Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

Last week I was stunned to find, right on our doorstep, a really beautiful chunk of English countryside. We had purchased a bike rack for the car and decided to venture out for a nice bike route away from town. One of our neighbours suggested Elmstead which sounded very appealing, and then another said why not go down Flatford Mill.

The weather was the best of the year, so far, and was so pleased we managed to get out as a family – rather than being cooped up in an office with the sunshine outside!

So we loaded up the car and off we went at the mercy of TomTom – which took us there without problems. The only problem was that although Flatford Mill is sited on the South Suffolk Cycle Route B had no facilities apparent for cyclists. It didn’t matter though, as we went on a charming trip through Flatford and East Bergholt with a well deserved pint at the Carriers Arms.

The countryside is classic English rolling hills with lush-green vegetation all around – Constable had perfect material with which to work.

This week has been a bit fragmented as other commitments have made it difficult to follow my fitness timetable. It’s half-term, James is having swimming lessons every day, and I’ve been travelling around a fair bit.

I sit there every morning watching the kids in the pool, wanting to just get in and do my swim and yet after getting James home I can’t motivate myself to go straight back down there! Today was scheduled to be another swim, and yet I’ve promised to go with Allan to the gym and be moral support while he gets his program sorted out.

Cycling has also suffered, partly because I’m not going down the pool on my own, so I’ve been using the car. And, partly because my gym sessions have been too late for me to use the bike – I haven’t got lights.

All is not bad though. I have been out and done a 5km run with Alison and kept to all my gym sessions. The 5km was the first one outside where I haven’t needed to walk. Alison was really cool and gradually slowed her pace to match mine as I laboured more and more in the final mile. I was a bit gutted when we reviewed her Nike+ log and saw that she had been doing this, as I thought I had been doing very well to keep up around the course! Even so, we managed a 9min 11sec pace, which is only 20 seconds off her normal training speed.

As I mentioned before, my bike has been a bit of a sod to get right. The gears needed tweaking a few times before they would change properly on the front gears, I had two punctures in 5 days, and the really annoying thing was a clunking coming from the front crank regardless of which gear was selected.

Kudos to Cycle King of Colchester who dealt with the problems in a most professional manner and kept at it despite my many return visits to the shop.

My bike is now running like a dream with smooth gear changes and a very quiet operation.

I now have a whole bunch of fitness goals for 2007.

1. Swim the Swimathon 5K personal challenge, beating my previous record of 1h58m.
2. Run a 5K race (I’ve yet to pick which event).
3. Cycle the London to Southend bike ride in June.
4. Lose another 8lb in weight.

I’ve been swim training for a while now, and comfortably do 2.5K training swims a couple of times per week. It won’t be that hard. I am cycling whenever I can locally, but a 58 mile bike ride is a little more than I am used to. This could be hard. The run is the one I consider to be the biggest challenge since I am yet to be able to run continuously without a walking break for more than about 10 minutes.

My bike has been a right pain in the backside since I started using it for fitness this year. I decided that it was silly driving to the gym and the pool, especially since the first part of the gym session is a warm-up on the stationary bike. So, out came the bike and I have been aiming to do about 25 miles (about 2 hours) per week as additional cardio exercise. At this time of the year, that’s been hard to achieve with bad weather causing me to jump in the car anyway on quite a few days.

What I didn’t allow for is the bike playing up. It has been back to the bike shop twice for the gears to be reset, and today when I was nearly home from an 8 mile trip into town and back (with Tiff and Ali) I got a flat. So they went on without me and I walked the last half mile home with my bike.

Not only that, but I can’t find a spanner that fits the wheel nuts – so I’m taking the whole bike back to the bike shop again, this time for a measly puncture.

I’ll have to get fit enough to be able to do enough running to burn up the calories, at least with running you only have your own body to play you up!