Squeeze

Some women try on their old wedding dress as an excuse for dressing up.

In the absence of anything better to do, as I re-organised all my long garments to one end of the wardrobe this evening, I thought I'd better try on my wetsuit - y'know for the day when I actually decide to do a triathlon again and incase I take up kayaking or windsurfing and just to see how it still fits.

Vital evening entertainment, apparently.

But not so easy to get out of with achey muscles from a National Trophy event.

Final prep

Next week is the biggie. The Three Peaks has come around again. Last year i had to ride it without my dad for the first time in 6 attempts on account of him getting his face smashed by a curb (couresty of motorist mayhem).

Me, I've been properly concentrating on training - doing specific workouts on the way to work instead of just travelling from A to B. Of course, the training schedule has been shattered by the impending doom of redundancies and the sheer exhaustion which accompanies such uncertainties.

Still, on Saturday I went for a run to see how the knee is doing after I badly burnt the skin on my cables before smashing the knee between the top tube and bars leaving me with lovely purple-dappled bruises both sides of my knee bones. The knee held out for about half an hour of running then I started to limp so I walked back through Wootton Bassett at a moderate pace to get supermarket shopping and pop in to see the pet carere and organise for lenny to be looked after whilst we swan around in Yorkshire for a weekend next week.

As a result of the running, the race in Exeter today went really badly and I was resoundingly last. Appart from being exhausted and ready for a rest week, I was also having issues with breathing on account of the volumes of dust being kicked into the air.

Nervous of taking another spill onto the knee I rode cautiously. Although, as I caught up Gabbie Day (womens winner) and Andy Hargroves (junior winner) in the wood, I guess I wasn't riding that cautiously.

It's frustrating doing a national race at the low point in the training plan. I just have to trust the system that next week's rest will turn out to be everything I hope and that it does the business of leaving me feeling rested and hungry for exertion next week. It sure as hell doesn't feel that way now.

But the three peaks is a personal adventure and the atmosphere on the day is more than the weeks of prep and build-up put together. I need to file today under, "a part of the processes" and arrive at the office tomorrow and declare myself "unflappable".

I fear this is easier said than done but I will persevere.

The waiting game

After two weeks of worrying about my job I was exhausted so I resolved to get on with it and compartmentalise. So I have been training and am just back from a lovely weekend in Wales. OK. It was a weekend in Wales. I got really wet. But TSK and I had fun and snuggled in the Vanu as the rain came down.

Every so often I do a little job hunting just to be on the safe side.

As a pretty respectable member of staff and one who has always seemed to have been quite responsible, valuable and amiable, I feel safe but there's this one chap who has ideas for something big. Something I can't be bothered with. One of these management gurus who puts all his trust in psychometric testing and strategy meetings and things that I generally consider to be a pile of the proverbial bovine stinky stuff. I can't read him, no one can so every so often I leave work at 4, I head home and I job hunt.

And today, a recruitment consultant phoned me back within 1 minute of me hitting the send button. I am tempted by interesting prospects and a move back to the home land, to the real hills of the lakes and the welsh mountains, of Hollyoaks country and IMC and of proper mechanical engineering without any of the civils outsider feelings that accompany my current place of work.

Written French would be a benefit. Mon dieu, je crois que je serai contente.