Maintenance Week Six

I have had a very exciting week this week - I was at a work conference for three days at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole.  Obviously, my prime reasons for being excited were the presentations, workshops and fantastic networking opportunities *snorts with sarcastic laughter* but I was also excited by the prospect of good food and good leisure facilities.  Not to mention the fact that Jules is working in the West Midlands at the moment and we'd arranged to spend Tuesday evening together.

Sadly, with one or two exceptions, the conference food was not good, and I was very disappointed - I expected a lot better from a Hilton.  In general it was bland, badly presented and badly served mass catering with a lot of very basic mistakes being made.  Some of the hot food not being hot was one mistake, and a distinct lack of cutlery was another...knives seemed in short supply for the entire three days! 

However, the leisure facilities were fantastic, and as I'd done no exercise at all last week I was determined to make the most of them.  Accordingly, Tuesday evening saw me and Jules in the hotel gym.  My running so far has been very ad hoc (I'm kind of training to run 10k but not officially) - I've been really enjoying the ad hoc-ness actually - and has mainly consisted of trying to run further each time rather than trying to run faster.  So I decided to take advantage of having access to a treadmill to do some speedwork and a tempo run.  Tuesday evening was speedwork day - I ran a very easy mile, then ran for a minute on setting 6.0 on the treadmill (I couldn't work out how fast that actually was!), and then ran for a minute on setting 6.5.  I managed to repeat three times before deciding that if I did it again death - or at least vomiting - would be a very real possibility and finished off with a very easy run to 2 miles.  The whole thing took me about 30 minutes (ironically slower than I would have run it if I hadn't been doing speedwork, but never mind!) and I felt BRILLIANT afterwards...talk about the runner's high, I was absolutely exhilarated.  Jules and I decided to have room service afterwards, and pizza and Haagen Dazs leapt off the menu at us (how does that happen?!).  We ordered one bruschetta, one pizza and one salad between us and a little tub of Haagen Dazs each.  And they were amazing!  When Jules phoned down the lady who took the call asked if we'd mind waiting about forty-five minutes as the pizzas were cooked to order, and it was worth every minute of the wait - the bruschetta were delicious little morsels of tomato, goats cheese and pesto, the pizza was as fresh as anything, with lovely light dough, lots of Mediterranean vegetables and olives and just enough cheese, and the salad was fresh, tasty and drenched in a beautiful dressing.  I don't usually have dressing on my salads so it was a big treat!  The Haagen Dazs needs no words...the whole thing couldn't have been more perfect after a hard exercise session.

In spite of our pizza feast I was still glowing from my run on Wednesday morning and well ready for my breakfast (and also, I have to say, paralysed in the calf region, the treadmill must exercise different bits of the legs from running outside!).  And breakfast didn't disappoint.  There was a vast range of food, and I decided to start with muesli and low-fat natural yoghurt as I was really fancying some protein.  The basic muesli was nice, but there were also dishes of dates, pecan nuts, hazelnuts and sultanas and what I ended up with was AMAZING.  The dates and pecan nuts gave the whole thing a sticky-toffee pudding taste and the yoghurt really hit the spot.  I followed this up with a bowl of chopped melon, grape and pineapple (bliss) and then decided that the loaf of speciality bread which was sitting temptingly in a little warmer was just too tempting to resist.  And I was so glad I didn't...it was GORGEOUS.  It was wholemeal, and I think it was made with walnuts because it was beautifully moist and had a lovely nutty flavour.  Oats on the outside finished it off to perfection...well, no, the butter and honey with which I slathered it did that!  I don't eat bread much, so this was the most decadent and delicious treat.  I relived the taste sensations throughout the entire morning, and resolved to treat myself to some speciality bread for weekend breakfast decadence next time I was passing a farmers' market or other such outlet.   

Possibly due to my gargantuan breakfast I decided that a serious exercise session was in order on Wednesday afternoon.  I took myself off to the gym, but rather than using the weights machines, which I'm not a fan of, I made up my own arms and core circuit (decided to leave my poor legs alone!).  I warmed up on the rowing machine, then did 3 sets of 10 press-ups, 3 sets of 10 bicep curls, 3 sets of tricep dips (have I got bicep and tricep the right way round?!), 3 sets of 10 sit-ups, 3 sets of 10 oblique crunches and 3 minute-long planks (well, I think the first one or two were minute-long, the others were just aspirational!).  I repeated once, and that took me up to half-an-hour so I called it a day.  It's amazing how quickly you lose fitness - for various reasons I hadn't been to Body Tone for four or five weeks and I could really feel it.  My muscles were sore for days afterwards too, so I definitely gave them a good work-out!  After my circuits I did a quick change and treated myself to a delicious soak in the jacuzzi.  Then I hopped into the pool for 30 length-lets (it was a small pool!), 15 breast stroke and 15 front crawl.  It took about 15 minutes.  Then I had a truly amazing session in the sauna.  My room in the hotel was very cold (an arctic gale was blowing round the edges of the window) and I'd not slept very well the previous night because I was so cold, so it was truly blissful to be properly warm.  I stretched out full-length on the bench and basked in the heat and the smell of hot wood.  My aching calves liked it too!

I was so desparate to get on the treadmill one more time before the end of the conference that I was up at 6.30am on Thursday morning - which was quite impressive to say that it was the "Gala Dinner" the night before.  There was definitely lots of food (Mediterranean vegetable tian, Chicken Florentine and Blueberry and Lemon Shortbread Stack - not bad at all) and lots of a rather nice Australian Shiraz, and there may also have been disco dancing.  I cunningly put the quilt from the other bed in my room over me as well as my own though so I was toasty warm all night and slept like a log.  I decided that anything I did exercise-wise would be a bonus, so with that in mind attempted to run for as long as I could on setting 6.0, which I'd worked out by then was a 10-minute mile pace.  This is the pace that I want to run my 10k at, so I was slightly perturbed that I couldn't keep it up for all that long, I kept having to walk for a minute or two every 15 minutes or so.  That could just have been because of the late night/wine/early morning combination though.  I managed about 2 miles more or less at a 10-minute mile pace so it was a good first tempo run and interesting to feel what a 10-minute mile pace is actually like.  I treated myself to a few minutes in the jacuzzi and then the sauna afterwards - blissful again! 

The hotel food hit a new low on Thursday, which led to me coming home starving hungry and demolishing everything in my path - as a result I was seriously surprised to weigh in at 9st 0lbs, BMI 21.9.  Body fat is 29.3% this week!  I think I might have to be careful next week to offset all my food and wine in spite of this result!