Training Log Archive: Mounty

Pleasant Brunch in the Hunter Valley, enjoyable road trip back home with Jonno, Cathy, Darvo, Katrin and Con the Fruiterer's mangoes, before a pre-dinner manly dam trot.

Started as a steady run, but kept finding excuses to stop & start. Without any rhythm happening, figured Id' go with the stop/start and do some efforts. Unfortunately, didnt have the energy and gave up soon enough. Trotted home to complete an impressively schizophrenic and hence largely meaningless run. Nice to be out but.

Short jog around the crowne plaza golf course before Dari's wedding - mainly to rework the wedding speech in my head after an incident filled morning.

C • It was a great speech... 5

Drove up to Dari's parent's place at Broke via the Wollombi Rd.

Subaru 1 - Kangaroo 0.

Paddle on real water for the first time in a while. Shame it was cold, windy and raining. Down to Sugarloaf bay and back. 30min easy, then a set of Monners on the way back. After 6 months of paddle hibernation, gonna be a bit of a grind to get going again with interval type things.

Of note today was the first of what will presumably become a growing trend - getting smashed by one's offspring. Tom had a plank competition at Taekwondo class. For context, I can last in the order of a few minutes before collapsing in a heap of abdominal lactic acid. He took out the class comp and kept going. After 15 minutes (!!) the teacher got bored and pushed him over. And I thought my core strength was improving. Ouch.

Summer Series at Manly in the rain. Squeezed in a quick trip down to Manly in the rain for a spin. Headed north first, crossed Pittwater Rd at peak hour 3 times (nice course setting), then back down the beach and in to some checkpoints in the hills along Sydney Road. Had planned to leave a couple out, but realised was ahead of schedule and had to improvise, losing some efficiency.

OK run, but top end speed pretty ordinary.

Quick Killarney loop with Katrin at lunchtime.

Good whacking session today. Due to a combination of circumstance, trained with Andy (scary black belt super coach) holding the pads. Learned a huge amount in a short period of time. Twas good.

Perhaps most educational was at the end when holding the bag for him, as he fired off a round of side kicks, first to the quads, then to the ribs. Regardless of the big pad, not sure Ive got the words to describe the force coming thru'. Holy crap. Bit shaky afterwards.

Got given a yellow belt at the end as result of the grading from a couple of weeks ago. Part of the routine is having to do as many pushups as you can in front of the class. (Strict pushup rules - on your knuckles, full dip). Managed 56, which I was quite happy with after 90minutes of whacking.


Having said all that, highlight of the day was still Tom's description in the morning of his new classmate who is from Hong Kong. "She speaks orange". "You mean mandarin?" - "Yeah, that's the one".

Evening Moneghetti on the ergo (pause for mental image of Monner's trying to kayak). Feels OK to get the HR up again finally.