London Marathon

London Marathon

Today is the London Marathon. It was started by Tim Peake from the ISS (International Space Station). I watched some of the BBC coverage with Gabby Logan and Dennis Lewis and Colin Jackson presenting the show.

There were many amazing marathon stories, with many of the public runners, running to raise money for charity.
Ben Smith was there, doing 401 consecutive marathons!
Kelly Holmes finished the race in a great time too!

I just want to say well done to everyone running or taking part or just being there. For anyone to run a marathon takes heart and courage. In the East of England, we had the youngest runner, a runner from Manningtree, Essex and the oldest runner an 85 year old (both women!).
There were just so many inspiring stories and mad people running in mad costumes.
You must be mad to run 26 miles dressed as dinosaurs, Bears, Paddington Bear and in canoes etc etc!

 I salute you all! :-)

Cakes are like London buses!

Cakes are like London buses!

How so? Well, you may not get a glimpse of a cake for ages and then suddenly, several appear at once (just like the buses)!

My last blog post mentioned cake and cake eating and when I returned home after work, I found my daughter had made a cake. I had to have a small piece and it was great!

No, I did not have a large piece! I showed great restraint and had a small piece, but it is amazing how cake can disappear as if by magic!

Now on to an x rated selfie! Yesterday as I went to have my shower, I caught a glimpse of myself and stomach in the bathroom mirror and it was an x rated sight! I took a selfie of my fat stomach and post it here, as a spur to me to fix this and get back to my normal non overweight non fat stomach! Look away if you are sensitive...

Shocking isn't it! What is worse, is I know I am fat and overweight but I have become comfortable being this way! I will have to change. It has taken me some guts to post this my fat stomach selfie...LOL! :-)

I remember well nearly 30 years ago my father and mother visited my wife and I in Cyprus, where we were working and we both noticed that my 60 year old father had become fat! Apparently, he had taken to drinking more wine at weekends and that was contributing greatly to his paunch. For those days, it was only a few glasses over the weekend but it had an effect. He recognised it and decided to reduce his alcohol content and the next time we saw him around a year later, he was back to his trim normal weight and had lost his excess fat! Now as I start to near 60 years old myself (in a few years), I feel I need to apply some discipline myself to lose my fat stomach and as soon as possible!

I wonder how long it will take for me to lose the paunch and slim back down? I have done my daily exercise today and my fat stomach did 35 situps. I need to work at this daily!

I only did 60 skips though (I usually aim to do 100) so I will try and add some more later today.
I enjoyed my 10 minute run though. It was a nice spring morning.

 When I briefly paused to take this photo, it seemed to upset my iphone fitbit app as it didn't record the usual route properly, but it did count my steps!

OK...now back to work and I'm looking forward to lunch time..LOL! Have a great day all :-)

Challenges that can make or break (the cake!)

Just doing my daily exercise is a challenge for me at the moment! I used to be a good amateur athlete in my younger days and would play squash up to 6 days a week. Now, I really was never the fittest or quickest athlete around, but I used to do training sprints and squash court exercises to improve my endurance.

That was many years ago now, and after squash, I took up moderately competitive club tennis, but didn't really train for it. However since finishing my competitive squash days, I have tried to maintain a daily fitness routine, but I have not been strict about it at all. Now though, in a strange way, I am enjoying the challenge of trying to restart a daily basic fitness program for myself. While it does seem hard for me at the moment, I am feeling better and stronger, physically and mentally!

So, I feel it worthwhile to stick with trying to do my daily fitness plan and to try to eat and drink as healthily as possible. I do like cake though! However I do not eat much cake at the moment (the last cake was my wife's birthday cake). I have done this image "Make or Break (cake)" to highlight how challenges can test a person physically and mentally.

There are many ways to deal with challenges and I believe any life challenge should be tackled positively. There are various phrases which spring to my mind on this topic (eg "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!" and "Never give up!" and even "Have your cake and eat it!").

However, my final thought on this post is to:

RISE TO THE CHALLENGE

So my final word is goodluck with your daily exercise healthy living plan and try your best to meet your fitness and health challenge goals, in a way that they make you better and stronger and healthier and do not break you!

Also, if you have risen to the challenge, why not treat youreslf with a small piece of cake ;-)

Motiivation and progress

Motivation and progress

Today's post is a very short post, but on a very important topic, motivation.

What is your motivation to change any bad habits and replace them with better habits that lead to better health and fitness?

For me, I am overweight and not as fit as I should be. I know that losing some weight and getting physically and mentally fitter will make me feel better and allow me to work and play better. In general, I know this will give me more energy to improve my life in many aspects! That is quite a big motivational what and why for me!

My motivational what and why need to be big though. Today I did my morning exercises (push ups, sit ups, skips and 10 minute jog) and this felt hard! Some days exercising feels harder than others and I need motivation to push on through. The temptation was to do fewer exercises as it was feeling tough, but I resisted and did one or two more instead! This takes a bit of will power and I know it won't always be possible, but training myself to at least try my best is good!

So now, as a reward for digging in when the exercise felt tough, I can award myself a pat on the back!

Self belief is a very good thing. Whatever stage of life you are at, love yourself and believe in yourself. Remember we are all special!

So, I must keep pushing on with good exercise (physical & mental and by the way, I won a chess game for the chess club last night!), good diet and good rest.

How is your health and fitness progressing? If you have been trying to improve your fitness and health, then give yourself your own pat on the back award. Well done!

Onwards :-)

Cool blue skipping jump rope visits Champneys

Cool blue skipping jump rope at Champneys

I have just had a brief weekend away break at Champneys health resort, Harlow. It was a birthday present to my wife from our children. I took my cool blue skipping jump rope!

We arrived for 2pm and settled in to our room, and took our welcome drink..a shot of some healthy vegetable concoction!

We then had a guided tour of the place and we decided to do a walk of the grounds before our first treatment,which was a massage called "Head in the clouds". The walk was very pleasant and called the snowdrop walk. Of course most of the snowdrops had gone over, but there were plenty of daffodils and primroses.

On our return, we got ready for our treatment and robed up and put on our flip flops! I felt a little out of place, because the treatment area was very busy and 90% of the guests were women! Still, both Hilary & I had our massage and it was great!

Amazingly then, it was time to get changed for dinner. Hilary dressed very casually and I put a tie on.
I think some guests still had their robes on, but I might be wrong? We had a good 3 course meal, with water to drink! We were being healthy drinking water and no alcohol! Amazingly, dessert was sticky toffee pudding. That was very nice and very unexpected in this health conscious place!

Then we retired to our room and studied the timetable for tomorrow! There was no skipping class! LOL! There were plenty of other activities to choose from though, including Hula hooping and Pilates and much more.
Unfortunately, we were so tired, we watched a fascinating TV program about crocodiles in Indonesia and went to bed!

About 7am we were woken by the hotel fire alarm! It only went on for 1-2 minutes and stopped and we both decided it was a false alarm, as there were no sign or sounds of guests evacuating!

We booked breakfast for 0815hrs. Our army marches on it's stomach and my stomach is unfortunately too fat! I had a very healthy breakfast of cereal and fruit and Hilary had toast too.
Hilary booked an "Aqua Mit" session but I wasn't keen on that.

Then we went on to the gym introduction and were shown the proper use of the gym machines and Hilary went off to her aqua mit session and I decided to jog around the walk we had done yesterday. I really enjoyed that as there was noone else out walking and I took my cool blue skipping rope and skipped in a couple of places!

I returned to Champneys and went to the swimming changing rooms and changed into my trunks and met Hilary in the pool. She was tired from her pool "Aqua Mit" session, so I swam alone and did 5-10 lengths of the 25 metre pool. It was lovely! It is ages since I last swam! I got dressed back into my sportswear and went to the gym and did a good power session on the cycle machine! Hilary had just been relaxing at the pool and then changing and we then met up for lunch.

Lunch was really good! We had 3 courses with soup to start and a great selection for main course, and I had almost a little bit of everything (chicken, fish, and pasta!). A light fruit and almost joghurt pudding finished the meal. Hilary was booked for a Zumba class twenty five minutes later and we retired to the conservatory to read the paper meanwhile.

Hilary went to Zumba and I went back to the gym where I tried all the weights machines and the crossfit training and treadmill and rowing machine! I had a great time! I came back to see Hilary finish her Zumba class which she enjoyed, but she was bamboozled by many of the instructors moves as this was her first ever time with Zumba.

Our time was almost over! We had just another hour left, but decided to sign out at reception and drive home a little earlier. I found the drive home quite tiring and yet after a brief rest at home, I felt
good and my FitBit was over 14000! I can wholeheartedly recommend Champneys, but it was a lot sweeter knowing that we had the experience with a very affordable offer price that our children had paid! Thanks Chris & Lizzie.. :-)

Exercise, good diet and rest is a good combination for a healthy mind and body....