Serious Cyclist

Both of us are on our bikes today. It’s not often I get chance to say that. L has even been out and bought some fingerless cycling gloves. Serious stuff. We have a bike event next weekend.

She’s already got the sexy shorts. I treated her to those the other week. You can’t be a proper cyclist without looking like a proper cyclist and you also can't be a proper cyclist if you can't sit down for a week afterwards.

I give her some advice and tell her that to look meaner on the bike she needs to take her pedals off and go clipless but she’s not buying that.

In the evening L goes over to her parents and I go to the pool. I need the money. One more visit this month is required to keep the cash back on course.

(Tuesday 30^th July)

Drowning Practice

I need to do a gym or a swim before Sunday otherwise I won’t get my cash back come year end. I also need to do a swim because, well, I need to do a swim. So it looks like it’s a swim tonight then. I drive to work, then afterwards to the pool. No bike today because we’re due in Sheffield later.

At the pool I embark on a bit of drowning practice. The idea being that if I hold myself underwater until I’m gasping for air then that is effectively emulating the situation I found myself in at Lake Windermere. The aim then it to get my breath back whilst swimming. I have some limited success with this.

I also experiment with something the experts called ‘sighting’, this is actually ‘looking where you’re going’ and isn’t as easy as it sounds. Again I have some limited success with this.

L is in the gym and meets me for a mocha afterwards. Then we head home to collect the dogs before we head north. First though I try on wetsuit number three which has arrived. It’s better than the first two, certainly more arm room. Still strangles me though but I’ll give it a go...

Daughter has advised, well insisted actually, that moving her to her new accommodation tonight will be easier without the dogs... but what's life without a bit of difficulty? So we take the dogs and they’re pleased to see her. I think she’s pleased to see them.

Oddly we get all the stuff Daughter wants to move into the car along with both dogs and the three of us in it as well. I was expecting this to take two loads, if not three. In fact I’d considered hiring a van. So just what has she done with all her stuff? Actually, who cares. I’m all for the very easy moving operation that it was.

At her new place I can see what the previous occupants have done with the stuff their parents couldn’t fit in the car. It’s all in the cellar. A very large rather gruesome cellar, which would have been renovated into two more bedrooms had I been the landlord.

Then we take Daughter for a birthday meal, well we get a Chinese takeaway, which enables the dogs to share some well earned prawn crackers.

(Wednesday 26^th June)

In The Dungeon

It’s my birthday today and it turns out to be just about perfect. It helps that the Birthday Gods schedule it on a Saturday this year. It's always good when you don’t have to spend the majority of your big day behind a desk.

There’s no football match and I don’t schedule a dog show, so I get to spend it all in the company of an attractive young woman. She even skips this morning’s Park Run, although this is more due to a nagging ankle injury than out of devotion to my birthday.

The dogs still insist on doing the park, but you can’t have everything, and they do let us have a long lie-in first. Then we do a very un-celebratory gym session because I need to get one in before the end of the month if I’m going to get my cash back at year end.

I mainly do the treadmill, 5 whole k without getting injured, so that’s promising and I also do some leg weights.

Back home L makes me a cake amid cries of ‘cake, you can't not have cake, can you?’

In the evening we head into Nottingham and hang out in Brewdog for a while. The beer range is a little down on what it usually is but one of the barmaids makes up for this by, clearly catching my birthday vibes, coming to our table to refill our glasses. So we don't even have to get up to go to the bar.

Then we head to Iberico Tapas for a meal in the dungeon below the Galleries of Justice. We were going to go there for a friend’s birthday last year until he found out it was underground which didn’t go well with his aversion of anything subterranean. It sounded great to us though and we’re vowed to go there ever since.

We are sat at a pillar in the bar as the restaurant is fully booked. It’s a popular place. It’s also in the Michelin Guide and there are no prices on their website... e.g. it’s not going to be cheap. Apparently not only is it in the Michelin Guide, it’s one of only 137 restaurants nationwide with a Bib Gourmand, whatever that is, and the only one in Nottinghamshire... e.g. it’s going to be really expensive.

Apparently the bib denotes ‘good cuisine at a reasonable price’ but yes, it's still pretty expensive.

Although that may be because we pigged out a touch. After a starter, we had five tapas dishes to share between the two of us. Then three more for dessert because we didn’t fancy anything sweet. Then there was the rather nice 6.4% Alhambra 1925 Reserva beer, basically San Miguel with balls and the fact L was hitting the Spanish Sherry.

All rather nice though. We’ll be back.

(Saturday 27^th April)

The Morning After The Night Before

Blimey that was hard. 62 minutes to cycle to work. Shoot me now.

L refers to the gym as excellent. She must be cheering up.

Daughter has arrived at her job interview in Sheffield. I know because I’m getting texted all the questions. She gets the job, serving in a hotel and then gets asked if she minds travelling to Nottingham for her first assignment. For once something is going to be convenient. It’s on Saturday, the morning after the night before, which is a friend’s birthday. I hope she wasn’t planning on getting too wrecked.

I decide to go for a swim. Purely financial, just for the end of year cashback. I doubt my legs will be up to more than about ten lengths.

It’s very very quiet in the pool, eerily quiet, normally there’s barely enough room to doggie paddle. Tonight there are only eight folk across the six lanes. All men, well apart from one but strictly no totty. So no distractions, no excuses, best swim then.

The post-cycling leg cramps hit me somewhere between 20-24 lengths and at about the same time someone comes to share my lane, so I stop. It’s actually filled up quite a bit. Twenty or so folk now. Still no totty though, might as well get out.

Doggo has a restless night, complete with vomiting, so we all have a restless night. Well apart from MD, he can sleep through anything.

(Wednesday 22nd August)

A Not Short Enough Leash

I cycle into work in not great weather. It’s misting very heavily at one point but I don’t think it ever actually officially became rain.

On a whim I’ve even put my swimming kit in my bag; I need to do a July session... for the cash back although I may defer it to next week.

I defer it to next week. I think the boys deserve a park session in the rain. Hopefully Doggo will come out of his corner, where he's hiding from the weather and probably digging a hole out of the wall to hide inside, long enough to join MD and I.

He does but probably wishes he hadn’t when it starts thundering heavily. A few minutes later all three of us watch the rainstorm moving across the park towards us, then leg it. We leg it to a nearby tree where we join several other folk attempting to shelter from the deluge, unsuccessfully. So three very wet boys troop home.

L is apparently on her way to the gym, slowly, as she’s flexing her plastic in town on the way. Plastic which she has stolen from the top drawer of my bedroom cabinet. I like to keep it on a short leash but she’s helped herself.

She asks me to quantify ‘short’ as she buys new shoes and a leather belt. Sounds like she’s already at the end of it.

(Wednesday 18th July)

Washout

There’s a match tonight (whoopee doo, another defeat), so I park the car at my parents' place and run in. Five and a half miles. It was good, well ok. My legs still ache from Sunday’s unnecessary, as regards the cashback, gyming.

I avoid the rain too, L says she got drenched on the way to work but we've had no rain here. There are some very black clouds skulking around but no rain. Had I cycled, then obviously it would have rained on me, probably while I was fixing my puncture.

It does rain in the afternoon and L says she doesn’t envy me sitting at the match in it. That’s undercover, what about not envying me running back to parents’!

Somehow I again avoid getting wet and have a decent run back in the other direction. The match though is a washout. No I don’t mean rain wise but performance wise. Another defeat.

A quick pint and then I head home with a food parcel from my Mum. No not for the hard up students. Its Sunday lunch leftovers for the dogs, although it looks like two full portions to me, each in their own little plastic boxes. Spoilt?

(Tuesday 29th November)

Gary Speed

With no events, a day off to recover from two nights predominately on the wine. Which is not often a good thing. The two nights that is, not the day off.

Daughter returns from the Skegness Music Festival... or whatever it’s more glamorous name is and we dispatch her back to Sheffield via the train.

In the evening I’m tempted into the gym, which is the second time this month and as I only need to attend once a month to get my ‘cashback’, it was actually unnecessary. 15k on the bike was sort of impressive but 1k on the rower is a bit meagre. Still it all keeps my fitness ticking over.

The whole day though is sort of overshadowed by the awful death of Gary Speed. I saw it first on the BBC website and just went cold. I had watched the guy not 24 hours earlier, as he put in a polished performance on Saturday’s Football Focus, which just made the news all the more shocking. He was only 42.

I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s death but I think it’s fair to say that because a lot of people in the public eye and in particular footballers are not the most likeable of people, the initial shock of their deaths is often followed by a general collective shrug of indifference.

Not so Gary Speed. His death has rocked people because he was a genuine nice guy and a footballer who simply got on with playing football and didn’t trouble the tabloids. If you wanted a role model he was it. When he became a manager, he simply got on with managing and with Wales he was starting to have some deserved success.

Simply stunned. RIP.

(Sunday 27th November)