unironedman

Just a quick wee post to let you all know that I am still here, plodding away. I know you worry. You really shouldn’t. The travails of the Wicklow Way certainly curtailed running for a while, and then I joined a gym. I can assure it was a pure accident. I was walking past the gym, and I was shanghaied. Honest! Well, okay, what actually happened is that my daughter, who works at our local amenities centre, arranged for me to do a little graphic design job for them. In lieu of money, I was offered an annual platinum membership, and before you could say ‘well goblet squat my Romanian deadlift’, I was getting my induction, and then my own personalised training plan.

Now, call me a cynic (join the queue), but I suspect most of these plans look remarkably similar. And I suppose a large part of that is down to how the gyms are designed, the trainers trained, and perhaps most critically, how clueless is the average mark, sorry, I mean punter, at your average gym.

But all of this is okay, despite my feeble rant. Any kind of movement or exercise is generally better than none at all. The obvious proviso being that you should (to paraphrase the physician’s maxim) do yourself no harm. And in a gym, there are multiple ways to do that, so my paltry advice for would-be gym bunnies is to start slow, and lift light with more reps, before you head into the murky world of ‘three sets to failure’.

And keep good form. Let’s be honest, looking around the gym these last few weeks, it seems that a few folk aren’t all that keen on being here. I could be wrong. I’m just reading the body language. But if you have made the effort to be in the building, you may as well put the work in. And part of that is maintaining good form. Which is to say, do your exercise properly, and don’t cheat. Each routine is designed to do a specific job, so it pays to stick to the programme, so to speak.

I’m beginning to sound like a gym bunny myself… I better get out running again! And in case you think I have some hidden wisdom on workouts, I should point out that last week, I was staring at my printed gym programme for several minutes before I had to ask a fellow traveller what I was supposed to be doing with the cable pulley machine…

In other news, I did revisit the Wicklow Way a few weeks ago, albeit very briefly. It was an IMRA race which began practically within the spray of the rather raging Powerscourt Waterfall. (We had had rather a lot of rain previously). From the car park, the route went rather fiendishly uphill. Forever. It did eventually reach a point when we literally ran out of room, which was the top of Maulin Mountain.

(Maulin (Irish: Málainn, meaning ‘High/sloping ground’),^[2] at 570 metres (1,870 ft), is the 272nd–highest peak in Ireland on the Arderin scale,^[3] however, being below 600 m it does not rank on the Vandeleur-Lynam or Hewitt scales.^[4][5] Maulin is in the far northeastern section of the Wicklow Mountains, at the mouth of Glensoulan Valley; Powerscourt Waterfall lies at its base.^[6][7])

That’s the Wiki entry, obviously. It seems rather lovely. Plenty of references to ‘mountainy’ things. And I can vouch for the views. Stunning. Though I was fairly banjoed by the time I got up there. And then, of course, you have to get back down again. And as is the norm with IMRA races, everybody is rather adept at flying downhill, except me. Towards the end, it got quite steep, and a little dark, and I once more realised that my trail runners don’t come with brakes as standard.

Fun times, though. And the route very briefly crossed over the Wicklow Way for a few hundred yards. So that was nice.

Here are a few images from recent walks and rambles. The flower is a Field Scabious and it always pops up along the canal at this time of year.

In further news, Saoirse’s niece came over from France, and in time-honoured fashion, we brought her up to The Salmon Leap Inn for a Guinness.

And that’s about it for now. I am still running, and now going to the gym three times a week.

And the film is nearly finished. So keep an eye out for that. I’m sure I’ll find a way to let you know.

And now for some greyhounds…