Category: Janathon

Janathon Day 12 – it’s all going well

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I’ve always been a fair weather cyclist, only venturing out for a leisurely ride on hot days, usually poncing about the countryside on my pink Pashley Poppy.

pashley_poppy

Since getting my Boardman though

boardman

and feeling guilty with it spending most of its time in the garage (although not as much time as my little Raleigh Shopper which I haven’t been on for years),

raleigh-shopper

as my £30-from-gumtree mountain bike

mountain-bike

is the one that gets the most use, getting me to the station and back or taking me into town, I’ve taken the opportunity when it’s arisen to get out for a longer ride on the Boardman.

Over the last few weeks, these rides have been a trip to Wye and back (around 20 miles), 28 miles last Sunday and then a record ride for me – 40 miles yesterday.

I was feeling mega-super-hardcore about my 40 miles, until I remembered @naominf RAN 45 miles the day before. Mega-mega-super-super-hardcore.

Although my Janathon exercise effort was to be applauded,

cycling

my diet certainly wasn’t. My food intake for the day was:

Breakfast: satsuma, nectarine, plum

Lunch: Creamy hot chocolate and a toasted teacake

Post-bike ride: 2 x hot chocolate (I was freezing) and 3 biscuits

Pre-dinner snack: 2 x Ferrero Rocher

Dinner: pizza and garlic bread

Post-dinner: 1 piece of peanut butter fudge, 3 squares salted chocolate, Tesco mint thin

Think I need to go and make some granola bars so I have something a bit healthier I can munch on instead of Christmas leftovers.

I also need some cold-weather cycling kit as the three-quarter length cycling tights I bought in the summer weren’t quite up to the job of keeping me warm. Any suggestions?

Janathon Day 11 – up before 7

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Despite deciding when I went to bed last night I wasn’t going to set my alarm and go to parkrun this morning as I had been up late writing and submitting an assignment, my brain had other ideas and woke me up early with the beginning of my dissertation proposal so I thought I’d better get up and write it down before I forgot it. Which meant I was up with plenty of time to get to parkrun.

If you were on Twitter a week ago, you might have seen a conversation between me and @TrevB1 where he said if he got a London Marathon place through his work, he’d do a long run in his tiger onesie and asked if I wanted to join him for a run in my penguin onesie. He suggested Guildford and so I thought, aha! I can’t get to Guildford, I can get out of running in a penguin onesie, so I said ‘sorry, can’t get to Guildford, can you get to Ashford?’ hoping he couldn’t get to Ashford but, alas, he said if he got a place, he’d come to Ashford. Bugger.

Unfortunately for @TrevB1 but fortunately for me, he didn’t get a London Marathon place, so if you came on here looking for pics of us running in our onesies, um, sorry about that.

What I did turn up to parkrun in this morning though was my Janathon t-shirt.

janathon-t-shirt

It didn’t get me a parkrun PB, but it did get some admiring looks (or I might have imagined that).

If you want to get a Janathon t-shirt or mug or something, there are some massive discounts at the Janathon Cafe Press shop at the mo, plus a further 15% off until midnight. I might buy some pyjamas; if they get here in time, I can do another Janathon pyjama plank.

Janathon Day 10 – I remember when…

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…I didn’t leave assignments until the last minute. Oh, hang on, no – that must be someone else I’m thinking of. I’ve got an assignment due at midnight and at the moment I’ve only written down a few notes and made a couple of sketches (I’m designing two adverts – one for readers of The Telegraph and one for readers of The Sun, then talking about why I’ve used certain words and images in them), so if anyone sees me on Facebook or Twitter between now and then, unless I’ve said ASSIGNMENT SUBMITTED, YAY, please send Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey a message telling them to disconnect me from their social networks.

Ta.

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve done for Janathon so far today.

body-pump

This weekend’s activities will hopefully be a parkrun tomorrow and a 38 mile bike ride on Sunday. Although, this depends on a) whether I get up on time; and b) how far I get with my dissertation proposal that’s due in by midnight on Monday.

Janathon Day 9 – silver tights are mine

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Not quite up at 5:30am as planned. Not even up at 6:30. Just about made it up by 7, although it was dark and I was warm but unless I slept through January, it was still Janathon and I wanted to go for a run before going to university, so that meant getting out of bed. Hang on, did I say ‘wanted to go for a run’? Blimey, Janathon is doing strange things to me, that’s three runs this week; I’m not sure I’ve run three times in the last three months.

Because I went out bang on school run mum time (despite it mostly being school run dads from what I could see this morning), my run was a bit stop/start for the first half a mile on the road where the primary school is, then it was stop/start for the next half a mile because of all the mud and puddles, then it was stop/start again as I collided with another school run going to another school. Still, three miles was done, just mostly at a walk.

Then, because the lifts at the station are being renovated, I had to carry my heavy mountain bike up the stairs and when I got to university, I ended up walking up and down three flights of stairs three times, then two flights of stairs twice and if I’d known that was going to happen, I’d have counted that for today’s Janathon exercise, especially as I asked on the Janathon Facebook page if I could carry some of it over to tomorrow and was told ‘no’.

Bah.

Still, my run this morning meant I got to wear my new silvery grey running tights.

grey-tights

 

grey-tights-2

I’ve got an assignment due tomorrow, can I count writing as exercise?

Janathon Day 8 – body pump is great

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Just a quick blog today, as I MUST get on with my university assignment that’s due the day after tomorrow, which I haven’t started yet (I must admit I was relieved yesterday when I went in and found out I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t started it yet).

So, today’s Janathon activity was my body pump DVD. I used my Scosche Rhythm armband heart rate monitor again, but this time with the Rhythm app, which tends to be more accurate than the MyTrek app (or maybe it’s the monitor that’s more accurate, not the app, I’m not an expert on these things).

scosche-body-pump

Janathon Day 7 – pink tights heaven

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Yesterday’s Janathon post should have been titled Day 6, not 5, but I’d already done the ‘five rhymes with alive’ thing and posted it on Facebook and Twitter and everything, so I decided to keep it. It was Day 6 though, I didn’t do Day 5 twice and slack off Day 6, honest.

As I mentioned the other day, the postie left a couple of pairs of running tights from Sportsshoes.com for me in the recycling bin (as you do). I said I’d model them for you when I wore them, so here’s the pair I wore for today’s run.

pink-tights

 

legs

Yes, I decided to do the whole pink thing and teamed them with a pink top and socks. (Did I really just type ‘teamed them’? Sorry, meant to say ‘I also bunged on a pink top and socks’.)

So, that’s my Janathon Week 1 done (that’s a normal ‘done’, not a Justin Lee Collins-esque type ‘done’), and here’s a screenshot of my SportTracks calendar to prove it.

sporttracks

Janathon totals so far:

Running: 6.49 miles
Cycling: 38.94 miles
Other (gym/body pump): 2 hours 20 minutes
Calories: 2,650

How’s your Janathon Week 1 gone?

Janathon Day 5 – I’m still alive

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There’s no actual reason to inform you I’m still alive, but it rhymed with five, so it seemed as good a title to give it as any.

I am still alive though, you’ll be pleased to hear, despite having achy legs – whether this was from yesterday’s 28 mile bike ride or the gym session the day before that or the run the day before that or just a Janathon accumulation of aches, I don’t know. But hey, aching muscles means I’ve been doing something, so yay.

It’s possibly not the best idea in the world to do body pump when you’ve got aching muscles but I was up early and didn’t want to wait for the gym to open at 9 before Janathoning as I needed to go to the Post Office and into town to the bank* and get back early enough to still have most of the day to spend doing my marketing assignment that I still haven’t done (tutor emailed me today and said she’d marked the first assignment and it was very impressive – didn’t tell me the flipping mark though, did she? Bah), so needed something I could do indoors (okay, I could have gone for a run but I don’t like to run on aching legs in case I make them worse, especially as I’ve only done one run in about the last two months).

So I did 30 minutes of my body pump DVD (yes, I skipped the floor bits and the stretching bits) and then found out how hard it is to put on mascara after doing body pump for the first time in ages. Oh, my aching biceps! Still, it didn’t look quite this bad (thanks to rundelrun for the pic).

mascara

Then I cycled into town and back and now my Janathon is over for the day. Back to university tomorrow, so this is where I might have to start getting creative with my exercise. Does exercising my brain muscles count?

*The bank has a snazzy new machine where you can deposit cheques and cash without needing to key in your PIN or use an envelope. You put your card in the machine, then the cheques and it scans the cheques and prints off the scans onto your receipt. So cool. Although not as cool as BigZigFitness’s bank – he can scan cheques on his phone into his account!

Janathon Day 5 – strangers, pub, cats and dogs

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I am too knackered to blog properly, so here’s my blog post in a list.

1. Saw tweet a couple of weeks ago about local bike ride, organised by Spokes.

2. Thought, I want to go on the bike ride and favourited the tweet to remind me.

3. Woke up and the weather wasn’t minging, so went off to meet a bunch of strangers.

4. Met the bunch of strangers who turned out to be a very nice bunch of people indeed.

5. Discovered I wasn’t the only one there who should have been at home writing a dissertation proposal instead of gallivanting around the countryside.

6. Cycled for about an hour until reached a pub in Smarden.

7. Spent a long time patting the dogs and stroking the cats in the pub.

8. Ordered cheese omelette and jacket wedges, then moaned my jacket wedges were chips, not wedges, and the chips were raw.

9. One of the group was perturbed her lunch didn’t come with the advertised bread.

10. One of the group said his jacket potato tasted old.

11. When we were asked how our food was, we all said ‘lovely, thanks’ in that good old British way even though we’d all just moaned about it.

12. Cycled for about another hour and went home and had two cups of hot chocolate to try and thaw out.

13. Went on Twitter and accidentally agreed to run Ashford parkrun with @TrevB1 in our onesies if he gets his workplace’s VLM place on Monday.

14. Spent four hours on Facebook trying to muster up the energy to blog. Remained unmustered.

15. Ate pie and mash and cabbage and gravy and wondered if I could be bothered to blog.

16. Realised I couldn’t be bothered to blog so wrote a list instead.

bike-capture

Janathon day 4 – a haiku and humiliation

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Here’s a stationary bike haiku for you:

Bike

Stationary bike
Why are you so crap? Station-
ary bike, you git.

Before I’d got on the stationary bike, I’d been happily cross-training on the cross-trainer when Mr Coach Driver Man decided to park his coach outside the window a foot or so from my face. Nope, 50 people staring through the window at me while I’m on the cross-trainer wasn’t embarrassing at all, oh no.

bus

In case I haven’t humiliated myself enough yet today, here’s a photo of me planking in my PJs to make up for the penguin onesie plank I did wrong.

pj-plank

Model (ahem) wears:

Grey and pink soft brushed cotton pyjamas by DKNY (cheap from TK Maxx)

Slippers by Tesco

Cabinet by Ebay

Vase by Homebase

Floor by don’t know, ask Shaun

Hair by Toni & Guy about 2 years ago and needs a bit of a trim

My deputy HelsBels has lined up a prize for the best plank (hopefully more prizes will be arranged so we can have prizes for different categories), so keep posting them on your blogs, Twitter and on Facebook. We want them all – in your pyjamas, in your onesies, or just blatant exhibitionism, it’s all good.

Janathon Day 3 – you voted, I obeyed

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You were determined to put the ‘jog’ bit back into ‘JogBlog’, weren’t you? Well, you won. The votes came in and the outcome was:

Run: 17

Bike: 4

Body pump: 1

Swim: 1

Gym: 0

So out I went this morning for a run. It was bright and sunny, the first mile was muddy and I saw a girl walking a dog so small, she could have saved herself a trip outside and put it on a hamster wheel instead.

voted-run

One good thing about being FORCED out for a run was I got to wear my new running tights, yay.

tights

Yes, that’s a little black cat curled up on the bed and yes, I know the mirror needs cleaning. Oh, and yes, I did change out of my slippers into something more appropriate in which to run.

Before I left the house, a Tabata DVD came in the post. I have no idea what Tabata is – I think it’s a high intensity interval circuit training type thing? Oh well, I’ll find out soon enough, something new for me to try during Janathon.

I also found out my postie’s New Year’s Resolution seems to be to give up ringing doorbells. Our one, anyway, as he left a parcel for me in the recycling bin. Not the shallow one with nothing in it, but the four foot deep one with a lot of crap in it. Nice. Most people give up drinking or smoking for New Year, giving up ringing a doorbell is a new one on me.

Anyway, in my parcel was a couple of pairs of running tights from Sportsshoes.com, I’ll model them for you when I wear them.

Speaking of sports attire, something slightly less conventional to exercise in is a onesie or pyjamas. Remember HelsBels set a Janathon challenge for everyone to do a plank in their pyjamas or onesies and post photos? Well, I’ve done mine dressed as a penguin. Fairweatherrunner said I had to do it again though and properly this time, on my forearms, not hands, as apparently that’s ‘too easy’. Bah.

penguin-plank

More photos of Janathoners’ PJ planking have popped up on the Janathon Facebook Page and Not Much Of A Runner was brave and posted a photo of his plank in the buff. We want more though, so keep them coming!

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