Catching Up. Again.

Eek. Another fortnight goes by at a pace considerably greater, I imagine, than I'll manage next January. No doubt some of you are thinking the radio silence means I've dropped the training and picked up the spoon. Well - small fanfare please - I haven't. After the self-control of Vegas, it's been back to "Webster's House of Pain". Although I must stop calling it that. "Couldn't you call it Webster's House of Gain?" suggested Giles the other morning, not entirely seriously. My own reasons for finding a new name are Twitter-based: it's genuinely scary how many new followers you can get just for mentioning "pain". Eek.

So, what to report? Well, things have been quite painful but that's mainly self-inflicted. As I've mentioned before, the plan is to do this training, complete the race and drop the pounds without dramatically adjusting the lifestyle / career. The reality though, as I've also mentioned, is that after doing the work, you just don't feel like consuming empty calories. For the most part, the drinking has been greatly reduced - and matched, as per instructions, with glasses of water - and the dining has tended to be of the healthier / smaller portioned variety. There have been a couple of notable exceptions, with last weekend's chocolate mousse (thanks again Charlotte) and a Tuesday afternoon spent running through, er, 18 of the ice creams available at the excellent Freggo in Swallow Street. Argentinean ice cream might not be as famous as Italian but this stuff rated amongst the best I've eaten in London.

Sadly, despite my nigh-faultless logic - chocolate is made from a bean and is therefore a vegetable, cream comes from cows so is effectively made from grass and is therefore a vegetable - by the time I arrived for Monday's and Wednesday's sessions, I was feeling slightly guilty. Giles provided his usual encouragement but probably didn't need to. That guilt drove me to extra efforts and, annoyingly, those extra efforts paid dividends. From this point on, I'll try and keep a record of the weight-based achievements, but by the Wednesday I managed to beat at least one of my "records" on the nightmarish shoulder press device, did 23 leg extensions in 20 seconds and got into three figures on the sit-ups / crunches. "Oh good," said Giles. "Now you're fitter I can start getting really nasty."

Oh joy.