Quick Tuesday update

As this blog has turned into my diary, I might as well keep it up to date for a bit.

Today I went to the hospital for my baseline ECG reading.  I had to strip to the waist and lie on a bed in a curtained off cubicle while the nurse attached half a dozen electrodes to me, mostly around my heart but also a couple on my left ankle.  You can't feel anything at all while the reading is being taken but you have to lie totally still.  I've had this done before at least once, when I got electrocuted back in 1994, and they wired me up to the cardiac monitor to check if my heart had been damaged.

It only took about 10 mins from arriving in the department to leaving again, amazingly hassle free.  I'd parked in the car park of a big Tesco which was literally opposite the hospital so did a spot of shopping.  Because the Tesco is very, very close to the University where I used to work, and the University has a high proportion of foreign students, this Tesco has a fascinating 'foreign food' section, which is rather more exotic than your usual jars of Thai curry paste and Mexican fajita kits.  I didn't really have much time to thoroughly examine everything they had but there was Eastern European chocolate (which I can recommend, by the way) and bags of  'oily' chana dahl and everything you need to make proper sushi, amongst loads of other stuff.

And as the Tesco is about 1 minute's drive from the swimming pool I'm now using, I thought I might as well take the opportunity to go for a swim as well.  Damn, I'm so organised.  As I've decided to increase the number of laps each time I go by 2 (I don't want to overdo it), today's target was 14 laps, which I did quite easily in just over 20 minutes.  It's definitely getting easier.

Today's swimming was made more interesting by the fact that, while half the pool was laned off, the other half was being used by an instructor taking someone through a synchronised swimming routine.  I wouldn't have noticed except for the fact they had a speaker at the side of the pool that was blasting out Labi Siffre's godawful song 'Something inside so strong', over and over, while the girl in the pool waved her pointy feet in the air and made angular movements with her arms.  Not something you see in the average, everyday swimming pool.  I'd have liked to have watched further, but I was on a mission to do my 14 laps and head home.

All in all, a pretty successful day.

Tomorrow is my wk2d2 run of the Couch to 5k workouts.  Let's see how far I get.