Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

Back in the office for the first time, after a week on the slopes, I am pondering my lifestyle.

Beast Mode On

Adebayo Akinfenwa, the AFC Wimbledon striker, is an old school English striker. He’s a journeyman in the truest sense of the word and it’s fair to say his game relies quite heavily on physical presence. While not the tallest (5 ft 11 in), Akinfenwa weighs around 16 stone. Big unit doesn’t even come close.

The 32-year-old has become an iconic figure largely by virtue of his unique physique. He is ranked as the strongest footballer in the world on most editions of the FIFA computer game series and was actually invited to attend the launch of FIFA 15, alongside more illustrious names like Rio Ferdinand and Lethal Bizzle.

Now, as part of the 2014 Dons Trust Auction, you have the chance to spend an hour in the gym with a man who can bench press 180 kg, almost double his own body weight. All you have to do is bid for the pleasure and the big man will be your personal trainer (for 60 minutes).

Akinfenwa runs a clothing label called “Beast Mode On”and the club are advertising the auction with the same phrase. It closes at 14.30 today and for more details you simply need to click here.

John, if you were planning a run last night but binned it in favour of wine fuelled present wrapping while watching West Wing season 2 reruns just because a few drops of rain fell, you are short of motivation. Why not put a bid in for the offer above? You can stay at mine if you win.

That Was The Year That Was

I was eleven pounds lighter this morning than I was on the last day of 2012. Not great, but not bad and a move in the right direction. My peers in general seem to be going into the credit rather than debit side of the avoirdupois ledger.

Come January 10th, I will be in my eighth year of recording my exercise every day, and on June the first I will have been going to Virgin Active regularly for nine years.

Where does the time go?

250

As we were walking to the pub after work yesterday, the Burglar tripped on an uneven pavement and crashed to the ground like a sack of potatoes, cutting his lip, grazing his cheekbone, mashing up his hands, hurting his knee and breaking his glasses. He couldn't even get up unassisted, I took him back to my place so he could clean up and sat with him until he was feeling well enough to go home.

At 6:30am this morning I went to my 250th yoga class. It struck me that while I keep doing that I am extremely unlikely to fall if I trip, that if I do ever fall I'm mobile and supple enough to be at a low risk if injuring myself, and that even if I did stumble and graze some flesh I would certainly be able to get up again straight away.

That is enough motivation to persevere. I'll let you know when I get to 500. Namaste.

One thing and another

I am gradually concluding that I have strained my left elbow and wrist by doing horizontal cable internal and external rotations in an attempt to nurture my rotator cuff.

No good deed goes unpunished. I will try replacing them with shrugs.

Yum-Yum

I Googled a list of some of the more venerable contents of my fridge and cupboards yesterday, and by said engine's wondrous serendipity came upon prawn chowder with mashed potato. Very good it was too, with the broken bacon in the role played by salt pork in an old-school chowder, and the mashed spuds enhancing the texture.

I'm possibly not the trencherman I imagine however, as I had to buy a new belt on the very same day; all my others being too big. Taking the long view, and ignoring the snakes and ladders along the way, I've been getting more svelte at the rate of about an ounce a week for several years, and it gradually adds up.

In other food news:

Two Germans needed hospital treatment after they fought a pitched battle in a supermarket with salamis used as clubs and a chunk of Parmesan cheese brandished like a dagger.

Putting the Nasty in Namaste

Myself: Has any other reader noticed the remarkable similarity between the Ardha Matsyendrasana of Rickson Gracie, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu master, and that of Bikram Choudhury, founder of the eponymous hot yoga system?

Prodnose: The point of this is?

Myself: I've committed myself to Bikram yoga for three months at least, so I'm trying to persuade myself it's badass rather than a bit wet.

Prodnose: Well Rickson is badass, no argument, but I think you've got a hill to climb. Further I'm not entirely convinced that pasting photos of flexed semi-naked men into the blog is necessarily contributing to a rugged vibe. Is that patouchi oil I can smell?

Myself: Don't knock the cosmetics man, even Tyler Durden was in the soap business:

Who you were in yoga club is not who you were in the rest of the world. A guy came to yoga club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of ....... bamboo.

Kevlar Tyres

I did the Richmond to Windsor bike ride yesterday (plus cycling from home to Richmond before it began and back from Clapham Junction after we got the train back).

I recorded the main event on my Garmin so you should be able to see it, along with pub stops, at http://connect.garmin.com/activity/12770335.

I had to change an inner tube before I even got to Wimbledon on my way to the event. Brendan (who also inspired me to get the GPS watch in the first place) told me I should get Kevlar tyres.

Kevlar tyres! Of course I need them and I wonder that I didn't think of it before.

He is the Lucius Fox to my Bruce Wayne.

Hot stuff

“NEVER TOO OLD, NEVER TOO LATE, NEVER TOO SICK, NEVER TOO BAD TO START FROM SCRATCH AND BEGIN AGAIN”

I can keep training almost every day alternating weights and cardio, but I will simply end up as the fittest plank of wood in the world if I don't address the tight hip flexors that have been bugging me since at least 2006 (Icons passim) though I note that I have rehabilitated my shoulders since then.

Thus I biked off this morning to the 6:30am Hot Bikram Yoga class in Balham: a series of 26 postures (asanas) carried out in a heated room, and man it was tough.

I get 10 days of classes for a tenner, so that is what I will be doing daily until Friday week, except for Sunday when I am off on the Richmond to Windsor bike ride with Andy, Bondy et al.

Annual Report

I'm nine pounds lighter this morning than I was on January 1, 2008. My weight seems to vary quite a lot from day to day; I've been as little as 13 st 2 and as much as 13 st 7 this week, but I am consistently less than last year.

Nothing dramatic but better than getting fatter.

Hard Boiled

Accordng to the scales in Virgin Active, I met my own challenge yesterday, and that's good enough for me. I don't believe for a second that I actually weigh 175 pounds, but that is what the scales said after a lot of sweat so there you have it. I am a light heavyweight.

Next stop twelve stone (on the friendly gym scales rather than the accurate one at home).

Prodnose: The last time you weighed 168 pounds you were beautiful. You could have been another Billy Conn. And that Skunk we got you for a manager. He brought you along too fast.

Myself: It wasn’t him Prodnose it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘kid this ain’t your night, we’re going for the price on Wilson’. You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night’. My night, I could have taken Wilson apart. So what happens he gets the title shot out doors in a ball park. And what do I get, a one way ticket to palookaville. You was my imagination Prodnose you should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have them dives for the short end money.

Prodnose: Well, I had some bets down for ya. You saw some money.

Myself: You don’t understand! I could have had class, I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am, lets face it. It was you Prodders….

Boiling Down

Time for a new challenge.

I hereby challenge myself to get down to the 175 pound light heavyweight limit by the time of the Calzaghe Hopkins fight in Las Vegas on April 19th.

John beat me in the our first challenge, but I beat him in the second. Both our weights have been recorded in the training blog this morning.

Whoever loses the most weight between today and then wins.

(There is a hint of Lent and penance about kicking this off on Ash Wednesday, don't you think?)

Oorah

My brother John having thrown down that gauntlet to me to me on a cross-trainer and barbell complex workout competition last week, I am hereby returning the favour by suggesting we go head to head on the United States Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test this week.

This consists of:

• as many pull ups as you can do
• as many crunches as you can do in two minutes
• a three mile run.

Follow the link for notes on form. Scoring works as follows: five points for every pull-up, one point for every crunch, and one point is deducted from 100 for every 10 seconds slower than 18 minutes.

Scores are graded into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class (below 3rd you fail) according to an age adjusted scale. I choose to interpret this as meaning that I can still win even if I get fifty points less than John. He may disagree.

One Year Later

It's a year today that John and I started recording our workouts. Looking at January 2007 I can see that I'm only five pounds lighter than I was then, despite keeping at the exercise pretty consistently.

I celebrated the anniversary with an early morning run along the Wandle today, and hated every step of it. (I'm going to step up roadwork in January and February before skiing in the first week of March.)

Looking on the bright side, I feel a lot stronger and fitter so I imagine that I have probably lost around half a stone in fat, and it is certainly better than being heavier than I was a year ago.

Also on the bright side, HELP YOUR HEART WITH EXERCISE - AND BOOZE says the Guardian.

Next Steps

Now that the Swansea 10k is out of the way, I've decided to rethink my training programme to keep it fresh for the last quarter of the 2007. Come 2008 I imagine I'll be retooling to get in shape for the Childline Challenge again.

For the last few months, while reserving Mondays for Muay Thai and Thursdays for swimming I've broadly been following a day's weight training with a day of cardio vascular exercise.

Next - while maintaining the Thai boxing and swimming bookends in the programme - I want to look at combining cardio and strength exercises, while perhaps also saving time, by using short, high intensity free weight circuits and interval training. The inspiration is in this article by Mark Twight.

I've tried out some of these ideas and concluded that - reasonable as it sounds - this style of training is a lot easier said than done. An investment in a puke bucket may be wise and I will ease myself into it.

Christmas Eve being three months from today, I also remind myself in advance that "it's not what you do during the Christmas to New Year interregnum that's important, it's what you do between New Year and Christmas". Take it easy for a week or so.

Any Old Iron

Excess in exercise is a way to marry the protestant work ethic of a Midwesterner with the self-indulgence of a sybarite.
It is the ultimate in carnality, the mortification and the indulgence of the flesh in one, all released in one mighty rush of endorphins. Asceticism and hedonism are united.

An article in the FT of all places, nails the peculiar and painful allure of exercising every day especially when you're no spring chicken. "A man makes a beast of himself to get rid of the pain of being a man", as Johnson warned, and it seems it can apply to sweating just as well as boozing.

I should really be tapering off this week, and taking it easy at AbbeyFest on Friday night if I'm going to swim, cycle and run on Saturday, but there ain't much chance of that.

I'm on target to swim in less than nine minutes and to run at 12km/hr which will both be huge improvements on last time out. Rewarding as that should be, at least I'm not so far gone yet sincerely to think of it as carnal.

Second Wind

The next youngest guy in his class was half his age. They must have thought he was some far-out old man humping it over that course. I did it when I was 19 and it damn near wasted me.

Words from Apocalypse Now came unbidden to my mind when I woke up on Tuesday morning after a hard session of Muay Thai on Monday night. My hamstrings in particular were on fire after a lot of stretching, kicking and conditioning.

I still went to the gym at lunchtime for a quick run and some SMR, and met Mark - one of the trainers - in the changing rooms. I've seen him around, and nodded, but I haven't had a chat with him for a while so I was surprised and pleased that he remembered when he asked me how I had got on in my triathlon from a few months back.

Speaking of triathlons, I'm not going to do the Afan Forest Park Off Road in August after all. Maturin can't do it because of family commitments, and my brother John has pulled out because he's going to a wedding. It seems a long way to travel (and travel back from) to do the event on my own, but it is a measure of how much exercise is simply part of my life now that I will carry on training as if I was going to do it, do a virtual version of the course in Virgin on August 11, and then swap to preparing for September's 10k road race in Swansea.

If your going to get obsessive about something, I guess working out is one of the least harmful.

Leather on Willow

Perfect Britain - a land where warm beer is served to the distant echo of leather on willow and the tring-a-ling of bicycle bells rung by spinsters on their way to Holy Communion.

Pete - of AbbeyFest and The ColourHouse Theatre fame - organised a social cricket match in the week. Twenty overs for each side, everyone except the wicket keeper bowls two overs, and batsmen retire once they've scored twenty five runs. We fielded first, then - even though I'm useless - I opened the batting. I only got two runs, but the way I figured it once I was out I could get straight on the booze without waiting for the match to finish. This is the stage at which I got Ray to take the photo above with my camera phone.

Britain. .. We've had running water for over 10 years, an underground tunnel linking us to Peru, and we invented the cat.

(As John was gracious enough to point out, the old school Corinthian centre stage above is noticeably slimmer than either The Sin Eater or Hotei circa 2005.)

Update 12:25: Just bumped into Pete who told me that he has arranged another game for mid July. I will need some time in the nets before that. (When I was in Bangalore, I remember Michael telling me that because Indians are all so cricket mad, the only slot his team could book for net practice was 6 am on Sundays.)

I Am Still Active

It's two years today since I first entered the hallowed portals of the new Virgin Active gym.

I weighed in at around thirteen stone on the bathroom scales in Wales this morning (it is difficult to read the analogue scale accurately) but I am undoubtedly a lot lighter than I was in the middle of 2005 when I estimate I was over fifteen stone.

I was down to 14 stone by November 2005, then 13 stone 3 in March 2006, before going into reverse and getting back to 14 stone again in July 2006; a weight where I seem to have stayed until Dave suggested the Childline Challenge and Triathblog was born.

What I've learned is that what works (and I hope will continue to work for me) is almost fitness by blogging; daily recording of efforts and results reinforcing discipline and demonstrating progress.

In retrospect it is clear today that I gained ten or eleven pound in the second half of 2006 when I stopped recording my weight regularly. QED.

This morning I did my standard Cardiff run in 30 minutes 20 seconds which is five minutes and 43 seconds faster than I did it on April 15 in the run up to the Challenge. Just knowing these numbers gives me a huge boost plus an appetite to break half an hour the next time I go out on it.

Given the way that I'm wired, that is the way to do it.

Hillz 'n Skillz

I, I wish I could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim,
Though nothing will drive them away
We could beat them, just for one day
We could be heroes, just for one day

I completed the Springfield triathlon this morning. It wasn't a spectacular performance but I ground it out fortified simultaneously by two convictions: first, that there was no chance in Hell that I wasn't going to complete it; second, that there was no chance in Hell that if I stopped to rest at all I would get going again.

Maturin, Llewellyn, and I cycled round the bike route and the run route on the days before the event. This sort of scouting is essential I think. I can scarcely imagine how disheartening it would be to come across an unexpected uphill section - for example - right at the end of the event in the run.

Now that I know I've got the wind to propel myself round a sprint triathlon course, I'm also pretty sure that I could improve my times, without necessarily getting fitter, by getting better at cycling and swimming.

That said, I was killing my speed this morning with plenty of braking while swooping down Box Hill in the pouring rain on slick tyres. I could have gone faster, but I couldn't help but wonder if triathletes get their numbers written on both arms and both legs by officials to help with reassembling bodies after accidents.

Thanks are also due to the Maturin family for looking after me so shplendidly over the weekend.