Apologies for the hiatus. Life has been.. how shall I put it? somewhat challenging, of late. I had to take stock of what was a priority and what wasn’t. Blogging wasn’t. Training was, but I still didn’t get to it much. To be honest, the challenges haven’t been overcome yet. But I have made a big effort to get my training back on track, and I really wanted to blog about it. So here I am.

The last few weeks I haven’t done much at all, sometimes only one exercise session in the week. The first week of June was ok but after that it went downhill. Week beginning Monday:

7th June: one swim session.
14th June: one 5km run
21st June: swimming stroke correction session, ice skating
28th June: one swim session, one 5km run, one 7km run, one 8km ride (<– this week wasn’t too shabby)
5th July: one 4.5km run, one indoor rockclimbing session.
12th July/This week: one 6km run, swimming stroke correction session, one 10km run, one 23km ride.

I’m glad to see that at least there weren’t any weeks where I did nothing. I often felt guilty as though I had done nothing! And certainly I would be happier if my running had been more consistent -the 14km City2Surf is in three weeks! But hey, I did 10km on Friday and felt pretty good afterwards. That’s always a nice thing. Wasn’t so long ago that 10km was a long distance to be worked up to!

I set out a little late on Friday evening so the sun was already setting as I headed out. Here’s the view from the Glebe Foreshore about 8 minutes in, with the northern end of ANZAC Bridge:

Looking north from the Glebe Foreshore

It was well and truly dark by the time I got up onto ANZAC Bridge 6km later:

Looking towards the CBD from ANZAC Bridge

That’s the Sydney Harbour Bridge barely visible in the centre of the photo. North Sydney on the left and the apartment buildings of Pyrmont on the right, blocking our view of the Sydney CBD.

Yesterday (Saturday) afternoon I headed out on the bike. I often view long bike rides as though they’re an unwelcome task that I’ll procrastinate as long as possible, but actually I love being on the bike once I’m out there. This ride there were two good surprises in store for me. One is a section of bike path which had been in desperate need of maintenance for as long as I’ve been riding along it. It had two sections about 50 metres apart where the path had buckled and broken quite badly. I actually popped a tyre on one of the ridges once, and had to walk the 3km home (I normally carry levers and spare tubes with me but I’d misplaced the levers that day and headed out without them. Just my luck). So I had been in the habit of riding off the path and onto the soft shoulder of the road to get around those parts; but this was obviously an unwelcome workaround.  So it was a very pleasant surprise to ride along there yesterday and realise that council had finally done some maintenance, in fact, they had replaced the entire surface of the path and extended it further than it used to go! Yay!!

The second pleasant surprise was when I reached a section where the path took you up along a rickety narrow old walkway over a bridge. Here’s the bridge:

Narrow pedestrian walkway over bridge

Not only is it narrow (please don’t let there be anyone coming the other way!) the various concrete pieces which made up the pedestrian walkway were quite uneven and alot of them even rocked when you walked or rode over them. Not surprisingly, it was bumpy and uncomfortable and annoying. Thankfully it’s only a short bridge.

Now, they’ve built a way around this bridge, which goes away from the road a bit, along some playing fields, and then joins back up just on the other side of the bridge. On approach you now see this:

Path splits in two..

Straight ahead and then to the right is the old bridge (the road runs parallel to the path just to my right here). If you follow the new path around to the left, you go:

New bike path

Over a much wider and friendlier bridge, then to the right along the side of the playing fields. The path then crosses the road at a pedestrian crossing and turns right to go back up to the main road. An extra 200-300 metres at most, much prettier, much safer, much more comfortable. Very impressed! Nice work, council!

In other news.. I’m still doing Weight Watchers. After my initial loss I went up again, but have now been consistently heading downwards for a few weeks. My eating hasn’t been perfect, but I’ve been avoiding chocolate for a month now and it’s making a good difference. I’m hoping for a good result this week after the more consistent exercise.

I’ve also spoken to my swimming instructor/PT, and she’s decided I really don’t need to spend more time on stroke correction -I have the moves, I just need to practice them now. What I really need to improve my swimming, is strength. So we’re going to switch to doing weights in our fortnightly sessions, which I’m really excited about. I have absolutely zero experience in doing weights, so this could be interesting. My only concern is that fortnightly sessions are not going to be enough -several sessions a week would be much more ideal -and I don’t know if or how I would be able to fit that in. Something to be tackled when I get there