Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Last leg also went OK - slept about 5-6 hours (although in a timeslot from roughly 6am-noon Melbourne time, which may come back to bite me). My company was a couple of Belgian high school exchange students; helping then through the immigration form was a reminder that for non-native speakers (and probably plenty of native ones), even though they spoke decent English, the clarity of the wording on the form leaves a lot to be desired - exactly what is the difference between a "natural medicine" (which needs to be declared) and a normal one? (This wasn't their first encounter with the shortcomings of the Australian immigration bureaucracy; they were arriving six weeks later than planned because of delays in visa processing).

Got home about 6.15. My standard jet lag strategy is to be as active as possible until a reasonably normal sleep time, and I certainly managed it this event, this session being the first of a sequence which also included restocking my cupboards with food (managing to resist the temptation to inflict grievous bodily harm on a Coles self-checkout machine after it required staff intervention five times in as many minutes), restocking myself with food, emptying most of the contents of my bag into the washing machine, putting out the bins and calling Dad for Father's Day. The session felt a bit flat, but I'm not too surprised by that.

C • Self checkouts 23

Not much of a chance to do any exercise today (other than walking up and down airport terminal corridors) - headed for the airport at 5am for the first stage of the Toulouse-Paris-Abu Dhabi-Melbourne trip. Generally went reasonably smoothly, although Charles de Gaulle is not an airport I'd be wanting to make a short connection through (and it did seem somewhat incongruous that the only food outlet I spotted in transit was Macca's).

Woke up with a stiff back (and pretty tired as well after a long week of meetings in hot rooms) - was fairly clear on the opening steps that it wasn't happening today.

Got a lot done this week, and I don't think the to-do list is too outrageous (these may be famous last words).

Bus route choice watch: came up with option number 7 this afternoon. It didn't seem to be a particularly good one, although the Friday afternoon traffic was bad enough that I'm not sure that there were better ones. (It's the proper end of summer holidays, which means this weekend is a very good one not to be on French motorways, especially those heading for Paris).

First attempt at intervals in quite a long time, down on the canal towpath (it gets light fairly late here this time of year and I wouldn't have wanted to be even five minutes earlier). Started off unambitious - 6 x "1 minute" (actually about 66-68). The good news is that nothing really hurt per se, the bad news is that my energy levels abruptly ran out about halfway through the last rep (just when I thought I might try a couple more). Still, another step forwards.

Warm-up and down, exploring a few more bits of the old town in the process. Slow on the warm-up because I always am these days, slow on the warm-down after using up my energy on the intervals.

Not quite as humid as yesterday, but the temperature in the meeting room in the afternoon still reminded me of the stories you see every now and again during European heatwaves about temperatures on the London Underground exceeding the legal maximum in the EU for transporting cattle.

Bus route choice count: now up to six distinctly different routes from eight trips.

Made it out today for a respectable period of time, heading initially to the river and then to the island the main stadium's on (home to a team who spent the weekend having a fairly familiar French football experience, being walloped by PSG). No real injury concerns today, but definitely slow - I'd be tempted to blame this on the GPS having trouble picking up signals in the narrower streets except that I wasn't breaking 6s on the riverbank either. Humid again.

The start of this took me through the older part of the city, with a market being set up in the largest square. Last night this was home to a demonstration. Demonstrations in France are usually well worth avoiding - not so much because of the demonstrators themselves but because French riot police are very enthusiastic users of tear gas, as Shingo found out a few weeks back - but this was a silent vigil which didn't seem likely to attract too much attention from the authorities.

Couldn't come up three days in a row - more hip tightness than anything which was left over from the weekend. Very humid morning (a prelude to afternoon thunderstorms, although these didn't produce very much rain).

The bus from the centre of town to Meteo-France (a few kilometres to the southwest) has taken three completely different routes in its first three trips. (Google Maps suggests the three routes are almost identical in time). In some countries doing this would be a precaution against getting ambushed, but I'm assuming France isn't one of those countries. (None of the routes in question were as indirect as some of the discussion today).

C • I think an old friend of mi... 4

Early morning session in Toulouse, heading out to and then along the canal on the north side of the city centre - I expected (correctly) that this would have a path along it with few road crossings, although the path was at road level rather than canal level (traffic wasn't too bad, though).

I expected to have a lot of muscle stiffness after yesterday, but didn't. Didn't have a lot of energy, though, and was definitely fading in the later part of this. (The muscle stiffness also put in a bit of an appearance after sitting down all day, so tomorrow may be interesting).