a few things

I have a few things to talk about today and will leap from subject to subject, I trust you can keep up. :)

First off. Just to point you in the direction of the poll on the right hand side of this blog. I have added the Parkinson Foundation to the list. This is a charity that I would like to champion for a moment as Parkinson’s disease afflicted my late granddad and ruined his quality of life in his last years, the collection at his funeral was for this organisation.

Next. I didn’t go to the gym last night as it was a rest day, and I was off to the doctors again. This shoulder injury is still not 100% healed. I still get twinges of pain if I extend my reach forward or rotate my arm backwards. These aren’t movements that I carry out in my usual day to day, but there shouldn’t be pain there.

My GP is pretty confident that it is a trauma injury (i.e. I did it in the gym) but just to be certain that it isn’t something else manifesting in a dodgy joint, I am off for some blood tests next week to sieve out anything that may be underlying this. He has suggested that I should start taking anti inflammatory drugs to aid the recovery and to knock the pain on the head as well.

My choices are pretty simple though. Stop training completely for three plus months and the injury may heal. Or keep training and put up with the niggly joint. My Doctor did say that we haven’t got a lot if time to get ready for this race as 17 months isn’t all that long in real terms.

It’s a no-brainer really, I’m going to continue to train and be sensible with what strains I put on the shoulder.

Then lets take a look at the continued observational experiment that is monitoring my transformation into a sleek super fit athlete. I weighed in last night. I am now 69.75kgs, or pretty much smack bang on 11 stone. I’ve never been 11 stone in my life. I thought I was destined to be 10 stone forever. My BMI is creeping up and is at 22.79 which is currently still in the normal bracket.

The Body Mass Index is an unreliable gauge of weight though as it doesn’t take into account muscle mass versus other tissue mass. With a BMI rating of 25 or over you are classed as overweight, if I keep on gaining muscle mass at this rate I will be overweight by approximately July next year.

And then finally I want to talk about swimming. I love swimming, given the choice I would like to be some kind of dolphin and in the future I would like to have a go at swimming the channel. But I can’t enjoy the swimming pool so much as I wear contact lenses. If I don’t wear lenses I can’t see anything except coloured blurs but if I do wear lenses I can’t go underwater. For some reason contact lenses adhere to my eyeballs as if they had been coated in a layer of glue if they get wet.

Upon hearing my plaintiff cry about not being able to splash about like flipper, my lovely wife went shopping for a set of goggles. These are quite possibly the coolest goggles I have seen for a while, they are mirrored and make me look like a cross between Mad Max and a Bee. Tonight I am at the gym and I intend to be pool side for a few hours.