April 21-27

Well, I'm going to start off by echoing the idea behind this track.

I shake my head at what I'm walking through at the moment.

At least my fitness is getting done.

I took one day off this week, took a look at another gym and have set myself up for success this season. I still see the benefits of the line "Habits eat everything."

I'm walking through a tough time. I'm glad of friends and family support, but I'm looking at the future with a different vision. I will seek solitude in my retirement. Glad, gentle and quiet solitude. But until then, I have some rage screaming to do inside a very large crowd.

Fitness this week looked was a fair amount of cardio, some lifting and rugby on Tuesday.

Man, I need rugby, but I also need to get going on my second career. I'm taking the ASL course in Mississauga; it is this that will help me move forward in my later career.

April 16 to 20

For those of you who are thinking I'm doing some sort of post to celebrate the day, I'm not. I hate the idea of this day and I'm glad it's raining like a son of a gun outside to keep protesters in and down.

I've been keeping to myself these days. My current mantra is "The gifts of exile are many." I'm not sure of the source of such a quote, but it might be me, I don't know. It does seem to fit rather nicely, though.

Evernote has made a comeback into my life. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to pay for this, but I'm trying to work with the unpaid version, just to see if it is workable. I'm trying to lighten my load on my back, get rid of some paper and make sure I can move forward as a paperless person.

I've managed to up my running game - this week I returned to running for 30 minutes on a treadmill. I haven't been able to do that for some time and I'm happy that I made that happen. It was kind of boring but at least I have that monkey off of my back.

The ASL experience/classes have continued. I've managed to work a class into my stupidly busy schedule and I'm taking the class on Thursday nights for the next ten weeks. I know it'll interfere with my playing rugby, but I also know it will help my retirement plans. Now I just need to get the people at work to get their stuff together and answer emails. It may happen, it may not.

So to summarize this week's training, it was lots of elliptical and treadmill work with one or two HIIT sessions. I've already put my current HIIT session here, so I'm not going to retype it now. I'm on the machines before 6:45 though. I'm with a coffee at work early these days. I can't say that my family is enjoying this, but at least I am finding making lemonade fairly easy with all the training I'm doing. These have been some two-a-days, but not many. But at least that possibility exists for me at this time.

Did I mention that the gifts of exile are many?

March 30 to April 15

Well, I've gotten to the hundreth meridian.

And as Gordon Downie mentioned, there's nothing to do but step right on over it. Yup, I've stepped onto the other side of an imaginary line and I'm not sure what to expect.

I'm still getting the training done. A lot of the workouts have been me getting my butt on to an ellitiptical trainer and getting 25 minutes done. I'm measuring all of them, and it's good.

I'm also doing the HIIT training, too. I've gotten up to a 47.5 lb dumb bell in those workouts. I do this for four or five rounds:

2 minutes elliptical - moderate pace and resistence
2 minutes DB snatches, presses and standing overhead tricep extensions.

after about 25 minutes of this, I do this:

farmers carries, inclined bench flies and single arm rows for three rounds.

These work outs usually last about 45 minutes and I'm pretty beat up by the end.