Students saw me working with the Visible Body beta software online in the anatomy revision session on Wednesday. After today’s anatomy exam (and with the last exam of the week coming tomorrow) you probably won’t care any more, but here’s the link:
www.visiblebody.com
It has been in a free to use, beta format up until today. From May we’ll have to pay to use it but they’re still offering 7 day demos.
Hot, cold, hot, cold
I had a VO2max workout this morning on the track, running fast miles. The first felt good, the second felt horrible, and so it continued downward (but I maintained my times). My warm down was a 1600m shuffle, not a run. It was a good workout and one of the toughest I have to do, so I only do about one a month as it destroys my legs. If I did it every week I’d soon quit running.
The point of this post is in linking back to Alan Couzens’ article on serious recovery again. As recommended by Alan and by Gareth Davies, the guy in the Swansea University Sports Village who for want of a better description, looks after my legs, I used a hot shower – cold shower cycle to warm and chill my exhausted muscles after the run. The aim, you’ll remember, is to use alternating vasodilation and vasoconstriction to aid pumping the fluid stuck within the muscles back into the systemic circulation. It makes your legs go an interesting pink colour too.
It felt pretty good. You can certainly tell when you’ve warmed up your legs properly as when you stick them under the cold tap a swearword will appear from nowhere. The muscles cool quickly though and its quite comfortable. After five or so cycles I was done. Walking (very, very slowly) back to my office my legs felt, er, “clean”. It’s difficult to describe. Fresh is definitely the wrong word, but they didn’t feel heavy, fat or stiff. They were tired, but they felt good. I’ll see if I can get a stock of ice in for the Tewkesbury half-marathon in 10 days’ time.
Ideas
“Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.” ~ anonymous.
New Orleans Voodoo
Do you like that? Jo brought me back a voodoo doll from New Orleans (she was at an anatomy conference there last week). This thing is horrible. It’s much more horrible in real life and this photo doesn’t capture the tackiness or the nastiness of whatever this thing is stuffed with (coconut hair?). I’m tempted to take it to this morning’s exam to sit and hold it against my chest with a mad, mumbling gaze. I’m not sure the already freaked out first years would find it as funny as I would, though.
Jo and I try to bring back the worst gifts we can find for each other when we travel. I don’t see how I’m going to beat this.
Bradley’s cake
I think everyone liked the cake. I think Kim did an amazing job. Its probably not a great time to start up a new cake making business though, eh?
Twitter, twitter, twitter
Do you still not Twitter? OK, so much of what I tweet is random crap, but I’m sure that was the original, microblogging intention. And I’d love to know about your day to day random crap.
It feels as thought Twitter is everywhere these days, and I think that’s a good thing. Can it keep socially lazy people like me connected to you? I’m approaching my first 1,000th tweet, BTW.
Twitter.com
BBC article: Can Twitter survive the hype cycle?
Peppa Pig cake!
Kim made this for Jo’s son. How great is that?
St George’s Day
It’s St George’s Day today, patron saint of England and many other countries.
Who?
Serious Recovery
Alan Couzens has written a great article about recovery (Serious Recovery For Serious Athletes) on his blog. More chillaxing and hot baths for me then, but how can I freeze that much ice? Less food and more water in the freezer I guess. Sorry Kim.
Link:
Serious Recovery For Serious Athletes.
Back home & back to work
Yep, we’re all back to the routine today. I thought I was tired running around after this lot last week but my brain seems to be working much better after a break from work. And I only came back to 200 emails, so Easter might not be a bad time of year to take a break.
I’m guessing that Jack & Ben had similar expressions to those of the photo above on their way to school this morning after the Easter break. They’ll be happy in class though.