This Week At The Gym: Week 14

There's a nasty cold going round London and I had it last week. I made it through Monday, woke up on Tuesday realising there was no way I was up to commuting, so I missed the planned Abs class that lunchtime. Wednesday I went in because I had reservations with my sister for an early supper at Murano, and I had no intention of missing that. (Sweetbreads followed by pigeon followed by a pistachio souffle. Some of the best food I've eaten in the last five years.) I went for a run Wednesday lunchtime, and tried the SCS class on Thursday evening. This was the beginners class, and it's about doing some basic weights exercises fairly quickly without a lot of rest in between the sets. Light weights for the first time. On Friday morning, I was aching from the after-effects of the squats. We had different tutor for Friday evening Pilates, who took us through some different exercises that made other different parts of me ache. And I still have that cold.

So let's talk about "playing hurt and working sick". Listen to athletes and sportsmen / women, and they almost always have something wrong with them. It's so unusual for them not to have an ache, a cold, a sprained this or a tired that, they actually make a point of saying they're on top form. If you want to achieve and maintain a respectable level of fitness, you will be aching, occasionally in need of massages and osteopathy (athletes take regular consumption of both for granted) and cannot take time off from training just because you have a cold. If you have an actual thermometer-busting fever, sure, you stop because training on a fever can mess up your heart, but if all you have is a cold and a cough then you train, in fact, you compete unless your coach and doctor physically restrain you.

One of the many, many things the know-nothing Government health and fitness advice slides over is this harsh fact. If you want to make a serious difference to your fitness and weight, you are not going to do it by taking a week off every time you get a cold or feel under the weather. You'll lose at least four, if not eight weeks a year like that, and each time you do, you'll lose most of the progress you made in the previous period.

Friday lunch with The Gang took us to a Korean behind Centrepoint, where I had really tasty noodles and beef. That evening I weighed 88.8 kgs with a body fat of 19.8%. The weight will come off, as it's mostly water retained by the noodles, and possibly a reaction to the Fluox, but I am going to have to swear off the Friday lunches until I've hit the target weight.

My primary purpose is to get to the end of the day without having a drink. My second purpose is to get to the damn targets I've set myself. Everything else comes after that.