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| Tuesday - 13th December, 2007 Reading back my entry - whose silly idea was it to start training for a marathon at the age of 50. I have decded that I am going to go through middle age and menopause with grace - you know do the Power of 10 instead. Yes, yes I am now into the Power of 10 with Amir and Lin. For the uninitiated, the Power of 10 is a methodology of lifting weights in the gym by counting to 10 slowly until muscle failure. The person who's been going on and on about it is my paranoid (I mean better) half - he bought the book. Can see some definition in the arm on the arm there or is it my imagination? | | |
| 9th June: Day 6: Lin and I lied to each other. We said we'd do the mile but we didn't. On Friday, we pretended to go to Danga Bay on the false pretext of looking for a flat surface where we could do the mile but seriously speaking we were more looking forward to the cookout on the same day for Amir's birthday. Major, major cookout. Lin's starter was incredible, my salad and home-made dressing was also incredible (if I may say so myself), Lin and Hani's cheesecake was incredible but our maincourse - unfortunately I was responsible- was only so so. Should have used my own recipe. Oh wait coming back to our training. So on Saturday we had to run the mile you know, according to the training manual. But we mutually decided to skip the mile and we instead just did 1 min of running and 1 minute of walking x 6. Or so we thought. After the first two sets, felt soooo tired we decided to walk instead. Got into a philosophical arguement about why we should bother entertaining people at all - me thinks its a nuisance : upsets my routine and Lin says it is our responsibility to the community to entertain people. I think it's just because Lin looooves to cook and I don't. Decided the argument was silly by the end of the walk. The entertainment on Sunday turned out to be such a success that the food really didn't matter in the end. Everybody just enjoyed each other's company. Lesson learnt - don't be overly ambitious when it comes to training for the marathon and preparing for a small family gathering. | | |
| 7th June: Day 5: I'm on Day 5 and I blew it. First I got the last two training entries mixed up. This marathon training might be slowing down my brain - memory. Not good. Then today was supposed to do 1 minute of jogging and 1 minute of walking for 10 sets but was totally exhausted by the 7th set. According to Lin, I started off too fast. I don't think so. I felt fine but by about the 7th set, I was finding that the 1 minute walking wasn't sufficient to recover my breath. So I am sure I stopped on the 7th set. But Lin said I completed 9 sets. I thought I completed only 7 sets and she did 8 sets. But Lin insisted I did 9 sets and she completed 10. Not only is this marathon training slowing down my brain, I now can't even count. Amir's birthday tomorrow - doing a major cookout - need to put on all those fat that we burnt during the training sessions. Beginning to miss the flabs! Need to work on the Business Plan - too many distractions. | | |
| It might not be much to start training for a marathon but starting to train at the age of 50 when I've never run before must count for something. So much for a cooking blog. I'm now doing my marathon-training diary. Lin suggested that since we're desperate to lose weight (and not doing terribly well) we might as well at least excercise with an objective. So Lin and I have decided to train for a marathon - which one? At this stage the shortest, easiest one will do. Lin is very 'gung-ho' about it all. She wants to train for a marathon in August 2007. Me thinks she's too optimistic. We haven't even bought our matching Nike track suits after all. Seriously speaking, I'm targeting the Subang Jaya 10km (those who train for the Boston or San Francisco marathon - please do not laugh) 2008 marathon which should be about a year away. So here's my diary. 28th May: Day 1: First day. I've always walked round the JB Taman Bunga twice, about 2-3 times a week. It's a beautiful park, and we get to walk past the Zoo and occassionally see lions sunbathing in their cages depending on their moods. Started by warming up for 5 minutes, jogged for 1 minute and walked for 2 minutes for a total of 10 times. A bit difficult for the first two sets but got easier from the third set onwards. The jogging part took a lot longer than the walking part. The sweating felt good - a lot better than just walking round the park, plus it was shorter than my usual walk. Met hubby at our usual cooling down place as he's decided not to join us on our quest. No lions today. 30th May: Day 2: We repeated what we did for the first day. Today it was relatively easy. Hey if it's going to be this easy looks like I could be 'gung-ho' about this as much as Lin. Lions were hungry today so they made a lot of noise but didn't come out. 2nd June: Day 3: Not so easy today. Did 2 minutes of jogging and 4 minutes of walking for the first set and 2 minutes of jogging and 3 minutes of walking for the next 5 sets. Luckily it was only 6 sets. Didn't even bother to think of the lions. Just desperate to finish all 6 sets. This was hard. But at rendezvous with hubby at cooling-down station, felt proud of myself. Weighed myself at home - rats no change. Must have been that massive buffett at the Straits Kitchen in Singapore on Hani's graduation day. At this age, must watch food as well as train for a marathon to lose weight. Must lose weight before next appointment with Dr. Fong (my sarcastic gynae who's always going on about my 1 or 2 kg). 4th June: Day 4: Can't believe it's 4 days of training already. Have been sleeping very well. Have been able to stay alert all morning with or without coffee! It's getting tougher. 1 minute of jogging and 1 minute of walking. Darn, the jogging took sooooo long, and the walking went by soooo fast. Did 6 sets. Lions very quiet. Are they alive? Ta ta - got to complete Stanley's Business Plan first draft today. Will update again! | | |
| My daughter, Hani suggested that I blog about my successes and failures in cooking. I admit cooking has never been my biggest hobby, come to think of it, I’m not sure I have any BIG hobby. Though reading comes out tops of what I enjoy doing particularly after all housework is completed and the latest episode of CSI-Las Vegas over, I love lying in bed reading whatever novel has been recommended by Lin – the struggling writer in the family. I assume her recommendations are highly commendable as she did introduce me to Alexander McCall Smith which ended up with me pursuing his talk in Singapore and getting an autographed book and me talking incessantly about being able to ask Alexander McCall Smith a question though no-one in the family seriously showed any interest. Putting up reading as a hobby just rubber-stamps the fact that I seriously don’t have a hobby. After all aren’t I supposed to read anyway – sign boards on the highway, latest gossips about local celebrities, hate-mail from opposition parties about the decadence of the ruling party, Dilbert’s cartoons, Astro’s monthly guide, headlines of the Malay Mail or Kosmo and subtitles of the latest novella on TV. And I say that reading is a hobby? Reading is like breathing you know, you actually do it unconsciously and then you go round the world telling people that you love to read. Have you heard anyone telling you that they love to breath? Wait, I digress. Coming back to Hani, who loves everything but bread and who never made me her Vichyssoise٭ from 8th grade. Have you heard of anyone in the civilized world who doesn’t like bread? Well Hani, how will you comment when I talk about baking bread? Wait, I don’t even bake bread, the struggling writer in the family, Lin, is the official bread baker. This blogging thing is getting hard. Especially about cooking – 28 years ago when I met my husband I told him I couldn’t cook and he married me anyway. We’re celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary end of the month. So maybe that says something about the importance of cooking in a marriage - over-rated. I think I’ll start blogging about my cooking escapades next week. This blogging thing is not only hard, it’s exhausting. Being half a century old is beginning to show! *A French cold soup. | | |
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