Lance Armstrong’s Time Trial bike has been stolen!

Lance’s TT Bike

I mean’t to blog about this before and help launch the campaign to raise awareness of the fact Lance Armstrong’s Time Trial bike was stolen. As it turns out it has now been recovered. So why am I posting this after the event. I will tell you.

Firstly I have a lot of respect for Lance Armstrong and what he does and has achieved. He is a credit to the sporting world and world at large. Not only that but I am following him on Twitter. So what is Twitter. Wikipedia describes it as:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

And that is pretty much it. However it is more sublime than that. In the same way the communications industry didn’t see the benfits of SMS till teenagers took it over and handed it to ther masses, Twitter fills a niche for socially connecting people at light speed, with up to the second information. Now I have only been using it for a few weeks now but I am hopelessly addicted. Rather than an apparent waste of time I actually use it as a productivity tool. Here are my main reasons.

• Connect with like minded exercise junkies who motivate each other
• Get bite size snippets of technical information for work and my running/triathlon training
• Get breaking news and hot topics that are being discussed on twitter

Twitter along with this blog keeps me motivated to carry on training. Now this isn’t the only source of motivation, let us be honest, but it does help. One of the great things about Twitter is the fact it has an open source API that allows developers to do all kinds of things to make Twitter even better. Take Twitscoop, I use a Twitter client called Tweetdeck that has a panel that shows what is buzzing on Twitter at that moment. Call it a Twitter cloud if you will. It was on Monday of this week that I found a lot of buzz around HTC so I looked and sure enough at 10:30am on Monday HTC had announced two new Windows Mobile phones. I found this out at around 11am, now that is pretty good going and without Twitter I would have stumbled across it much much later. Not convinced this is useful well it is to me. In a time when outsourcing is in vogue I look to outsource my tv viewing as well as internet research. Rather than trawling blogs and websites for information I wait for the pertinent information to come to me. Call it Perato’s principle or the 80/20 rule put to good use. And if you ask yes I am a fan of Tim Ferris and his productivity techniques.

Another important reason is that Twitter appeals to my sense of keeping my followers up to date. The sort of thing that I could write on Twitter just wouldn’t work on this blog, certainly not the way I intentioned. No this blog is more for informative blog posts. Whereas Twitter is a snapshot in time of how I am getting on in my training. Doing the same thing here just would not work and make this blog pretty much unreadable in my opinion. It helps keep this blog fresh with hopefully decent blog posts rather than diarised updates. Any how you can follow me by clicking the Twitter feed on the left hand side or going to Tuxzek on Twitter.

Which brings me to wrapping this one up. While I might not be able to locate Lance’s bike for him, I wouldn’t have known it was stolen unless I was interested in what he was up to. However by making use of Twitter he made people aware of his situation and now the bike has been recovered it might have helped in the recovery process. The power of Twitter.

To follow Lance Armstrong on Twitter click here

Training update #1 : January 2009

running man

Originally uploaded by esbjorn2

Following on from my last post I had a lull of week where I did no training last week. A number of factors contributed to this, 1) it was snowing and apart from anything proved difficult to go the gym let alone go to work, 2) I slipped and badly bruised my arm in the first snow fall on Monday which in itself prevented any exercise for about 5 days and finally 3) I more importantly probably needed the weeks rest as I did more exercise in the month of January than any other month in over a year.

I had a really good training month concentrating on core strength and running ahead of my two half marathons in March and April. I burned more than 10,200 calories during my training, now this calorie count is based on my weight and height taken from SportTracks the software I use for logging my training. I will introduce SportTracks and my training equipment in a forth-coming blog post. It turned out that I burned more calories in January 2009 than I did in any other month (except September 2007) since I started logging my training in SportTracks. I started my log in August 2007. So I was really happy with this achievement.

Time wise I put in about 14 hours for the month which works out as an average of over 3 hours per week. Considering that we have two kids now, the second being born just before Christmas I don’t think that is too bad going. Would love to pull in 6 hours but I don’t have that kind of luxury just yet as my time is taken with the kids and other stuff but I digress.

The above chart shows my calories burned since I started logging back in August 2007. It is worth noting that January is the big bar second from right. And you can see that December was a bit of a lull month.

Onwards and upwards my training for February now beckons.

Krispy Kreme blewout my training plan

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts!

Originally uploaded by au_tiger01

OK it is almost the end of January and it is no surprise that it is around this time that all the well intentioned exercise and fad diets decide to slip. I am no different in that respect, I have succumbed to some Krispy Kreme glazed donuts today.

It all started back at Christmas time. Our boss, as bosses do, sent us a xmas card. Nothing unusual there but what I didn’t know till the new year was that it was actually a voucher for a box of one dozen krispy kreme donuts. As all my team mates at work also got Krispy Kreme xmas cards we decided to club together and get a box of donuts each day this week. It came to a head today when I ended up having 4 donuts. Yes that’s right 4! It didn’t end there I also went for a full english breakfast. Needless to say my nutrition went out the window today.

Now this didn’t stop me from doing my training. I still went down the gym at lunchtime and did a 4 mile run to work off those donuts. I worked out each donut was 254 kcal and my 4 mile run worked off 500 or so kcal. So 2 down and 2 to go. I have been planning and logging my nutrition since the first week in January so I know today was just a blip and well if you are working hard at your goals it is OK now again to have a bad day.

The lesson today is even when your best laid plans go off the rails just dust yourself off and steer yourself back onto that course you set yourself. Remember it, but don’t dwell on it and carry on regardless.

Chicken, Chickpea & Apricot recipe

Lentils and Chickpeas

Originally uploaded by rusvaplauke

Continuing my mini series of recipes I present a very healthy dish for your delectation. This is not my own recipe and is actually taken from Anita Bean’s book The complete guide to Sports Nutrition (How to eat for maximum performance) which can be purchased from Amazon and all good book retailers.

Information

Serves: 2
Calories: 502 per serving
Protein: 47g per serving
Carbs: 52g per serving
fat: 13.3g per serving
fibre: 11.6g per serving
(The above values are taken directly from the book and are not my calculations)

Anita says: chicken with apricots sounds an unusual combination but it tastes delicious and supplies lots of valuable nutrients. Apricots are high in beta-carotene (vitamin A)

Ingredients

• oil, 1 tsp
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 piece of fresh ginger
• 2 chicken breasts, cut into large pieces
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 75g of dried, ready-to-eat apricots
• 150ml of water
• 400g or one tin of chickpeas

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in a wok or heavy based pan
2. Stir fry the onion until softened. Then stir in the ginger and fry for a minute.
3. Add the chicken and stir fry with onions and ginger for about 4 minutes.
4. Add the apricots, water and chickpeas.
5. Simmer for 15 minutes.
6. Serve with boiled rice and green vegetables

Tuxzek’s tip

This is a firm favorite in our house. It is really simple to cook and takes no time at all, we sometimes even fore go the rice and just have vegetables as it is quite a filling dish. This dish is quite dry which some might find to be to their liking we prefer a bit of sauce. So what you can do is grab a chicken stock cube and use about 250ml of hot water to make the stock but also add a tablespoon of corn flour to thicken it into a sauce. Delicimo. Enjoy.

Sponsor me and help Cancer Research

Father’s Hands

Originally uploaded by Shutr

A close friend has recently lost his wife to cancer, this has prompted me to doing my tiny bit to help by taking part in 3 sports events in 2009 and raising money for Cancer Research. I will be running the Reading half marathon on 29th March, 7 days later I will be running the White Horse Half Marathon on the 5th April and then finally I will be taking part in a triathlon at Blenheim Palace on the 7th June 2009.

As I do the events I will add here a post-race report to keep you updated with my progress. The post-race report should be up on the Monday after the race event.

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