trainer, and will probably continue with him for a little while more just to make sure I know what I’m doing. I’m attempting to go every day, to make it a habit (yes Kim, that’s thanks to your advice) and today I actually noticed two things.

One, I’ve slipped back a notch on my belt. That’s pretty cool. Two, I can bend my left leg! When I first started I physically could not bend my left leg, it just wouldn’t move. Tonight I sat down to do my stretches and without thinking I tucked my left leg in to my right. It took me a couple of minutes to realise I’d done that. So, a couple of real physical changes and that’s enough to give me the motivation to keep on going.

Yesterday we took a quick trip to Bendigo. It’s equidistant from Shepparton and our place (give or take a little bit) so was the perfect place to catch up with the Jankes and Mum and Pater. We had coffee by the lake, toured the Grace Kelly exhibition (mildly disappointing – poorly planned, too many people to comfortably take it all in, too dimly lit and many exhibits lacked context) and then an afternoon back at the lake for lunch and crazy running around the playground time for the kids.

It was a perfect, relaxing Autumn afternoon and we’ve decided that later in the year we’ll arrange a holiday there to take in the city and surrounds properly as a few hours really doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve discovered an unexpected benefit of exercising at a gym and it’s tech related.

Ever since I stopped driving to and from work four years ago I haven’t had much use for my iPods. They’ve languished on my desk, getting a sync every now and then to keep them up to date but were hardly used. Now that I’m out of the house regularly sans kids they are back in favour, especially my 2nd gen shuffle that I had never used. It’s the perfect size to clip on to my shorts.

Of course this calls for a ‘Gym’ playlist so over the past couple of days I’ve built up 6 hours of gym specific music and hit play on it for the first time this evening. Born Slippy fired up, I smiled and off I went.

Are exercise, you truly are a wonderful thing.

I ached for two days after my first personal trainer session. Really, really ached. I could barely get in and out of the car until Friday night. Arms, stomach, chest, legs – everything was sore. I wondered just what I’d got myself in for, if it was worth it.

Today I think I found out it may be.

I’ve just had my second session with my personal trainer and I feel fantastic after it. I can walk and lift things, two things I struggled with after session one.  I could even chat with Adam as we went through each of the Machines Of Evil. It seems the first session was about pushing me beyond what I could do just to see what my body was capable of (or not, more to the point for me).

He’s now started work on getting me to the stage where I can start proper exercise. Or, to quote Adam, “I’m getting you to the point where I can begin to hurt you.”.

I feel so much better after this session (well, until I wake tomorrow morning) knowing that I’m going to be able to cope a lot better than I thought I would. It’s a good thing, I think I’ll be sticking with it.

Everything aches, everything…

When I joined the gym they had an offer of 3 sessions with a personal trainer for $60 so, thinking it sounded like a good idea to get started, I said sure.

I went for my first session with Adam. Ladies and gents, never judge a pleasant smiling book by its cover. At the end of the session I was a quivering wreck on the floor. That’s not surprising though as we’re starting from a zero base. I haven’t exercised in, well, must be over 20 years so it’s no surprise my body decided it wanted to shut down almost as soon as we started.

The major issue is that thanks to a quirk of genetics my whole left side is weaker than the right and over 42 years the right has taken over – so much so the muscles in my left leg and arm have all but atrophied. I can’t do any weight work or I’ll injure myself straight away, and no running either for the same reason. The right side of my body tries to take the whole load. I have a pronounced lean and my hips are way out (apparently) so we’re starting from scratch. To quote Oscar Goldman “we can rebuild him”. I have to stretch every day to get things loosened up and I can see many more sessions ahead of me sweating away while Adam smiles at me.

My major concern right now is how on earth I’m going to recover in time to walk from Richmond station to the ‘G tomorrow night for the Tigers game. That and what on earth I’ll do if I drop the soap in the shower in the morning. Now I know why the invented soap-on-rope.

I’m scared of my computer.

This evening I was chatting to Rae and came back to work to see my login screen. I thought it was odd that my PC had reset itself but thought it must have been an update, I’d been gone a little while.

This evening I was on a conference call for a client when one of my monitors went black. Oh oh. Then the other went black, then (almost unheard of with Windows 7) I received the Blue Screen of Death and the PC reset itself.

The thing is I’m now scared of my PC. I think it may be sentient. Last week I was concerned with how sluggish and temperamental it had become for no apparent reason so I requested a quote for a new system, just to see. The quote came back but it was more than I wanted to pay so I filed it away in my emails. I now think my PC may be able to read my emails and is upset with me so it has decided to misbehave more. I’m too scared to ask it to save a file, or to open the pod bay doors. I just know it would say “I’m sorry Tony, I can’t do that.”.

Time for a quick game of “Where’s That Rotunda?’.

Name the suburb and the closest mode of transport.