The Weather's Turning...

I had a few problems connecting to the internet.
After coming home from a long long day at work, and a fitness assessment in the gym, I wanted nothing more than to sit, chill out, and browse the web. No such luck, as the first popup message I get on logging in, is that the wireless network can't be detected.
Now let me explain the dread I felt.

I spend, maybe seven or eight hours a day on the internet. While my body sits motionless on my bed, my mind is soaring all over the world, absorbing information from a thousand sources, reading about events in places I've never been, learning about things that I'd never even heard of. Hundreds of millions of tunes, videos, stories, pictures, articles, all completely accessible for me to look at at my leisure. The Internet in short, makes me so much bigger than myself.

Being without the internet, when you're used to having it, is intolerable. You feel like you are trapped inside your own world. The internet allows all of us to communicate across the world, like some vast digital whalesong, it's an awesome and beautiful thing to behold.
When you're cut off from it, you're trapped in your own part of the world. Unable to express yourself, unable to explore, play or learn. While there is a whole world outside your front door, you become confined to only what you can see with your own eyes, to what you can sense with your own senses. While the world outside your window is the same world that everyone else lives in, their parts of the world are hundreds and thousands of miles away from you, and all you have to experience is the outside existance you've always known. It's like losing the sixth sense that the internet gives us...

That is the panic I feel when I see that the internet is not accessible.
Fortunatley, for me, this didn't last long, as you can see, and I managed to get the damn computer working. So here I am...

Yes, as the title says, the weather is indeed turning, and it is bitterly cold outside. By UK standards anyway. Outside thermometers put the temperature at 2.5C (36.5F), and with no clouds in the sky, and it only being 18:23, I suspect colder weather is to come.

I undertook a mock fitness assessment at work to see how I am doing with my goals. I have to admit, I got mixed results. So mixed that I honestly can't decide whether to be excited, or disappointed.
I had been optimistically aiming for a 1.5 mile time of 11:30. A time which may still be achievable, but only through considerable effort. I calculated the speed I need to run at to achieve 1.5 miles in 11:30 - some 12.6kph, and after half of the 11:30, decided that I am, at the minute, not fit enough to run the entire course at that speed.
Fair enough. On further research, One of the regiments that I had wanted to join, has a required 1.5 mile time of a more realistic 13:15. Easier to attain.
Out of a requirement of (approx) 45 pressups in two minutes, I managed to do 42.
Out of a requirement of around 50 situps in two minutes, I managed to do a pitiful 31.

Unfortunatley, that wasn't the worst of it.
I decided that the best way to run at a constant speed, was to use the treadmill, and set it to a certain speed. In retrospect, this was a very bad idea, as treadmills are extremely unforgiving on your shins. Indeed, after only 6ish minutes running, I stopped with substantial pain in my right, and moderate pain in my left shins. Seems to be a combination of having not stretched enough (5 minutes, as opposed to 30 reps), and running on too hard a surface.

Still, I'm optimistic - I hope - that given time, I will be able to make the grade. I'm going to let my legs recover for a day or two, and then I'm going to go running in the park again. As for situps and pressups - I'll be doing several sets daily. I am determined to get my arse out of my dead end job, and into a new carreer.

Right now though, it's 18:50, and I am going to have a couple of hours sleep. Just you try and stop me.

Later!