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.

Fundraising

We’re starting to think about raising funds both for charity and as a way to get hold of the boat (which currently is way out of our financial reach).

Devizes Westminster is an excellent opportunity to get sponsorship and raise funds for charities and special causes, and even though you aren’t required to get sponsorship to take part, it seems only right that we do.

There are many good and great charities out there, and we have a few which we have thought about collecting for but we can’t quite decide. But I have discovered a widget on blogger which allows me to poll my vast and numerous readership. So consider yourselves polled. Even if you have stumbled here by mistake, click your chosen charity for me.

In fact, if you have a charity that is close to your heart that you would like us to consider, leave a comment in the comments section of this post and I will add it to the list.

I think we would need to make a decision who will be our named charity by early summer next year. So on the first of June 2009 whichever charity has the most votes on the poll (even if there have only been two or three votes overall) will be the one.

And then the other thing we might have to consider is getting corporate sponsorship to pay for the boat.

The boat we need is a two man kayak, preferably of marathon type, and preferably at the more stable end of the racing boat spectrum. Finding a boat that fits the bill on ebay is a very hit and miss thing. And although our feelers are out there looking to borrow a suitable boat, so far we haven’t had any luck. The third way is to buy the boat. I have spotted the one that I would love to demo, the Marsport Condor looks pretty much ideal for this race… Only at over £1200 for the cheepest, we are not in any kind of position to fund this ourselves. However Nigel suggested that we could petition local businesses to sponsor us on this front.

More thought needs to be put into this, but it might be a way to do this race.