We won!!

Luke and I went to a charity curry/quiz night at the Concorde club on Tuesday in aid of the Rose Road association. We won first prize in the raffle - a champagne afternoon tea at the De Vere hotel. The last thing I won at a raffle was a giant pink pig that I called Bacon. I think it's now in the loft at my parent's house, I must retrieve it one day...

Map reading isn't my strong point

Not only do I have difficulty reading maps, I'm also rubbish at following multimap directions. In my 3 years of driving, I've had a number of bad experiences of getting lost/missing motorway junctions/wondering where I am. Often behind these scenarios I've had to make a judgement call on which way to go, and nine times out of 10 I'm wrong. For example, last week I was following multimap directions to a hospital in North London. Multimap told me to leave the M25 and join the M40. What it didnt tell me (and I'm surprised at this) is whether to take the M40 east or west. So as the junction approached I had to make a quick decision - East or West? I was heading for Hatfield, which unhelpfully wasn't on any of the signs, so I picked West. Why did I pick M40 West - because it was the first slip road off the junction, and I figured that's what multimap must've meant.... I realised 2 junctions on that I was wrong. I should've gone East. I don't blame multimap (well not entirely) I'm just awful at mapreading. So I've bought a TomTom, that should fix things....

Farewell QE2

On Tuesday Luke and I made a trip down to Mayflower Park to wave goodbye to QE2 - departing for the final time to her final destination as a floating hotel in Dubai. We joined thousands of others (mostly locals) lining the shore to wave her off, and it was all pretty atmospheric, especially when the fireworks went off around her, framing her towering shape against the dark skyline.

I love running in the dark..

I love running in the dark. Just me and the ipod. The darkness helps me 'switch off' from my surroundings, and 'switch on' to my me-time. This evening was an exception to the rule though - I couldn't 'switch off' completely - running with all the fireworks exploding around me was pretty cool.

On the Nike plus website I've entered a new challenge to keep me motivated, clocking one of the top 10 5k times for a chance to race against Paula in London. Doubt I'll be that good, but it all adds to the motivation factor!

Plod on.

I never knew study could be so much fun!

I had 16 hours of lectures this weekend... and loved every minute of it! (Except maybe the last 5 minutes on sunday when my brain cells had kind of turned to mush after having such a good workout.)

I drove to Coventry early saturday morning, for the start of my sports nutrition course. It was a really full weekend, with general uni induction stuff and a range of introductory 'refresher' lectures on metabolism. I must've enjoyed it, because even 4 hours straight on energy metabolism fascinated me all the way through!

The next steps are to complete an online anti-doping course, to become a registered anti-doping adviser (pretty cool..) and to do 130 hours of self study over the next 2 months (ouch!, I made the right decision going part-time). There's a number of special discussion forums online designed to keep us on track whilst we're away from uni.

Dietetics is a small world, I discovered I knew at least 3 people on the course of 24 through a mutual friend/colleague/university.

Who knows where this will lead, but I'm just enjoying it for what it is at the moment!

Kate enters the Land of Blog...

So, I was reading Luke's blog, which I must admit I don't often do (secondary to facebook distractions) and thought I quite fancied starting up my own blog. That way, readers not only get the Musings from the Potting shed, but also the Ponderings from the Kitchen. Luke has yet to find out my intentions, I wonder if he'll approve of my blog title...



Today's my last day at home to do some final pre-reading cramming before my Sports Nutrition post-grad course starts this weekend. I'm feeling fairly confident that I have a good enough basic knowledge to get by, although until I get there it's difficult to know how much basic knowledge they're expecting us to have! I've spent the last couple of days revising the Krebs Cycle, something which I barely understood the first time round at uni, I'm not sure if I'll still be able to wing it at post-grad level though!



Today I did my third run since my appendicitis episode in August. The doctors told me I had to have 6 weeks off from training post-surgery. I'm aching today. Shows how quickly fitness levels can drop! At the beginning of the year I linked my Nike plus trainers upto my iPod, measuring speed and distance run - it's a genius idea and really does get you out the house when it's pouring with rain and the sofa seems so much more appealing. Anyway, yesterday I went for my second run post-surgery and when I got back I sat down in front of my laptop with a cup of tea and uploaded the stats of my run to track my progress. Only to find my latest run wasn't there. My iPod had reset itself to January 2000, and, as I later discovered, Nike plus was established in 2003. All that hard work for nothing!