A new year

Happy new year all...

As is customary at this time of year, I have been taking stock and reflecting on my life and the priorities I have in it.

Having recently finished university, I have entered 'full time employment' - somewhat fortunately I feel given the current economic situation and the struggle some of my friends are having.

Work wise, I want to continue to learn more and develop my skills - in as broad a way as possible. I think this achievable, and just requires concentration and perseverance. I want to try and tame my somewhat scatter gun approach to things by splitting my day into hour long blocks and setting things to achieve in each hour.

In my personal life, now I have returned to Brighton, I am back at Taekwondo studying with the excellent Howard Mayes.

I have also started playing keyboard with the band Creature - which is something I am very much enjoying - getting back into music.

Another change I am making, is I have bought a digital SLR and am starting on a creative photography course with Evolution Arts. This has decent reviews on the interweb and I hope it opens a whole new area of creativity for me! If I get on well with it, I may even look at the Photoshop course they also run.

Does anyone else have any plans for their year along these lines?

Exercise!

I recently found thanks to Lifehacker, hundredpushups.com. This involves doing a fitness test on the number of pressups you can do at point 0 (now), and then suggests a program to build this up to 100 pressups over a number of weeks.

I have recently been using the gym and running a lot, as preparation for my next half marathon in Bristol.

My question is - for anyone out there with half a clue about these things, how should I combine these things? Currently I alternate running, and gym work daily. Should I try doing these pressups on a running day, or on a gym work day?

Running another half

Well, my last blog post back in May was about my first half marathon, so it seems appropriate that this blog post is about my second!

In 3 months I will be taking part in the Bristol Half Marathon. This time I am not entering the run for charity - it is a purely for me. I'm aiming to set a time close to 1 hour and 50 minutes, taking 15 minutes off of my previous time. I need to start training for this again this week - so plan on blogging my progress as time goes on!

Running Progress

Well, I'm proud to say (a little bit late I'm afraid) that I completed my first ever half marathon in the time of 2 hours 10 minutes and

It was an amazing experience - and thanks to all who sponsored me.

I've entered two more runs the Bristol Half and the Great South Run which are in September and October this year. I have also entered the London Marathon ballot for 2009!

Given how unfit and overweight I was a couple of years ago I'm pretty amazed that I'm even considering doing these things...

Running in progress

Last comment I made on here about my Half Marathon preparation was that I'd managed to get acute tendonitis (apparently) through over exertion (and not warming up properly when the ground was still frosty - stupid).

After my early set back in early January and being unable to do much training, the last few weeks have been good. I've been getting in plenty of 3-4 mile training runs to build up my stamina, as well as cycling up widcombe, and swimming.

First mile stone today was a long(ish) run at near to my race pace - 5.5 miles in 45 minutes. If I can sustain that for the whole race then I'll come in under my 2 hours target!

Transformers

Saw this last night - thanks to Amazon DVD rental.

I really enjoyed this film, I thought it was great - if slightly too long for my liking. I think they could've taken about half an hour of action out of it and it would've been the better for it!

Effects were great, it was pretty well acted, good bits of humour, even if Bumblebee did make me think 'Herbie' initially - all this despite some continuity issues.

Anyone know if they're doing a sequel?

Injured?

Went for a run this morning as part of my training to run the Bath Half marathon.

Unfortunately about 3.5 miles in, I appear to have done something to my lower calf/achilles tendon area. It's quite painful, though not when I'm not using it (which I guess must be a good thing). Hopefully it won't take too long to heal as I can't really afford to get too much more behind training.