Gym and Athletic Support - 07/04/2010

Stepson and bike in perfect harmony - get that seat up, lad!

Went to the gym with James last night again.

Laddo is coming on well and ran for ten minutes at 13kph. I don't think I'm going to persuade him to come out on a hill though... but I'll keep trying.

I rowed 2,400m in 10 minutes on moderate resistance as a warm up, then did some work on the upper body to try to build core strength and endurance - three sets of 12-20 reps on upper back, ab crunch, chest and shoulder presses, arm curls and arm extension. I'm trying to do each rep at a steady pace rather than explosively to maximise the benefit - it's surprising how quickly you reach overload that way...

I then did 10 minutes of hill specific work on the stepper at high resistance (1.5km), and cooled down on the recumbent bike for 10 minutes - why does the seat alway wobble about so much on the recumbents? It's annoying.

Re: athletic support. It's not what you think - I'm not posting about underwear. More like financial support.

Hopefully easier to get money out of the Mr Osbourne

I'm putting a grant application together for our fledgling development programme at Mercia. Why does it have to be so difficult? I've spent hours and hours tweaking project plans, copying building society pass books, ringing people etc... It's the classic clash between the simple fellrunning ethos (ably demonstrated by one of our members on Tuesday - jump out of your car, run up a hill) and the unbelievable bureaucracy involved when any kind of quango or governmental body get involved. If this country was run like our races, we'd have colonised other planets by now.

Rant over.

Over and out.

UPDATE: nearly four hours later I have pretty much finished off the application form. Jeez!