Feels like I’ve been swimming this set for a long time, now. Hopefully improvements will continue and I can kill it off and move on soon. It was much quieter at the pool today so much easier to swim, though I did have to politely ask one swimmer who was managing to swim diagonally between the ends of two lane lines if they wouldn’t mind sticking to just the one…
Anyhow, the set was quiet tough, but I did just manage to make nineteen reps before my first and only fail. That being one more than in the previous session I was happy enough with it and hope the good news will continue tomorrow.
USRPT distance this year: 67,300m Total distance this year: 69,100m
The pool was quite busy today. I had to persuade a couple of pensioners that they’d really be better off the “slow” lane instead of trying to share the only other lane available with myself and another swimmer going about twice as fast as they were. They weren’t best pleased, but common sense prevailed in the end.
I don’t usually swim that well when the pool is crowded because the water becomes very choppy and I didn’t sleep at all well last night, but I can’t really complain about today’s performance, particularly after yesterday’s disaster. I managed eighteen reps before failing just the once on nineteen, though I was a little late setting off on a couple as a result of trying to avoid the other swimmer in the lane. That messed up my next rest interval a bit which in turn made the following rep somewhat harder. Still, I’ve got no complaints given the improvement.
Hopefully I can now continue to improve and we’ll just gloss over Monday’s performance 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 65,550m Total distance this year: 67,350m
I was back at the pool today with some hope of completing my current set. It soon became painfully obvious however that it just wasn’t going to happen. Right from the start I was struggling. No idea why. I was working very hard, but just couldn’t recover fast enough. Perhaps I didn’t get enough sleep or maybe I’m getting a mild cold or something, but whatever it is my performance was certainly not up to last week’s standard.
In the end I failed on rep twelve and then again on rep eighteen, making it to the end of the set in very ragged fashion. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow.
USRPT distance this year: 63,800m Total distance this year: 65,600m
Last swim of the week and I was determined to do one more rep than yesterday. I did manage to do just that, but towards the end things were getting quite ragged. These last few reps are proving quite difficult to get through.
Be nice to finish off this set next week if I can though.
USRPT distance this year: 62,100m Total distance this year: 63,900m
It’s been another unpleasant weekend weather-wise (pretty much for everyone in the UK and Ireland by the looks of the news), but I eventually forced myself to get outside and do a little work on the observatory.
The first job was to finish off the warm room floor around the cable trunking. Unfortunately that meant removing my temporary power supply (I had an extension lead running up through the gap). When the weather is a little more pleasant I’ll work out another way to do it. I also managed to get caught outside in a sudden hailstorm, which wasn’t pleasant
After that I used up all the remains of the insulation I have, fitting it in the warm room walls. The builder’s merchant was supposed to deliver some more last week, but they didn’t turn up. I’ll have to enquire about it tomorrow. I’d only piggy-backed it on an order for some other jobs because fitting the insulation is a nice simple inside job that doesn’t require lots of wandering back and forth between the observatory and workshop.
Finally during a break in the cloud I dropped the end flap down and trimmed a little off one corner where it was binding on the roof rails, which means it now closes much more neatly.
That’s two more jobs ticked off the list which is good news.
Doesn’t look like there’s much of a let-up in the weather this week other than for a few hours of sunshine tomorrow, so I’ll try to get outside then and re-route the extension cable to allow me to do things inside in the evenings. I’ve got a lot of jobs backing up that need at least half-reasonable weather though. I need to be able to get on with those at some point soon.
Another repetition of my current set. I felt very sluggish when warming up today. Not that I was particularly tired, but it just felt as though I was swimming through treacle 🙁
It didn’t seem to affect my performance too badly though. This time I managed twenty-one reps before failing on twenty-two and then the last two were a doddle to finish off.
Given a refreshing night’s sleep there’s a chance that I could complete the entire set tomorrow. If I can make twenty-two reps then I’d really feel I needed to push myself just to make two more. At which point I’d have to have a rethink of my current strategy and change the focus of my sets slightly I think. But that’s for another day 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 60,350m Total distance this year: 62,150m
Yet another repeat of the same set I’ve been doing in the last couple of weeks, but things are progressing slowly so I’m not going to get distressed about that.
Today I managed twenty reps before failing on twenty-one and then finishing off the set relatively easily. That’s one more than yesterday, keeping things moving in the right direction.
USRPT distance this year: 58,600m Total distance this year: 60,400m
After the disaster of my last session I was determined to do better today and I’m pleased to report that’s how it went. Not a big improvement on my previous best performance, but an improvement nonetheless.
Today I managed nineteen reps before failing on twenty, after which the last four weren’t too hard to finish off. Hopefully I can keep things going tomorrow.
USRPT distance this year: 56,850m Total distance this year: 58,650m
During last week I managed to get most of the final piece of cladding at the tops of the walls in place. All that remains now is a piece above the door and the piece below the flap in the southern gable, which I can’t do before the flap is completed because I want it to trap the strip of EPDM that will stop rain being blown in through the gap where the hinges are.
The forecast for this weekend was pretty miserable. However, Saturday wasn’t actually too bad so I decided to try to finish the end flap. The first job was to make a few adjustments to the fit, then get all the hinges on. I was planning on using large strap hinges, but I found some stainless security hinges intended for hanging fire doors on the Screwfix website and decided to use those instead.
To fit the flap to the wall I made up the supports that will hold the flap when it’s down. I’m not really very happy with them at the moment. They do support the flap, but they just don’t feel quite as stable as I’d like. I might have to revisit them later, perhaps to add some extra bracing or even another support in the middle of the wall. Once I had them in place it was easy to put the flap in the “down” position to fit the hinges to the top of the wall. As I lifted the flap into the closed position to check the fit again, the rain started. I think I need a small amount of adjustment at one end, but it will have to wait for dry weather.
Because I wasn’t quite ready to stop at that point I finished off by using up the offcuts of insulation that have been lying about the observatory for the last few weeks to fill the smaller spaces in the warm room walls.
A couple of photos with the flap in the “down” position:
By the time I took this one of the flap closed up I was starting to lose the light.
I wasn’t feeling great when I went to the pool today. Nothing specific, just not quite right. No idea why.
Clearly there was something not right as the session was a complete disaster. I couldn’t even finish the set. Not a good day nor an encouraging start to the month. Best forgotten 🙁
USRPT distance this year: 55,100m Total distance this year: 56,900m
