This is a new blog/diary to track my sporting/fitness progress.
I did not start it at the beginning of my current fitness journey as I was unsure if it would actually get anywhere at the time I started it.
I will however move all of the various posts such that they appear in the month/week that they relate to.
This first post will provide some historical background to what will come later.
I have never really been the sporty type. At school I was pretty useless at most sports and especially hated running, so much so that on one occasion when I was being told to run 1500m for the third time that week, I simply sat down on the grass and refused to do it.
I was no good at football/soccer, useless at cricket, no good at swimming, basketball or rugby, only scraped a 1 star athletics award due to being just about able to achieve a mediocre 100m and 110m hurdles time and then a half decent high jump score due to being reasonably tall.
I was a tall, skinny, weedy kid who thought that sports were just not for him.
Then, just when I thought there was no sport suited to me, I was introduced to rowing and I had finally found a sport to which I was suited.
The training was brutal: three afternoons of rowing for 3-4 hours, 2 afternoons of 20 minutes circuit training, followed by 1 1/2 hours of weight training and then every now and then, just for good measure we had to run back from the boat house.
I was 16 and insanely fit, I changed schools due to not achieving the required grades at O level and only really had the option of cross country running that was even vaguely suited to me and lost all the fitness in about 6 months.
In addition to losing all of the fitness, the excessive rowing and weight training had seriously damaged my knees, to the point where I could not keep them bent for more than 30 minutes without being in extreme pain – this made car journeys, cinema trips, plane journeys, etc an even more unpleasant experience than they might otherwise be.
Went to University and tried to pick up rowing again only the rest of the crew of 4 that I was put with never bothered to turn up, so that pretty much died a death.
During my placement year I took up archery and then continued with it at university in my final year. My university (University of Central England) did not have an archery club, however nearby Aston University did, so I joined that and shot for the, I also joined another nearby archery club, Beacon Archers and shot with them outside.
I continued with archery for several more years with Windsor Forest Bowmen, even making it onto the Berkshire county team.
Work then took over and with all of the travel I was doing, I could no longer guarantee I would be around for tournaments or even practice, so ended up taking a 10 year break.
I picked it up again for a season with my girlfriend at the time and shot with Brunel University, but then had a break for another 5 years during which I met my wife and started a family.
We went to a local May Day celebration where someone was doing an archery ‘have-a-go’ that I let my children do while I spoke to the guy running it. He gave me his card and suggested I come and try join his archery club in Harefield.
I ended up joining Harefield Archers and slowly regaining my form, although I will probably never be back to the scores of my former glory days.
During all of this time, I have been slowly gaining weight and not exactly exercising well. Up to the age of about 35 I had always been able to regulate my weight by simply eating slightly less and the pounds would drop off again. After 35 this no longer seemed to happen and pounds that joined my waistline seemed to want to stay for good.
I did improve my fitness at one point with one employer who had a gym in the building, although that stopped pretty much the same day the contract ended.
My weight slowly crept up and up, being slim and fit is not exactly a requirement to be good at archery although it does help from an endurance point of view.
I have always have a love/hate relationship with diets, I have tried Atkins, Slimming World and several others, and although I may be able to lose the weight, it always came back within a relatively short time and I often felt hungry whilst dieting.
During the Covid lockdown of 2020, I started working from home full time and took up walking our dogs every morning for around 20 minutes and evening, just ‘around the block’ for about 12 minutes.
Eventually during lockdown I had reached over 17 stone once again and was noticing that I was occasionally receiving alerts from my watch about high heart rate when sitting down watching TV.
This was when I decided I needed to do something more long term about my weight, health and fitness.
I downloaded a few apps in preparation, ErgData, ErgZone, ErgRace, Strava and also started uploading my walks to Strava.
My birthday was coming up and I decided I would buy myself a Concept 2 rowing machine, I had thought about buying one several times in the past, but never actually followed through.
I placed the order and it was due to be delivered on my birthday near the end of June.
Well due to various supply and delivery issues I finally received the rowing machine on the first of August.
I spent the months between ordering the RowERG and its eventual arrival watching youtube videos about rowing, mainly binge watching Shane Farmer’s videos on his Dark Horse Rowing Youtube channel.