Rachel Coleman

Yesterday after work I did a library run (more Rick Riordan!) on the way to pick up a hire car for the weekend. Then drove with Charles over to Northstowe for the Kodiaks Christmas party at the Northstowe Tap and Social. Secret Santa, noodles buffet, attempting to introduce an American to prawn crackers - she didn't like them - and a drag queen bingo.

I left the party a little early to go to the last Warbirds practice of the year and was so glad to be back on the ice again. (Yes, in shock news, 48 hours after having a massive mood crash about having a cold forever, I was well enough to skate hard for 90 minutes. It is a weird signal, but a consistent one.) It was ten days since my last practice, and it's now ten days until my next one (Kodiaks 2 on 30 Dec). I missed it so much. Practice was just the right level of challenging that I'm really pushing myself but not feeling like a hopeless incompetent, it was just what I needed, as was seeing my teammates again.

(Charles made his own way home from Northstowe by bus)

Tonight is the last Kodiaks 1 game of the year, for which I will be herding the volunteers as usual, and rocking my lovely new manager's coat (incredibly warm knee-length hooded puffer coat, personalised with the club logo and my initials). There is apparently a post-game clubbing plan. And tomorrow morning I'm taking Nico climbing. Somewhere in there I'm sleeping, honest.

I have 2.5 more days to work this year, and I am so ready to be done. The giant Ocado order is booked for Tuesday evening. I have a very large pile of borrowed books to read, and the rink public skate schedule in my calendar. The hot yoga place had a special offer, so I also have a 12-day pass to get me through the lack of hockey practices. They are quite strict about turning up sick, and I still have a bit of a cough this morning, so I won't be using it today. But hopefully tomorrow.

I was thinking yesterday that my energy levels recently are so much higher than I've been used to for the last couple of years. I've spent the summer cycling and skating and working full time, and even getting away with impulse decisions to go clubbing (I was honestly expecting to feel a lot worse yesterday/today than turned out), and I'm habitually paying attention to my limits etc and being kind of delighted not to hit them.

I feel like the France holiday was a turning point. I was definitely very tired shortly beforehand (still getting over covid round 3, feeling run down by work), but then I got there and played hard, and did a whole lot more than I'd expected on top of the tournament, and continued Doing All The Hockey when I got back. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was the week responsible for no-one but myself, but I'm wondering also if maybe it's the HRT (which I'd been on about 10 weeks when I went to France and have just passed 21 weeks altogether). Or at least, maybe the HRT is helping: I know it's helped enormously with sleep, but maybe it's helping my general energy levels too. On top of the virtuous circle of having more energy so I can do more consistent exercise, which improves my fitness so I have more energy ...

Last Saturday afternoon I went over to the rink to help out with the annual charity ice hockey game between two of the rec teams based there. I'd offered Slavik, the organiser, help "wherever you can use me", which turned out to be selling raffle tickets and also entries to the "Chuck a Duck" and "Shoot a Puck" games held after the ice cut between periods 2 and 3. People don't tend to want to buy tickets when the hockey is being played, so I got to watch quite a lot of the game, which was fun. We raised over £1000 from the evening, all for a local churches charity helping people in food poverty. After the game I got distracted by meeting a very tiny and very adorable baby (about 10 days old! such tiny fingers! such alert eyes! mama looking so well for 10 days post-birth!) but eventually biked my way home in the post-sunset twilight.

Sunday was a busy day. I got up early and got my covid jab (and despite the stern wording about needing to show proof of my diagnosis, and digging out one of my stash of hospital letters referencing it, the nurse on the day took my word for it). Then I did a circuits class in the gym just upstairs from the vaccine clinic, showered and changed and left my sweaty stuff in a locker for the day. I bought a nice sunhat and headed off to Alexandra Palace park for a goodbye picnic for a hockey buddy who's off to Germany for the next stage of their academic career. Vast numbers of people also had the idea of a sunny picnic in the park, but the park is also large, so we got a reasonable bit of space between us and the surrounding groups. Buddy has lovely friends, both ones I already knew and new ones, and it was a great afternoon.

I missed my planned train home and the next one was cancelled, so I wasn't going to be back in Cambridge before the gym closed. I sent a frantically apologetic email (because we aren't supposed to leave stuff in lockers overnight). On the bus replacement from Royston, about halfway to Cambridge, I realised I'd left my nice new sunhat on the train, which must be some kind of record. At least I got one afternoon's use out of it. Back at home I had a reassuring reply from the gym that they'd let me off this once and not break my padlock. Literally as I closed the email my arm started aching and the vaccination fever started, and considerately passed in about ten hours, leaving me just fine for work on Monday morning.

I had a bunch of training sessions at work this week, and I spent two hours staffing a stall at the University's Jobs Fair (I'm also in the video on that page encouraging people to come work for us), talking to people interested in working in IT for us. I enjoyed it, but the room was very noisy, so it was hard work. I made a point of mentioning the noise level in my event feedback, so maybe next time they'll find a venue that isn't terrible to be in with dozens of people talking simultaneously.

Wednesday evening I had a "healthy nudge" check at the University Sports Centre that I booked for myself a good three months ago. Weight, body composition, peak flow, grip strength, blood pressure, and instant cholesterol & blood sugar tests. In summary: I'm fit and well with above-average strength and muscle mass, also very overweight with a lot of fat. None of which is really a surprise, but nice to have in writing.

Today I did strength class again and then went to visit naath, leaving my sweaty gear in the gym locker, along with a library book that didn't fit into the out-of-hours book drop. I picked up fancy sourdough pizzas from Tesco for our lunch and we had a good gossip. This time I got back to Cambridge well before the gym closed, and also managed to get the giant book to Cambridge Central library before it closed.

(The giant book is The Power Broker which I've made no progress on since being on holiday last month, and now someone else has requested it. So I'll give it a month or so and then request it again, and attempt to get through more of it for the 99% Invisible podcast book club. I have a library book backlog, and I've been reading everything Sarina Bowen has in Kindle Unlimited because that's where my brain is right now, and also I feel like letting whoever-it-is get at least one renewal in on the brick before I claim it back.)

Tomorrow I have both a skating lesson (one-off move from Tuesday because of the Jobs Fair) and the penultimate Learn to Play session, and enough hours in between it's worth coming home. I could and probably should tackle the garden but I'm more likely going to chill out with some of the library backlog.

It was a lot of fun. It was not very like the glamorous, bikini-clad rip curl posters, more sandy wetsuits and screaming arm muscles. I feel like I spent most of the week barefoot, tired, aching somewhere, and almost always at least damp if not outright soaked. I'd dry out each evening in my hotel room, then be off into the water again each morning. Even yesterday, wandering around in a dryrobe in the rain, with the bottom hem of my dress slowly becoming saturated.

The coaching was good: I got lots of opportunity and lots of feedback. I think I got about as good as I could get at surfing this week in my current state of fitness. The "surfing confidence" session on Tuesday helped me recognise that I was holding back from trying things out of fear of "getting them wrong", when the only way to get them right is to keep trying until the body gets the hang of it. I do this with skating too, so it's not that it's an easy problem, but it is a familiar one, and I went into Thursday's sessions with more determination to "just do it", and I had a better time as a result.

Some people try surfing and then rearrange their entire life around being able to do it some more. I am not about to do that, although I recognise the impulse, because ice hockey got there first. I do want to try surfing again sometime and to work on things that will make next time better. I need to be stronger, especially upper body and core strength, and I need to have better stamina and cardiovascular fitness. (Which I need and am working on anyway.) The coach said honestly the best exercise for surf fitness is a lot of front crawl swimming, which makes sense.

I have been reminded how much I love the sea: hearing it, seeing it, paddling in it, swimming in it. I feel like my childhood had lots of seaside holidays and days out, but my children have not had the same. On the last day of the course, we looked up surfing in East Anglia and Cromer is apparently where it's at, as is Sheringham: both seaside towns on the railway, a bit over 2 hours from Cambridge. So I'm thinking about some day trips and weekends away, and what we might do for family holidays. We did have last October by the sea in Greece, and we have an upcoming holiday with Tony's sisters and mother on the Yorkshire coast.

I've also been reminded how much I love sauna - honestly, three days in a row of sauna was amazing - and how lovely it is to get a massage. So my takeaways are: visit the seaside, keep going to the gym & working on my cardio, somehow make time to swim and sauna weekly, and find somewhere to get a sports massage maybe every 4-6 weeks. Play another season of ice hockey, and then maybe do another surfing course next summer.

It's been a lovely week of being responsible for no-one but myself, pushing myself physically, making some new friends, and rediscovering these things I love: the sea, sauna, swimming, massage. Not really restful, not really lifechanging, but definitely refreshment and renewal. A good holiday.

I did not have my planned second PT session this week because the PT has covid (sigh). But at least she discovered this the day before spending an hour in unmasked close proximity to me, rather than the day after. She has also uploaded a very detailed "mobility workout" to the app she had me install, complete with little videos and instructions. Some of it I will need to be at the gym to do, but I can do most of them at home, and am going to try to do at some point today..

Instead I did a nice social skate with lnr in the same timeslot, which was lovely and restorative. Then I had to go get N from school and take him to buy new shoes at John Lewis, which went about as well as could possibly be expected. We rewarded ourselves for this effort with a trip to the cafe on the top floor, and had eyes sufficiently bigger than stomachs that I had to wrap up the slices of cake and bring them home for later consumption.

Tony is now in Rotterdam at the DNS Hackathon and RIPE 86 meeting. I have a visiting aunt L in Cambridge this weekend, and we're going to take in the Islanders exhibit at the Fitzwilliam today, and probably brave the (unheated, eek) Jesus Green Lido tomorrow.

I had my echocardiogram this afternoon: everything went very straightforwardly and the person doing it (who did introduce himself by name and role but it immediately fell back out of my head again) said that the data he captured needs to be properly reviewed, but he didn't see anything obvious to worry about. Which is good! I'll get the formal letter through at some point, but for now I'm not going to worry about it until my next 5-yearly check up.

On fitness generally, I have decided to engage a personal trainer for the next few months. I'll be meeting with her for an hour once a week, plus getting additional support and "homework" in between sessions. The brief I've given her is: build up my general fitness and figure out what needs work to prevent further injuries from playing hockey. We had a longish initial consultation, which was mostly feeling out if we can work together, and our first actual session was last week, which was mostly assessment: current state of my body, my ability to understand and follow her directions, that kind of thing. It's going well so far, and I'm being reminded again how much I like exercise that centres me in my body, has me focus my attention on what I'm doing right there in the moment.

My current plan is to have weekly sessions all summer, and then cut back to probably-monthly from October when hockey season ramps up again. Not cheap, but very much "paying someone with expertise to work things out, so I don't have to". I just have to show up, and do the work.

Head: Still not fully recovered, still quite frequently hit the disconcerting point of brain just ... failing to comprehend perfectly straightforward information, and needing to sleep a lot. I did spend my work week on reduced hours and in minimal meetings, as advised by GP, and I did dutifully cancel planned exercise when I was already tired. (No Learn to Play, no skating as yet this week, no strength class this morning, possibly a gentle skate tomorrow morning, we'll see.)

I cut my hair this evening, I've been wanting to for weeks but finally mustered up the effort, and it always pleases me to be back buzzed short. Next time I won't let it go 3.5 months, honest. My fitbit cheerily told me I did 27 minutes of cardio while standing in one place wielding clippers, which conveys my current fitness level pretty well.

Knee: improving well, the one thing I did keep up this week was stretch class at the gym, for the second time now, and I can feel how much it's helping unstick bits of my body. I'm going to prioritise doing this class forever. I'm considering engaging a personal trainer through the gym when my brain is a bit better, and probably I'm going to ask her to start with supervising me through More Stretching. Theoretically I know how to do all this myself at home, but in practice I don't without an external push, so. Classes and a personal trainer.

Reading: when my brain stalls out on actual work or house/school admin, apparently I can still read fanfic, or short books written 80 years ago for children, but not much else.

Planning: I've a remote-attending membership to Eastercon, and I've got set up on the Discord and done the schedule-wrangling and put the choices into my calendar. (I like to do the hard work of deciding on panels in advance, so that on the day I can just roll with past!me's decisions.) I probably am not going to be able to watch all the panels I've chosen, unless my brain's ability to Cope With Video improves dramatically by next weekend, so I need to do one more pass to highlight my absolute unmissables and let the rest go if need be.

I'm now going to Eindhoven in early June to watch the UEFA Womens Champion's League final: turns out I can get the first Eurostar out of London Saturday morning and get to Eindhoven before 3pm for the 4pm kickoff. Best plan ever. Hoping that Arsenal make it to the final, but entirely happy to watch top women's football whoever is there.

Ice hockey is probably the most intense physical activity I've done in my life, and I'm stepping it up with the uni team right when I'm also managing a long-term chronic illness triggered (among other things) by over-exertion, and a more recent but apparently persistent issue with fatigue following Covid earlier this year. So how can I do it?

( content notes: sleep, money, diet, weight with numbers, fomo )

Is it worth it? It is to me. I don't know how many years I have left to play hockey. I wish I'd found it 30 years ago, but I have it now and I'm grabbing it with both hands, until I get too ill or too old or something else happens to take it away.

Faint positive line still, ugh.

I went out and did more Pokémon Go this morning. I walked further than yesterday in the same amount of time before giving up for the day, and ended up about as tired. So that's better than being worse, but also I can't get that tired on a daily basis and still do my job, even working from home. I'm going to try working tomorrow and see how I get on.

I miss ice hockey so much it hurts, and I am also terrified of giving myself post-viral fatigue by doing too much too soon. So I made myself a list of activities I should work up through before flinging myself back on the ice like I haven't missed a month of practice. The idea is I have to be able to do each thing without spending half a day in bed afterward before I try the next thing on the list.

• school run by bus
• school run by bike
• bike to the rink and skate for 30+ minutes
• Storm practice (1 hour)
• Warbirds practice (2 hours)

I expect this means I won't be well enough for Storm practice next Friday, but I can live in hope.

Not for the first time, it's being impressed upon me that I need a certain amount of daily exercise in my life to maintain mental health and my ability to concentrate on anything[1]. It's just that most of the time I have my life arranged so I get it without having to think about it. In the Before Times, my baseline was an hour of walking to commute five days a week, plus a skating lesson and sometimes a swim at the weekend. During the last few months I've gone out for lots of solitary walks at antisocial times, but right now I'm in self-isolation and have fallen back on exercise videos.

content-note: exercise, diet-talk

( Read more... )

In recent weeks I've made a significant increase to my daily/weekly exercise by changing my commute from cycling to walking, and incorporating interval running. This is driven by two things:

• I'm not enjoying cycling very much these days and would rather walk if at all possible
• for child-related reasons it would be very useful if I was fit enough to run a lot more than I currently can

( cut for detail and numbers )
I'm definitely feeling the effects of the extra effort. I'm tired a lot sooner in the evening, and I suspect it contributed to my two recent migraines. But in the longer term my body should adjust in response to the load, it always has before. I've already noticed my baseline walking pace is faster and easier than three weeks ago.

(It is currently a few degrees above freezing when I cycle to work)

1. Help! It is freezing cold and I can see my breath in the air! Put on coat, gloves, hat-with-earflaps, and still feel shivery!
2. Hmm, I seem to be warming up, better take the coat off at the next traffic lights.
3. My hands are a bit hot, perhaps I should take my gloves off.
4. Ow! My hands are too cold! Put the gloves back on again.
5. My head's a bit warm, the hat can come off.
6. My hands are sweaty! Take the gloves off again.
7. Still cold, but my hands are ok. 
8. Actually my hands are strangely warm.
9. Help! I am suddenly Boiling Hot all over and there isn't anything else I can decently (or easily) take off!
10. Slow down for remaining journey in hopes of cooling down before arrival.

I have stopped even bothering with the coat, and I am doing much better on the days when I wear a long-sleeved running top for the commute and change into something more work-appropriate on arrival.  Shivery at first, but keeps stages 9-10 fairly minimal.  I need to find better gloves.  (Thinner? Easier to remove?  Maybe I need lightweight mittens or something.)

I didn't use to overheat so much.  I'm hoping it'll pass as I regain fitness, or cycling to work in summer will be no fun.

There is a letting agent whose sign I pass on my commute, called Let's Rent Cambridge.  Every time I see the sign, I find myself thinking "what, all of Cambridge?"

Tony was 40 earlier this week and we had a meal at the Cambridge Smokehouse, where the Eraina used to be.  This is a great restaurant if you like meat with your meat and some meat, and I love the "ping a light for service" approach.

I have a new fitness-monitoring-wristband thing (Fitbit Flex for those that care), and my slow overfull waddle back from the Smokehouse was classed by it as "intense activity".  I slightly fear what it will make of my running, when I next manage it.

I lost my pedometer on Tuesday, and haven't been able to find it.  It prompted me to look at pedometer apps for the phone and I've been playing with RunKeeper.  It uses the GPS to measure where I actually walk/run/cycle and how fast I do so, so is quite fun for discrete sets of exercise.  It also helpfully draws a map for me of where I've been, and allows me to label my usual routes and attach each day or week's iteration of them, so I can see how my performance changes over time.

I think I'll keep using it to measure specific 'walks' that I do, but I do like the way the pedometer captures all the little movements around home and office, so another (cheap) one is on its way.  In the mean time, I'm going to use the RunKeeper measurements and my memory of what the pedometer racks up in similar days to estimate the step counts I "should" have achieved.

I've had a bit of a nasty cold the last couple of days - bad enough I left work at lunchtime yesterday and didn't go in today. Determined resting seems to be helping, though I have a butterfly attention span. So what better to do than post a random set of stuff.

Indi is doing well after his operation. We managed to keep him in the recommended 2 days, by some miracle, probably helped by him obviously feeling very sorry for himself and lethargic. He's more back to normal now, and although I've stopped catching him and shoving pills down him daily, he's still very wary around me. Charles was particularly gentle and sweet with him, and seems to finally be developing some impulse control around tails. Stitches out tomorrow, but then it's vaccination time for both pusses.

Charles is being a darling. I decided he was wittier than me so made a Twitter account to post his short gems to. We have established a regular library day and he is very keen on borrowing DVDs of his favourite things (e.g. Thomas, Postman Pat). I have decided the best thing about this is that they go back after a week before I want to smash them due to repetition. (Double-pity that we are missing today due to my lurgy - luckily we can renew everything online, his and mine both). He frequently "reads" his favourite stories, and also engages in lengthy complicated storytelling/play with his toys that we delight in listening to.

Recently he had a sudden breakthrough around jigsaws, partly driven by enjoying doing a large 40-piece one he got for Christmas. And we've been playing a bit with numbers, counting, and a flipchart book I got him ages ago and he's finally interested in. He has the hang of phone calls now, and will happily talk to his various relatives, as well as making a lot of "play" phone calls both at home and at his childminder's.

Potty training is creeping along slowly. He is (usually) dry at night, but less confident and reliable in the day. If he asks for a nappy I will put one on but we are trying for more and more nappy-free days. His childminder is helping us with this.

Other things:

* We did a day trip to Leeds last month to meet up with my mother and based it around the Royal Armouries. I picked it primarily as an indoor thing we could get to easily from the rail station. It is in fact a fascinating place, both in layout and exhibit contents, and we all happily got lost in it for hours. Literally - at one point Mum and (I and Charles) were in the same room for at least 20 minutes and didn't see each other until I rang to ask where she was.

* I saw Nation broadcast from the National Theatre to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse. It was an impressive adaptation and the broadcast tech worked well for me as well. Will do again (much easier and cheaper than going to London).

* We have booked two trips in the next few months: a holiday with Louise in La Charronniere in April, and the tenth anniversary AFP Gamesmeet. Both by train, and we get a double-decker TGV down to Poitiers. I can't wait to see what Charles makes of that - he goes nuts enough about double-decker buses.

* And of course we have DWCon to look forward to in August.

* I have begun training for the London MoonWalk in mid-May. Unlike training for the half-marathon last summer, this time I am counting calories so I don't just eat more with the additional exercise and end up fatter overall. I fell back very easily into the habit considering it's been four years - in fact too easily, and gave myself migraines by trying to undereat more than my target in the first couple of weeks. I have given myself a stern talking-to and think I'm more stable now.

* I've been listening to a lot of podcasts while walking, and have been enjoying A History of the World in 100 Objects (though the incidental music is a bit annoying). It's just the right length for getting to work.

I am very overweight. My initial attempts to lose my pregnancy weight just sputtered out after a while: regular hard exercise has been a hard thing to make time for in the post-baby world. Since last October I have been slowly trying to "get my act together" generally: eating better, sleeping better, and exercising.

My weekday routine includes 4 miles a day of walking, but I kept being tempted to take the bus some of the time, and the walking was not a very challenging pace. Other activities (ballet, swimming) were hard habits to establish and tended to unestablish very easily. When we went on holiday in June, I had time to think out clearly what I'd been feeling fuzzily for a while: I needed a challenge, and I needed exercise I could do when it suited me.

I thought about running for a while but I'm very paranoid about my knees, and my ankles like to twist at the mildest provocation. Then I was reminded of the "London MoonWalk" and I've always enjoyed walking, so I decided to give power-walking a go.

I realised that next year's MoonWalk was too far away to effectively get me moving right now, so I settled on the Bristol half-marathon, which gave me 10 weeks to train. I've followed a power-walking training plan more-or-less faithfully, apart from 3 weeks in the middle when I kept getting summer colds. Until this week I wasn't really sure I could do the walk in the time required (the race is primarily for runners, and timed accordingly), but checking over the final information this week, I reckon I can complete the race before they stop guaranteeing support. So we're off to Bristol tomorrow and I'm racing on Sunday. Hopefully Tony will manage to take some photographic evidence which I can upload on our way home.

In the mean time, I've lost no weight at all (if anything, I've gained 0.5-1kg), but I've had to start wearing belts with some of my trousers, and I'm keeping up with Tony much more easily when out and about. I've mostly-established a habit of regular high-heart-rate exercise, and will be working towards the full marathon next year.

(And if you want to sponsor me for Sunday, you're very welcome.)

Sunday: took Charles to the rec for >1 hour
Monday: mowed lawn (bit pathetic, wasn't anywhere near 30 min, but did get me out of breath)

Tuesday: spent HOURS taking part in silly "corporate team bonding" games on inflatable torture devices in the rain. I did mostly enjoy the games, especially the last one which involved climbing and thus I was able to be vaguely competent (unlike certain other games - good thing I don't feel overly attached to my dignity). My team came 2nd! I have a pretty rosette, which Charles already broke the safety pin off.

No idea about tomorrow, but I have an Exercise Menu on a card in my diary now. Picking something is much easier than being creative, especially when I'm tired. I already worked this out about food, which is why we try to have supplies of ping in the fridge/freezer.