Action Heroes
Mood:  cool
Now Playing: Shawn Colvin
Dave and I just took the Action Hero Quiz.

Turns out he is Batman and I am James Bond.

Coooool!

Doggie adventures
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Mansun - Attack of the grey lantern
Had a lovely Friday yesterday. Took the afternoon off, cycled into town and bought some martial arts shoes for TKD. Dave invested in a pair too, which I'm taking as a hopeful sign that he will be coming back with me again this week - yay!

Afterwards we took the boys to Paddles doggies swimming pool. Vic who owns it lets you go in with your doggies if you want, which we don't usually indulge in, but it was such a hot day we took the plunge and it was lovely. The pool is colder than most human pools and has salt in instead of chlorine. Eddie and Neo thoroughly enjoyed themselves as did I. Quite good exercise too - I was trying to race them up and down the pool and considering they're only doing doggie paddle they were pretty damn quick!

Here's a piccie of them enjoying the water:

More doggie fun this morning on our walk: we met a greyhound cross who appeared to be lost. He followed us round for a while until we realised there was no owner in sight and he didn't have a collar on. Neo started getting a bit sniffy with him - he doesn't really like other dogs being around us for any length of time - so we had to put him and Eddie on leads and wander round the common looking for the owner. Eventually after about half an hour we came across him looking for his dog. Turned out the dog was called Jake, is 16, and is starting to go a bit senile - hence the running off. Poor Jake. Just as well we found the owner as we were starting to think we would have to bring him home with us. And that would have ended in tears and dog fights :-)

Anyway with all the excitement we didn't get back till gone 10, so no time for weights today before combat. Probably just as well, as I was feeling kind of wiped. Still dragged myself to combat though - new routine this week, I'm not too convinced by it to be honest, have to see what I think next week.

Rant of the day: Saw this article in the Independent today. The guards at Buckingham Palace, you know the ones who wear those stupid black furry hats, have abandoned their trial of synthetic fur. Apparently it got too waterlogged on rainy days, and lacked "bounce". So they're going to carry on buying Canadian black bear pelts. Well, never mind about the senseless killing of bears then, just as long as we have sufficient bounce in our hats for our archaic and completely pointless ceremony. Gosh, it just makes me proud to be British. Grrrrr.

Punches, Pianos and Poltergeists
Mood:  lyrical
Now Playing: Nickleback
Excellent TKD class tonight. The sore foot held up ok, I took it a bit easy in the warm up and did less mad jumping around than usual. We did some nice punching/kicking combos today. Spinning back fists are cool!! Mags (my usual partner) reckons I'm getting stronger and my kicks and punches are much harder than they used to be. That's what I like to hear :-))

Played the piano today for the first time in months. Had so much fun I ended up playing for about an hour instead of going to the gym to do my weights before TKD. Ah well, my fingers got a good workout :-) I worked out the chords to a couple of Lily Allen songs and sang along at a shocking volume. Just as well our next door neighbour is in his ninety's and nearly deaf :-)

In other news, one of my friends has a poltergeist. Now I don't believe in any of this stuff, but she's someone I consider a really good friend, and she is neither mad nor prone to making stuff up. Things in her house have disappeared from their usual places and then reappeared weeks later. Plus she hears noises like people moving furniture around. She seemed remarkably calm about the whole thing....if I was living in a house with just me and a ghost, I think I would be a tad more freaked. Anyway, this happened before and she had a priest come round and do his exorcism or whatever and the poltergeist went away. Apparently it has now come back though. Maybe the holy water passed its expiry date or something.

No mates
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: KT Tunstall
Gaaaaaaaaah....the whole perfect nutrition day didn't really work out. There's a shock hey :-) I did fine until about 5 pm when I got the munchies and ate...ahem...a mars bar. Followed by ditching the planned dinner of fish cakes and salad in favour of curry :-)))

Oh well. At least I'm doing loads of exercise. I'm not going to beat myself up over it...just try and gradually improve my food choices. That's the plan anyway.

Managed to hurt my foot at the gym yesterday. Dave & I had done our workouts (upper body weights for me) and went into the studio on our way out to mess about with the punch bag. I managed to throw a back kick at it and catch it all wrong, hurting the top of my foot. D'oh!! It hurt for a while, then felt ok, then woke me up at 3 am hurting like a bastard. Lovely Dave got me ibuprofen and ice spray which calmed it down. Then this morning it felt ok again. Very odd. Anyway, thought I had better rest it today and get back to the gym tomorrow.

I tried going for the double cardio madness again tomorrow but left it too late - Combat was fully booked! D'oh again. Not too bright this week am I. So I think I will have another weights session tomorrow, before TKD. Gotta do something to combat the mars-bar-curry-fest.

Dave has had loads of "friend" requests on his MySpace site. I haven't had any. Sob! Nobody loves me :-( So I tried clicking on some of my interests to see who else shared them. I came to the conclusion that people are weird. I'm just gobsmacked by their tastes. I mean, how is it possible to list Michael Moore films as one of your favourites and then put Ronald Reagan in your heroes section? And who the hell likes Green Day, AND Michael Jackson??

Still, after browsing through some odd people, I happened upon a cool looking Taoism group which I signed up for. Nice to see some UK people on that one, all the other Taoist sites I've found are US-based.

Bad Blood
Mood:  energetic
Grrrrrr! Went to give blood this morning and was turned away because I had acupuncture. Grrrrrr! Wasted an hour of my morning going down there. I can go back next month cos it's 6 months after the acupuncture.

On the plus side this means I can now go to the gym today - was planning a day off but will now go and do my upper body weights and some running.

My running is getting slightly better, but I still find it sooooo hard!! Yesterday I had a whole plan going - I was going to try and do a full 5k on the treadmill. Now at my snail-like pace that would be taking me around 40 minutes so I timed my visit to coincide with Countdown :-) I figured I could run all through that which would keep me entertained for half an hour, then I wouldn't have much more to do at the end. But disaster struck!! The gym changed the channel and we had bloody Miss Marple instead. Far too boring to run to. Especially as I already knew whodunnit. So I abandoned my run after 20 mins and went and did my lower body weights workout.

I'm trying to work on getting my food right this week. I'm doing pretty well on the exercise front - but have ZERO willpower with my food. Yesterday I did OK calorie wise, but not enough protein and too much fat. Today I've planned all my meals out and they give me 50% carbs, 25% protein, 25% fat and 1300 cals. Spot on. I'll let you know tomorrow if I stick to it!

Dog walks are really nice at the moment. Having to take them early to avoid the heat means the common is much quieter and we see more of the regular dog walkers. Everyone we meet has a name according to their dogs. We see Poodle-Lady, Jack-Russel-Guy and Grumpy-Lead-Throwing-Man (we once saw him throw his extending lead handle at his dog in a fit of anger. Nice.) Dave once met one of the regulars in the gym and totally didn't recognise him without his dog :-)

It's also still duckling season. Here are some dead cute ones we saw:

Kickin'
Mood:  spacey
Now Playing: Beatles White Album
Dave came to TKD with me today! I've been trying to get him to give it a go for ever but he always said he didn't fancy it. I think he quite enjoyed himself, despite falling on his arse in mid kick :-) Everyone does that at least once ....

We had a fun class today. Poor old insane Glen volunteered to put on a padded body armour type thing and let us all kick him for about half an hour. He looked a bit battered at the end :-) It was really great though. Good practice for getting power and accuracy into your kicks. When we started doing side kicks I was barely touching him and by the end my kicks were actually making him stagger back a bit. How cool!

Walked the dogs early again today. We have to at the moment or the poor little guys would just melt in the sun. Even early-ish it was still hot so they got a shower under the garden hose when we got back. Here's a picture of my babies in the garden:

That's Neo on the left and Eddie on the right.

Yawn
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Lily Allen
Sleeeeeeeeepy tonight. It's too hot to do anything.

Went to the gym this morning. People keep saying "how can you go to the gym in this heat" - they don't get it - it's the best place to be, lovely and cold and air conditioned! Did 45 mins upper body weights, then Combat. Dave ran 9k on the treadmill!! I'm well impressed. He is so much better at running than me. I can do an hour of Combat or TKD happily, but put me on a treadmill for 20 minutes at a snails pace and I turn purple and lose the ability to breathe. It's very odd.

Today is a year's anniversary since my granny died :-( She was great and I miss her. Marked the occasion by buying a frame for a really nice photo of her and christening our new bookcase with it.

Eng-er-land started off their World Cup campaign with a pretty unconvincing win. Thank god I'm Welsh, Dave is Scottish and we don't really care!

Lazy day
Mood:  cheeky
Now Playing: Bon Jovi, annoyingly
Well I survived the double whammy cardio workout. Actually I was pleasantly surprised. Since they cancelled my Monday morning combat class I have only been doing it on a Saturday morning, straight after body pump. Doing it "fresh" I really didn't find it that hard. Which goes to show how much my fitness has improved, as I used to find Combat class a killer. Going on to TKD it was hard to get going again, but once I was in the swing of it I really enjoyed it, as I always do. So I may attempt to repeat the insanity next week. We shall see :-)

Tonight Bon Jovi are playing at St Marys Stadium. It's like 4 miles away from us and you can totally hear it from our house. Must be bursting some eardrums for the people there. It's just at that annoying level where you can hear it enough to notice but can't make out what song they're actually playing.

Had a nice lazy Friday today. A meeting and then lunch with my favorite client. We went to a lovely country pub and had lunch sitting in the garden by the river, surrounded by ducks begging for scraps. It's a hard life being self employed :-) Honestly, I don't think I could handle going back to working for someone else now. I've got used to being able to take 4 hour lunches when I feel like it.

No exercise today, after last night's madness. Tomorrow morning it's off to the gym for upper body weights then Combat. I've decided to give pump a miss for a while and stick to the gym weights instead. Then its home for a leisurely lunch with the papers and settling down to watch the England match after. Mmmmmmm I love Saturdays.

Insanity
Mood:  energetic
It's just too hot at the moment to do any work. I've done sod all all week and today I decided enough was enough. Managed to get my head down and get some sets of accounts finished off, but it was a real struggle.

The dogs are bonkers. Especially Eddie. He sits in the sun until you could fry an egg on his head and he is panting like mad. It never seems to occur to him to move into the shade. We keep pointing out to them that sitting in the sun in thick black furry coats is not wise, but they ain't listening to us.

In a moment of madness I decided today I would do a Body Combat class before TKD. I dunno what I was thinking. BC on its own exhausts me. TKD on its own nearly kills me. What made me think it was sensible to put them together? Anyway if this blog never gets updated again, you'll know I collapsed in a small heap and didn't make it back.

Goals
Mood:  lazy
So, I've decided this is mainly going to be a fitness blog. I think it will help motivate me if I put stuff down on here and can go back and see how I've progressed.

In which case I'd better start off with where I am now:

Weight 10 st 1 (height 5'4")
Pretty fit
Yellow belt Tae Kwon Do (and seriously addicted to it)
Been weight training seriously for about 5 weeks and I'm starting to see ARM DENTS!! I'm very excited about them :-)

Here are my aims for the next 6 weeks:

Lose 6 lbs
Weight train 3 times per week
Serious cardio 3 times per week, plus other lighter cardio.
Learn the patterns for green tag TKD.
Develop my upper body strength. Hopefully this combined with some loss of body fat will lead to even better arm dents!

Here's my training schedule:

Monday - 40 mins upper body weights, 20 mins interval run.
Tuesday - 40 mins lower body weights, OR longer slower run.
Wednesday - 40 mins upper body weights, plus either lower body or run depending on what I did yesterday.
Thursday - 90 mins Tae Kwon Do training - high intensity, lots of punching and kicking pads.
Friday - rest.
Saturday - 50 mins Body Pump, 45 mins Body Combat
Sunday - 90 mins Tae Kwon Do training - more technical and less knackering than Thursday.

I've been sticking to that more or less for the last couple of weeks, so want to carry on with that and up the intensity and weights a bit.

Today I did a full upper and lower body weight workout. It's a new workout my trainer set for me yesterday. Previously I'd been doing BFL style weights - 12 reps at one weight, up the weight for 10 reps, up again for 8. He told me to make a change from this and swap it round. So now I have to start off on my highest weight for 12 reps, drop it for a second set, and drop again. It was nice to have a change but just about every muscle in my body HURTS!!!