If You Work It, It Works….

Thursday was a rock n’roll adventure day….   I cycled 30k, did an hour lifting weights in the gym, and finished off with a couple of hours on the river, playing water polo in a kayak!

I feel a bit tired just reading that myself, but it wasn’t planned, it all sort of ‘happened’.  I hadn’t been on the bike since the Triathlon on Saturday, for all sorts of reasons – most of them connected with laziness, but then I saw on the weather forecast that Thursday was going to be a good day in Dublin, so I decided to roll out the wheels and start cycling into work again.  I’m not saying I’m fast  (I’m not) but I really felt the benefits of the ‘work cycle’ when I did the 18k in Kilkenny; and cycling into work means I HAVE to time myself and cycle to time.   As it happens,  I do seem to have knocked a few minutes off – I left the house at 620am and found myself on Pearse Street at 7 – with time for a quick cup of coffee, sitting in the sun, beside the bike, beside the canal… before I went into the office.  What a lovely way to start the day.

After work I cycled back home – via the gym.  I wasn’t looking forward to that.  It’s a time-trial too, because I’m reading the news at 3pm, and have to make the gym by 4pm, which is a bit tight.  Whenever I’m late, Dave my trainer, makes me suffer by stepping up the intensity of the session, to make up for the minutes I lost.  This time I was on time, but he still creamed me!  We did kettleweights and quite a lot of squat-lifts with fairly decent weights.  My shoulders feel a bit sore after that today.

By the time I’d finished the gym, there was just enough time left to grill some chicken, dress some salad – wolf it down, and throw on a swim cossie and wetsuit, before belting out the door for the river.   I really didn’t feel like kayaking – I had 6 training weeks of being forced to capsize for hours on end, and I just wanted to sit in the boat and be dry for once.  It was unlikely to be tonight – I was having my first go at water polo and the boats are a lot more unstable than the learner kayaks I’d been using up to now.   They’re tiny and light and overbalance in a heartbeat.  Well to my suprise and my club-mates’ amusement – I left the river with dry hair.  I was so damned determined not to fall out, that I remembered every trick in the book that they’d taught me the last few weeks.  Blocks and brace turns, and balance and leaning forward.  The works – there was NO WAY that I was getting wet this time, and I walked away a dry kayaker.   lol…

PS. Loved the water polo.

PSS.  You know, I started off dreading everything this Thursday and ended up enjoying the lot.  Says something, doesn’t it…..?

😉