No pain no gain, or big socks

This week an area of my chest about the size of a tennis ball turned brown then blue/grey strangely this was as a result of learning a roll last weekend in the pool. The way Alex had me doing the armpit roll involved the paddle resting on my chest rather than my armpit. IT was tough trying to maintain the paddle blade in contact with my body while upside down and sweeping my arm away from my body so I kept finding myself applying a lot of tension on the paddle to keep it in place. The resulting bruise was certainly worth the feeling of satisfaction the successful rolling created. The area is still a little tender, but it looks far worse than it feels.

This morning I discovered an advantage of getting older. I was researching healthy weight and percentage body fat, and according to many of the sites due to me passing the big four o I am now able to weigh more and be considered healthy – sound like a load of old rubbish to me. As far as I can tell I need to decrease my body fat by 3%, obviously this can either be by weight loss or by muscle creation combined with fat loss. Either way the target seems to be 17%. We have scales in our house that measure this and it is currently hovering at the 20% mark, and my weight is hovering at the 180lb mark. Not too far to go. I have exercised the last 5 mornings, so I am hoping to keep this going and see if I can get in good shape this winter. Next week J is travelling to a conference and I have a busy week ahead with a series of evening meetings, followed by my folks flying in from the UK and then going to MD to pick up Emma, and attending her school conference while I am there for good measure. But what is really exciting is I am taking off work from Thursday through to the Monday after Thanksgiving. It will be great to spend that much time with the family. Next weekend is the second pool session so I need to decide what is going to be the focus of the session. Probably reinforcing the progress I made last week, and then I am hoping to work on reverse sweep rolls…. I will need to do some research.

Someone really irritated me on Friday and it discombobulated my day while I dealt with it, I don’t think it is going to work out in their long term interest, time will tell. Anyway this irritant did get me thinking about all the exciting things my new role will enable me to sink my teeth into, I can’t wait for our new organization model to get rolled out and for me to be able to get stuck into the new role – I am going to be swamped! Personally there is nothing I like more than new technology and new people challenges and rest assured I am going to have a plethora of both!

Mark showed me an awesome plug-in for the Firefox browser last week, its called DownloadHelper and it allows you to grab video and audio content off web pages. I have wanted to string together a series of rolling videos into a sort of best of tutorial for my own benefit, to review prior to going to practice the rolls. Using this plug-in I have been able to grab the video content from the different YouTube videos and am now going to set to work editing the training tool.

Speaking of setting to work, I have been sewing again…. I have been working on what I am calling kayak socks, a skin tight rip stop nylon cover for the Tahe so that when I tow it during the winter months the salt from the roads won’t cover the hull and then pollute the swimming pool. I have made much progress, I started with a one piece design but moved away from this when I saw how much loose fabric this created at the stern ( I had created a tight fitting bow section and then just kept the socks tube diameter consistent from the widest part so that it could be pulled on front to back. The second version is a two piece that is Velcro’d together at the midsection. This enables the sock to fit tightly over the entire length. The real test will be if the Velcro is strong enough to withstand the wind at 60mph on the highway. I used half inch wide sewing Velro as it was very flexible…. I can always upgrade if necessary.

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