Posts filed under 'Exercise/training'
You know when you watch a movie and there’s the bit in the middle where the character has to undergo some kind of transformation? Maybe they have to get in shape for a marathon or start up a business or work a million hours to make money to win the heart of the girl. You know what I mean. It’s during this part of the film that the character’s actions are set to a piece of manic music and they go from barely being able to crunch a sit up to being able to run 26 miles with ease.
It’s uplifting and motivational to watch. Sure, they show the tough bits of them getting sweaty and deflated, but within the space of a 3 minute soundtrack, their lives are transformed and it all looks ludicrously easy.
Right about now I’m living that bit. Apparently real life isn’t set to some toe tapping music and it takes quite a lot longer than three minutes for everything to magically transform.
In fact my movie would show quite a lot more sweating and rushing around. Amazingly a few weeks of exercise hasn’t seen me transform from Mr Blobby to a toned goddess and putting a few calls in hasn’t seen me instantly raise all the money I need.
Far from it. Despite writing to many companies, I’ve not managed to secure any main sponsors. Understandable I guess given the current economic climate - but that doesn’t happen in the movies does it? So I’ve spent quite a bit of time pulling together my fund raising events, specifically trying to secure prizes for an auction I’ll be holding at my ladies tea party. Thanks to the generosity of some lovely companies, I’m making some headway.
Sweaty Betty - what a fab company! Their sports gear is gorgeous but they also live their brand and are incredibly supportive of women. So a huge thanks to them for donating some gift vouchers.
Boden - again, kindly donating some gift vouchers so that the mummies coming to my tea party can update their summer wardrobe.
Aunty Ollie - one of my clients for donating vouchers for their brand new beautiful children’s wear range, which we’re about to launch.
Stardust Kids - for kindly donating an item my son will lust after and covet and insist I buy for him: A kid’s electric guitar. All the coolest kids have them
Darling & Darling - another client for donating one of their lovely keepsake photo albums.
Hannah Baker - a local mum who provides beauty treatments has offered some pampering treatments, which I would dearly love myself
Babylicious - for donating a month’s supply of their delicious frozen baby or toddler meals, something all busy mums need a supply of.
Cuddledry - for donating one of their ingenious baby or toddler towels. If you haven’t seen them before, go take a look at their range. I LOVE the bug one.
Fink Cards has very kindly agreed to give everyone who comes to the Tea Party fundraiser a free gift worth £5. I’ll keep it a secret as to what it is.
And lastly but most excitingly of all, the absolutely brilliant Tots to Travel has donated a family holiday!! If you haven’t booked a holiday yet for this year, I highly recommend that you visit their website. Their properties cater for families with young children and will have you drooling over your keyboard.
Besides organising that little lot, I spent my weekend driving around the countryside sticking posters up for my nearly new sale and my pile of stuff to be sold is sitting patiently in the spare bedroom waiting to be labelled up.
I also got to go shopping on Saturday. Not for the latest fashions you understand. No, my shopping list included a sleeping bag, sensible knickers, a sailing knife, seasick tablets, wet wipes and other glamour items. That’s because this Sunday I start my first traing session out at sea and I feel woefully underprepared.
I’ve had a cold for the last week so have done no fitness training, and I’ve misplaced my training manual and haven’t been memorising the various procedures that we’ll be practising out at sea. I also haven’t even started to learn the knots I’m supposed to have mastered by the weekend. So finding the training manual is becoming a bit of a priority.
And finally, I’ve found a nanny! Hooray. Thanks to the help of Newbury Nannies who have kindly agree to reduce their placement fee by 25%, we’ve found a nanny who can become mummy for the times that I’m away. She is a 60 year old lady who makes 20 year olds look positively sluggish given her amount of energy. She comes in and just becomes mum. Which is brilliant.
So slowly and surely I’m ticking things off my list. It’s not taking three minutes and none of it is set to jaunty music, but hopefully at the end of it all, it will still be a blockbuster.
P.S. If anyone knows of any other companies who’d be willing to donate a prize for my auction, please let me know. And I’m also in need of some sponsored champagne that I can sell at my tea party. All donations gratefully received.
Now, where’s my training manual….
Tags: aunty ollie, babylicious, boden, darling & darling, fink cards, movie, sailing, shopping, Sponsors, stardust kids, sweaty betty, tots to travel, Training
March 30th, 2009
I haven’t sailed off into the sunset just yet. I’m still here, just a leetle teeny bit frenetic so blogging has had to take a back seat (as has twittering, facebooking, exercising, housecleaning and cooking).
My fund-raising plans are now well underway, with two big events planned. Firstly, I’ll be holding a Nearly New Sale on 9 May. This isn’t just a good way for me to raise money, it also means that I can at last get rid of all the piles of baby stuff loitering in corners of the house but which I can’t bear to just put in the recyling bin. Thanks to the kind help of some of the pre-school mummies - especially Caroline - it’s starting to come together although I still need more sellers not to mention plenty of buyers!
Secondly, I’ll be holding a girly tea party in a marquee in our garden on 13 June. Many of my lovely clients and people I’ve worked with have agreed to donate some prizes for a raffle or auction including Fink Cards, Babylicious, Darling & Darling and Cuddledry. There will be tea, cake, champagne, bunting and general girly loveliness. Just a shame I’ll be too busy rushing around like an insaniac doing everything to actually sit down and nibble on dainty sandwiches.
If anyone lives remotely close to Newbury, Berkshire and is interested in attending either of these events, please let me know! And if anyone else would like to donate a prize for the auction, shout! I shall swoon and kiss you and generally sing your praises. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll be able to put out flyers about your business for all the mummies to look at.
A big thanks also to Babycentre for being the first corporate to sponsor me. Please go visit the Babycentre site - particularly if you don’t know anything about babies. Type a random question you may have about children into the search tool and the site is almost guaranteed to have an answer. It’s a mine of useful information, particularly if you have children like mine who didn’t come with a guide book.
I’ve also made some headway on the press front - I’ll be on Mybabyradio.com this Thursday between 1 and 2 pm. And hopefully the local paper will run the piece they came to take a picture for several weeks ago. I’ve now added a press page to this blog to keep track of all the latest news.
Lastly, my training manual has arrived. OMG. I know how to sail and I’m daunted by the amount of info I need to bone up on before I head off for my first training course on 5 April. I think if they sent the training manual out before you signed up, no-one would do it. There are whole sections, for example, that deal with how to handle sea sickness and how to avoid the spread of germs on the boat and how not to set fire to the boat and how to send out a Mayday signal if you do indeed set fire to the boat.
My brain has barely any room left in it. I’m not sure how I’m going to squeeze this all in. Not to mention that I’ve just discovered that besides the first 3 weeks training I have to do, there’s a 4th week of pure theory. I thought that was at home study but apparently not. So somehow I need to fit that in too. Oh, and that involves meteorology and navigation. I assume from that, that it’s not as simple as just plugging in: ‘Rio’ to a satnav and setting sail.
I shall fill you in further as I delve deeper into the manual. And I know I still owe you the next installment in my sailing history: The teen years including bad hair pics. It’s coming. Eventually.
Tags: babycentre, babylicious, cuddledry, darling&darling, finkcards, fund-raising, mybabyradio, press, sailing
March 17th, 2009
‘What’s that new fragrance you’re wearing there madam?’
‘Who me? Oh, it’s called Stress. You can buy it in bulk when you sign up to do something ridiculous.’
My to do list at the moment looks like this:
- Run business. Do client work. Keep getting results.
- Look after children. Stop children from fighting. Get children to eat things other than bread and jam/marmite. Help son1 be more creative and sociable.
I had a parent/teacher meeting today. Good news is that he’s ace at maths and is ok with reading, so no extra homework for me there. However, he is very ‘boy-y’ (read pushes people a lot). I know. And still doesn’t like joining in. I know. And is behind in creativity. Actually lacking it altogether. But he does know 20 - 3 = 17 and he’s only just turned five. So he could be a genius but poor artist or he could be a computer programmer and keep me in fabulous shoes in my dotage. I vote the latter.
- Raise funds. The plan is starting to take shape. I have a tentative date for a nearly new sale that I’m hoping will make me millions (ok, thousands, alright, hundreds. Pence. Whatever). I have other plans in the offing. All of them take a LOT of time. Time isn’t something I have much of.
- House. It needs to be cleaned and laundry done. But I feel that stepping over the piles of washing helps with building my leg muscles and forms part of my training programme, so they can just stay where they are.
- Training. Firstly, I’ve still not been able to do anymore physical exercise since overdoing it on Saturday. This won’t do. Secondly, my first sailing training session is on the horizon. I head off for my first taste of life at sea on 5 - 12 April. I was cool with this. That was until I asked for the available dates for the second training session. My options are
a) do it 12 - 19 April (er no, that would be two weeks back to back. I might need a short break while I break myself in).
b) do it 26 April - 3 May (a possibility but doesn’t leave me a massive amount of time in April to do work and it would mean heading out to sea the day after my Nearly New sale so I might be a little pooped and I don’t have any childcare.)
c) 10 - 17 May. My mother arrives from New Zealand on the 13th, stays two days before going to Ireland. I need to be here for this.
d) 24 -31 May. My mother is here all of that week to see me and the boys. And no, she can’t be the one left here to look after them.
I’m in a bit of a pickle aren’t I?
And don’t even get me started on Part C of the training.
This would all be very, very doable if I had a granny living nearby, a fulltime nanny, no job and pots of money. Sadly I have none of the above. Anyone got a spare fairy godmother loitering in the attic?
Clever suggestions on a post it note please. Just don’t say give up. That isn’t going to happen.
Tags: Money, sailing, stress, Training, work
February 24th, 2009
On Saturday I finally had a chance to put the new exercise programme into action. On paper, it looked doable. I donned my finest aerobics gear, dug out my exercise ball, weights and mat and cranked the stereo up.
According to the instructions kindly provided by personal trainer EJ, it was a simple series of exercises alternating between cardio and various muscle groups. Muscles that until now, I didn’t realise were actually there.
After the first set I was streaming sweat, purple in the face with wibbly wobbly legs. After all the sets were completed I was officially a mess. But the glow of self satisfaction buoyed me.
Waking up on Sunday that glow had vanished, being replaced with sheer agony. Stairs became an object of pure evil. And the pain involved in trying to sit down on the loo meant that I pushed my bladder capacity to the brink. Being upright or being in a seated position I could manage, nothing in between.
The only thing for it was to try and work the muscles out, so I went for a gentle walk. Anyone watching me might have thought I’d had an unfortunate meeting of a carrot and my backside given my ungainly stance. All the walk did was result in my calves, butt and knees aching too. I gave up and resolved to stay in the upright or horizontal position for the rest of the day. The children were bemused when I didn’t hop up to get them their million daily requests and said: ‘But I thought exercise was good for you mummy?’ Indeed, as did I.
But my husband needed me to feed garden cuttings into the chipper. As this was a vertical job it sounded doable. It wasn’t. It merely served to remind me that I have no hand or wrist strength as snapping green branches proved impossible. I soldiered on realising just how much bending over there was when it cames to picking up sticks.
I got out of gardening duty that afternoon as I had to take son 1 to a birthday party. It was a fabulous party with lots of party games all set to thumping tunes. My son, always reluctant to join in, wasn’t overly interested in taking part unless I did it too. Once again, my legs made themselves known to me as I danced the hokey cokey and whizzed around playing musical statues.
Having not won a single game, my son was about to stage a revolt when musical bumps kicked off. Fuelled by E-numbers and sugar, he danced like a fiend. By dance, I mean doing star jumps and lots of high bouncing with groovy hand gestures. He did this with incredible energy for a full three songs. It came down to him and a little girl. Despite the little girl hitting the decks before him at the end, the party organiser (bless her cotton socks) recognised the glint of sheer determination in his eyes and announced that my son was the winner. The joy on his face was priceless.
This morning, I hobbled my way downstairs bright and early thanks to shooting leg pains waking me up. While sitting downstairs nursing a cup of coffee, I heard son 1 making his way down the stairs saying:
‘Ow’
‘Ow’
‘Ow’
‘Ow’
with every step.
Upon seeing me he said: ‘Mummy, I think I’ve got what you’ve got….’ and clutching his legs, he stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed. That’s what about 300 star jumps will do to you mate. Glad to know that even fit five year olds aren’t immune to the joys of excess exercise.
Am off to get the heat rub now…
Tags: exercise, muscles, pain, party
February 22nd, 2009
