unironedman

This week’s training has been somewhat curtailed with fire service activities. Such is the way with the journeyman retained firefighter. I was keeping an eye on my left knee, so gym work was tailored to avoid any additional stress on Monday morning.

Wednesday morning came, and I met up with a few of the Liffey Trailrunners for a spin around the town. That’s a jog, by the way, not the bike. Due to the heavy rain this week, we stayed out of the park for the first part of the run, and opted for a visit to the back of the dam at Leixlip, and then on through Cooldrinagh, past the Lucan golf course before entering the park near the weir.

All told, we clocked up about 12.6kms of easy running at a nice pace of 9km/h.

A planned swim was cancelled when I was called out, and I had a refresher driving course on Thursday, so it was Friday before I hit the gym again, and also managed another run in the park. During my gym session, I invented a new way of working out which will totally revolutionise training for evermore. Well, I think so anyway 😉

So you want to do a few miles on the exercise bike. But you also want to do some pilates-style light weight toning on the upper body for the pool. You’re strapped for time. How to combine these two seemingly irreconcilable workouts? Without throwing your bike in the pool, that is. In other words, how do you swim and cycle?

Simple. Swycle.

Sit on the bike. Pedal. Get a few Pilates weights like the ones shown here, and perform the front crawl movements whilst cycling.

Do you look stupid. Yes indeed. Is a great workout. Yep. Is it any good? No idea. It’s probably wrong for a whole range of reasons that only a physio can explain.

I just know it’s a tough workout and you sweat buckets, and your arms are hanging off. There was no reason to put in the other pics, to be honest, but they are also in the gym, so I thought I’d drop them in anyway.

I went out on Saturday with my mate Mark into the Park yet again and pretty much repeated the 7 or so kms from yesterday, and then to complete the hat trick, we went out once again on Sunday. The weather was fairly dreadful, but we had a good long scrabble around in the park, and changed the route around a bit.

I will leave you know with two random images. I was hoping to surprise everyone at home with a new bike but after a few beers on Friday night, the news slipped out. Oh well. I guess seeing as it’s my new bike, perhaps the rest of the family wouldn’t be that impressed anyway (though I know S is excited). More on this later. I won’t be picking it up for another week or so. Nor will dear old Didi be resigned to the shed for evermore.

*Swycling is of course not sweeping across the nation anytime soon. And if you have already trade-marked swycling, good luck to you. Perhaps you could buy my logo?