Gluteus maximus

Wednesday:

Yesterday I took the kids to see Ice Age 4: Continental Drift. It was really enjoyable and well worth seeing. Enough interest there even for adults. I recognised some of the voice acting, but was stunned at the end to find that the main bad guy, Captain Gut, was voiced by the man who plays Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. He is my favourite character in GoT but I didn't even feel a twinge of recognition.

We went to the food court for lunch and I had Oporto chicken and chips for the first time in a couple of years. They used to marinate the chicken in Lemon & Herb (or whatever) sauce but now they just give you a plain quarter of roast chicken and a sachet of sauce to squeeze onto it. Not the same thing, people! I think they've done it because they expanded their range from two to six flavours (they actually mainly do burgers) and it would be prohibitive to have six kinds of chicken marinating. That's my guess, anyway. But not happy.

The kids had happy meals from McDonalds. Special school holiday treat.

I spent the afternoon doing a bit of editing work while the kids amused themselves, clearly they didn't get enough exercise because they were very hyperactive at bedtime.

As the evening progressed I was coughing more and more, with a horrible tickle deep in my throat. And this morning I woke with lungs fulls of phlegm. I was really worried that I was coming down with yet another strain of this horrible flu that is going around, but by mid-morning I was feeling fine. I spent the morning working while the kids played PowerUp Heros on the XBox, jumped on the trampoline, and tossed a ball around outside. In the afternoon we went to the gym and they had their Club Gecko class.

I had a much better session today. I started with 20 mins on the cross-trainer, which I haven't used for ages, and did fine. I was a bit annoyed that they had moved all the equipment so that nothing was overlooking the pool anymore, I used to enjoy looking down on the swimmers. The cross-trainers were all pointed at the TVs, none of which were on the channel I wanted to watch. I couldn't hear my iPhone over the music they were playing, so I just listened to that and watched the subtitles on Catalyst about how bad the current flu season is and how many people died of flu in 1918 (between 30 and 100 million people).

I next moved on to the rowing machine which I used for 10 mins, I've had problems rowing in the past due to my shoulder injury and was fully prepared to stop after 5 mins or less if I needed to, but I was fine. On to the stationary bike. I used to use a recumbant bike all the time (where it's like sitting in a chair with pedals in front of you, not sitting on a saddle) and I thought Monday's struggle was just due to general tiredness, but I could barely get the pedals moving. It was weird. After 5 mins I moved to a normal stationary bike which was better as far as the pedalling was concerned. Since having children I have zero core strength which makes riding a bike really hard work, my postural muscles around my ribs started aching straight away but I kept going for another 15 mins. Finally 15 mins on the treadmill before it was time to collect the children.

While I was actually at the gym I felt like I was doing well, pacing myself so that I could keep going for the whole hour and not overstrain my rarely used muscles but still get a decent workout in. But once I was home the little voice started up again. Didn't work hard enough, should have pushed myself more, pacing myself was just an excuse to slack off, how come I only got in 70 mins of exercise when I had 90 mins, why did I go so slow on the treadmill at the end ... I hate that little voice that makes me feel like nothing I do is ever good enough.

But a couple of hours later my glutes started to get sore. So that made me feel like I had done some work after all.