Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

It’s Sunday night, which is the worst part of the week, as I’m preparing to go away again for the week. It’s a tough thing to do as I hate leaving my daughter as she’s great fun to be around. I had a personal training session at the gym today to work on my olympic lifts before the Northern Masters in 3 weeks, and took the kid down too. We had her working on deadlifts with a 7.5kg technique bar (she weighs 24kg). Then we had her do a quick Crossfit workout of:

3 rounds of:
100m row
10 jumping pull ups
10 box jumps
5 dumbbell push presses with 3kg DBs

She managed this is a respectable 10:10. The dumb bells were bought from Newitts in their new year sale and the kid loves them. I’m going to try to get her doing at least 1 Crossfit style workout per week, if not 2.

This weekend we had 2 new members at the gym, 2 members of the Ugandan Olympic weightlifting team, one of which made it to the Beijing olympics! They were impressive to watch, weighing in at under 60kg, they were both doing easy power cleans, push jerk and clean and jerk complexes up to 100kg. They weren’t so good at the other stuff though. Rowing form and dumb bell push presses for example. It will be interesting to watch them as they progress.

As a slight aside, the wife has taken up spinning. Not as in exercise bikes, but as in sleeping beauty style spinning wool with a spinning wheel. So we went to some farm wool show in the middle of the country, south of Macclesfield. The trip was uneventful, but for one event: when driving down the drive at dusk, we were buzzed by a barn owl! I’ve never seen an owl flying in the wild before, hunting dinner I guess. It was spectacular.

Written by a bloke on his own.  It looks simple, but is very clever, but then isn’t that always the way?

It’s called Crayon Physics Deluxe

Or that’s the claim.  Time magazine (which appears to be right behind Oprah in top most quoted “authoratative” sources) called Dean Karnazes possibly the fitest man on earth.  He’s an ultra distance runner, and has run such things as:

“a 135-mile ultra-marathon across Death Valley in 120-degree temperatures and a marathon to the South Pole in negative 40 degrees. He’s run a 200-mile relay solo, racing alongside teams of 12 and has completed a 350-mile run. In 2006, he ran 50 marathons, in all 50 US states, in 50 consecutive days, finishing with the NYC Marathon, which he completed in three hours flat.”

It would be interesting to see him do for example the Crossfit workout known as Helen, but that’s just me.  Either way, he’s very good a running long distances, better than most.  Apparently he’s even considered one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the World, a nice title to have and no mistake.

What’s the key to his success?  Well according to Barry Sears, he follows the Zone diet:

“Dean Karnazes is a great example of the ability of the Zone Diet to cause adaptations to one’s physiology to give them unique advantages in athletic performance,” Dr. Sears said. “Dean follows the Zone Diet exceptionally faithfully, yet during his ultra-marathon runs, he consistently consumes high-fat junk food. What gives? By following the Zone Diet, he is adapting his body to burn fat preferentially as opposed to carbohydrates to make the chemical energy (ATP) needed for muscle contraction. During an ultra-marathon, by consuming high-fat (i.e. high-octane) junk food, he can produce extraordinary amounts of ATP. His competitors, who are adapted to burning carbohydrates (i.e. low octane fuel), will make far less ATP than will Dean. This means one thing: He will always have far more energy than they will. Fortunately for Dean, it is unlikely they will ever learn this basic fact of metabolism.”

Nice to know.

I’ve had a few weeks off the blog over xmas and the new year. It’s strangely refreshing to take a break from the blog, but now that the new year is here, it’s time to resume with a quick catchup.  In the last 2 weeks I’ve:

• Discovered suggestion that BWLA appear to have upped the qualifying requirements for all Masters weights, which would be very bad for me!
• Been down to Newport and Cardiff, looking for a place to live whilst working for my new client.
• Looking for a gym in Newport or Cardiff that has olympic weightlifting facilities.
• Stayed in the best Bed and Breakfast ever: The Hill House, Howle Hill in Ross-on-Wye.
• Taught my daughter to dive.
• Eaten and drunk far too much.
• Replayed through most of KOTOR2, one of the best PC games ever.

And now I have to pack as I’m off to Newport later today.

I want to go to this place.  Can you say “Wayne’s World”?  😉

Whilst it doesn’t look quite so impressive from the cockpit, checkout how little runway is left by the time they stop!

And given how close you can get to the runway, it was fairly obvious that people would end up standing as close as possible to the back of one taking off:

This was a hard post to do as I’ve actually not got that many photos of me from a few years ago, but here are 2 pairs of before and after photos, I’ll let you work out which is which! 😉

Both the before pictures are from 2006, before I’d heard of Crossfit or the Zone Diet, both the after are from 2008. Click the picture for a bigger version:

It’s rare I do a post like this. I’m not a raving leftie. I’m not an animal rights advocate. Actually, I do believe in animal testing… for serious life saving drugs that is, not for cosmetics. I don’t have a problem with wearing leather or suede, in fact I can even condone that because leather coats mostly come from a cow and suede mostly from a lamb, and as I eat those meats, it makes sense to utilise the whole animal by wearing it’s hide.

However fur is a different matter. Fur coats have never sat well with me. Rearing and slaughtering animals purely for their fur just doesn’t feel right, and quietly I’ve always looked down with disdain at people wearing fur on the street. But to be fair, I don’t really know much about the industry. I don’t really know how animals for fur are kept.

I’ve watched the recent slew of TV cooks educating us about how meat animals are raised and slaughtered in order to educate myself, it seems only right after all to be fully informed and make a conscious decision to eat meat or not, based on an understanding of the whole process. So when I came across a video showing the process of slaughtering and skinning animals for their fur, I felt similarly inclined to educate myself. This is that video (not suitable for young children), it starts harsh but you need to watch to at least half way in my opinion:

Now I wonder if the reason that footage exists on the net, is because it’s an extreme example, or whether that is common place? Judging by all the covered cages at the end, it looks like a permanent installation, which suggests that this video is routine. I for one was pretty shocked by it all. The issue with fur is that it’s so hard to track and trace with illegal imports claiming to be nice European raised fur when in fact they come from China, like the video. I’ve even heard that some real fur is died strange colours (pink and green etc) and sold as fake fur! Which seems barking mad, but if there’s a profit to be made, well that’s what people do huh?

So where does that leave us? Actually not much has changed. I will still look down with disdain on people who wear fur coats or coats with fur accessories, but at the end of the day, it’s a personal choice. I hope in some small way I’ve contributed to the cause by educating viewers of this blog in an issue they may not have known much about, and I’d be interested in your opinions on the subject.

And I promise, next week’s Friday Fun post will be a lot more jolly!

The new year will see another big change for me work wise.

For the past 4 months I’ve been working away from home Monday – Friday in London. Actually this has been 2 engagements, the first was through a small consultancy into British Telecom and the second was for ITV.com . Both were interesting projects, but for different reasons, however Non Disclosure Agreements prevent me from saying much. I can say that ITV.com have some great plans for the future and it could become a great website, with a host of cool features.

Commuting down to London on a Monday morning and coming home on a Friday may seem like a drag, but it’s actually not been that bad. Virgin trains run a twice hourly service, which is about to change to a thrice hourly service, taking less than 2 hours Stockport – Euston. I also got a great flat through MondaytoFriday.com which is walking distance to work and of course have benefited from the world class weight lifting coaching at Bethnal Green.

All this is going to change however, as I’m just about to accept an offer to work on a government project in Newport, Wales. Starting Jan, I’ll be commuting instead to Newport near Cardiff on a Monday to Friday basis and now have the arduous task of once again finding a gym and a flat. I’ve already determined that the #30 bus runs 3 times an hour from Newport to Cardiff, which runs past the new office, so I can get a place anywhere on that route, but I don’t yet know where is good.

Also I’ve currently struggled to find a Crossfit friendly gym in the area. There is allegedly a Crossfit Cardiff, but the website appears down and I didn’t get a reply to my emailed enquiry. There’s also a Crossfit Bristol, which is a bit out of the way, however they don’t appear to have any kit as it appears to be a Krav Maga place that uses Crossfit style fitness. No bad thing as Krav Maga is on my list of stuff to do, but I need to find an Olympic Weightlifting gym if I’m going to have any chances of qualifying in February for the BWLA British championships.

So if anyone knows of a good place to stay (estate or specific house / flat share) and/or a decent gym in Cardiff or Newport, where I can do some oly lifting, do let me know.

Having said I don’t mind the commute, occasionally things don’t quite go according to plan. I had a bit of a ‘mare this morning for example. For reasons that escape me, the train ticket machine asked for the ticket booking confirmation code (it doesn’t normally bother). Fortunately I always write this down on the Outlook appointment I make for the train times. However, for more reasons that escape me, despite plugging my phone in last night the appointment didn’t sync to my phone. So I had to pull the laptop out and look up the code, before I could get the ticket. Just like a watched kettle never seems to boil, nor does a watched laptop boot. Still as I had 15 minutes spare, there was little risk of missing the train, but it was more drama than I need at 6:10 in the morning!

Then I discovered why the train ticket was £50 cheaper than normal: it’s a slow train to London, stopping at 10 stops on the way (instead of the normal 2) and taking 3hr 20mins to get to Euston (instead of the normal 2hr 10mins). Gah. At least it was quiet getting on (there was a faster train 15 minutes before). That didn’t last long however as due to the many stops, many people were using it as a short haul commuter train. Between Birmingham and Birmingham New Street for example, it was standing room only, down the aisles, all down the length of the carriage.

The annoying thing is though, that even knowing that, I’d still probably get the same train and save the £50. An extra hours sleep and less hassle, isn’t worth the money… either that, or I’m just tight. 😉

This is genius, more for the uk audience perhaps (WFS), it’s a bit quiet though: