I Don't Wanna Clean the Bathroom

I am an evil genius.  I've tricked myself into starting a blog post by turning it from "something I should be doing" to harmless procrastination.  I'm sitting on an unmade bed, awash in a sea of clothes that need to be hung up and a bunch of forms that I really should fill in to renew my passport.  Am so smart!

I can already hear my mum telling me that this isn't something I should be celebrating.  Good job she doesn't know that I've not cleaned the bathroom properly for a fortnight either.

Oops.

Now I'm here, I don't have a clue what I'm going to talk about, so I think I'll just waffle at you about stuff I've done until I figure out what sort of life admin I can ignore next that'll make cleaning the house seem like a fun distraction. In the meantime, if you have any bright ideas, please feel free to throw them my way. 'Kay? 'Kay.

The Rowathon

I can't believe this was a full week ago.  Still getting a major hit of the warm fuzzies whenever I think about it.  Last week, an incredible lady at my gym, together the the coaches that run the place organised a 24 hour event where 12 rowing machines were to be more or less constantly on the go.  She wanted to raise money (and still does - I'll pop the link below) for two other incredible ladies in her life who both have families and are both working to kick the shit out of cancer for the second time in their lives:

 

Link for more info & to donate - Please, please donate! 

Some brave souls (translate: fucking nutters) did the thing for 12 hours, or even the whole 24, only occasionally hopping (and later flopping) off the rowers for a quick bite of cake and a banana.  I appeared for 7 hours in total in 3 shifts over the course of the event to have a crack and LOVED it.  Even at 4am, Outcast Strength & Fitness was heaving with rowers.  Music was blaring long after all the local nightclubs kicked out their last punters.  A couple of the gym's members even turned up in their glad rags with cans of Carling after a party and did the best "ha ha fuck it!" style of rowing I've ever seen.  The atmosphere was incredible.  Dozens of people all through the course of the days and night coming in to do this crazy thing.  Just..ugh.  Feelings.

 The face of a person who obviously doesn't fully comprehend what a ridiculous thing this is to be doing at 3am.

Zombies! Run! Spring virtual race

Gah, I love this game!! Got to a point where a run doesn't feel like a run if I don't sort of feel like I might have have my brains eaten at any given moment.  The app that I'm nothing short of obsessed with released its second ever virtual race this month, where you follow a story on your phone and compete with people all over the globe to get a decent place on an online leader board.  Pushed myself to the point of "ooh, might do a little sick!" and machete'd (this is a zombie apocalypse after all) 4 whole minutes off my personal best.  Holy balls!  Didn't even do the little sick I'd fully expect to do.  Also got a very cool t shirt (will show you when I'm feeling less lazy) and medal for my efforts.  Winner.

And I've seen that Wil Wheaton is also into Zombies! Run! and that he also has the virtual race medal and t-shirt, and he's been on the Big Bang Theory, so my compulsion to play it must be cool, yes?  

Shut up, the answer is yes...Double winner.

I've run out of "stuff what happened that I can report" now.  Unless you want to hear about the cool £2 coin I found the other day, or when my dog patted me on the head earlier until I patted him back (ow, my cold, dead heart!), then that's about it!

Got a 10k (yet another 2016 event where I have done little to no race specific training in the run up.  Huzzah! Also heh, "run up"...the irony) race to get did tomorrow at the National Botanical Gardens in Carmarthenshire.  Expecting lots of hills, funky plants and some sort of cake in the cafe at the end.  All in all a good day for the taking. Cake is an excellent full stop on any kind of thing. Or question mark.  Or explanation point, depending on how the thing goes.

I'm off to find the next thing that I can wedge in between me and adult responsibilities now. Did you get any suggestions together like I asked?  Come on, come on!

Zombies, Run!

I love a bank holiday! This is my first year in a few where I've not attended Reading Festival, so I've been busily distracting myself to avoid coming down with a case of the sads.  

Le sigh.

Oh, well.  Busy month ahead of me!  Foo Fighters and Royal Blood in Milton Keynes next week (uh huh, much smug), Wheatus towards the end of the month (much love) and a 22 mile walking marathon mid September along the Gower Coast with Outcast Swansea (much...snacks? It's for Macmillan, so if you'd be so awesome as to sponsor us...?).  This weekend's come with plenty of ups and downs to keep me distracted while I've not been paying a billion pounds a pint and getting sufficiently mucky in my welly boots.  

It wouldn't be a British bank holiday without an ill advised night on the tiles.  Saturday night/the wee hours of Sunday morning were spent at Swansea Beer and Cider Festival and in my favourite sticky local Irish bar, Jack Murphy's.  All the best bars have sticky floors.  The more time I invest in my trainers, the lower my tolerance for booze plummets, so let's just say that just being within sniffing range of locally brewed (strong!) cider ensured that I ended the night as cock eyed as I began it. Believe it or not, this is the "before" shot:

 Much classy. So lady.

Sunday was meant to follow on in pretty much the same fashion at a friend's wedding do, but a stomach tantrum (seem to be getting a lot of these of late, but so far am choosing to ignore them as I suspect they stem from something delicious like cheese or bread.  No one's ever intolerant to muesli or liver are they?) meant that I had to miss out.  Plus side - no hang over today... Which meeeeans....running!

During a nine miler I attempted earlier on in the week, I decided that I hate running.  Hate. It.  It's uncomfortable.  I'm slow.  I'm bored and my butt hurts!  Whine whine blah blah.  I spent more time sulking and walking than actually running. After all the mileage I put in to get round Liverpool without my legs falling off, I've fallen fully head over heels back in love with CrossFit's short, sharp and shitty (in the best possible way!) approach, meaning that my brain's ability to endure runs upwards of an hour is now pants, and I have the Cardiff Half Marathon to get around in October.  Bollocks.

I know I'm fit enough to do half the distance I did back in June, so the problem was/is clearly all in my fragile little mind.  I needed to remind myself that I run for the enjoyment of it, not as a form of torture or simply a method of burning off some of the cake I eat.  So, I decided to turn it into a game.  Not like in Saw.  The sort of game where you still have limbs at the end.

I remembered an app that I tried on my phone when I first got it into my head that I wanted to learn how to run more than two miles in one go.  It was called Zombies, Run! and it cost me about £6 in the Apple Store (also available in Google Play). It plays out a story in which you're immersed in a post apocalyptic, zombie infested world and your job as Runner 5 is...pretty self explanatory.  You run around, automatically collecting things for your camp as you go and if you have them enabled, you occasionally enter into a zombie chase, where you have to put on a burst of speed lest you become a human jerky.  Actually, you just drop a few items and don't actually get eaten because it's  all pretend, but it bloody well got me going!  You hear the moans of the undead in your earphones, making it sound like they're close enough to give you a shoulder massage.  I don't think they want to give you a shoulder massage.

The reason I've waited so long to pick it up again is that the first time I tried it, I didn't bother to look up the instructions (which are pretty idiot proof, really).  I got so immersed in freaking myself out that I blindly ran out into traffic, terrified I that was about to be eaten.  Turns out I didn't even have chase mode enabled, so I would have succeeded my "mission" alive, even if I'd been lying down on the floor the entire time, face down in a bowl of Doritos.

I'm only a few episodes into the game, and I'm quite enjoying being the mysterious Runner 5, who has just appeared in the township and whose purpose is so mysterious that even I don't know what my own deal is yet.  I've had a crack at an interval run (one of the few different modes available outside of the story), which is made up of shorter bursts of speed, jogging and walking, and I've been using the items I've picked up on my travels to help build my little vitural town in the app when I'm not actually running.  My town has two playgrounds so far, because that's how I roll.  Now that I've figured out that you can choose roughly how often the zombies chase you (I've set it at about 5 times an hour) and how fast or slow you want the story to progress, I feel much less like I'm going to soil my pants and more like I'm actually having fun because I'm in control of the game.

...Though I still get nervous when I'm approaching an incline.  Hills may slow me down, but they apparently have no effect on the imaginary zombies' athletic ability.  Jammy buggers.

I ran seven miles today without the urge to walk.  Not even once.  It may be that I'm rediscovering the joys of running for fun thanks to this genius game.  It may be that I'm less concerned with my overall speed because I don't want to have a cardiac arrest when the next zombie chase could happen at any moment. I think I'm going to use that in future, actually.  I'm not slow.  I'm saving my energy so I can get away from the zombies when I need to.  

Happy weekend, and if you choose to have a bash at being a zombie evading badass like me, please read and listen to the instructions and stay the hell away from cars!

 

Warm Bodies: A Film Review....?

Funnier, drier and quicker on the jokes than I expected. I fully believed that movie land were going to murder the book dead. It's going into the "collection" of the select few DVDS I have to routinely watch over and over and over in a totally-not-obsessive-compulsive way at all (current ones on my forever-rewatch list - Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, 500 Days of Summer...the best films ever made. I will not listen to any opinion that states otherwise *fingers in ears* lalalalala...oh, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

I won't go into any more detail, because I'm not a film critic and I just don't wanna, okay?!

Bottom line is, go see it! Twilight it ain't. This is a good thing.

....Also the weird kid from About A Boy got hot. This knowledge does strange and confusing things to my innards.