Towel Day

Apparently, today is towel day. A day to remember and mourn the late Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame. You're supposed to go out with a towel and take it everywhere as a sign of remembrance. I must say I didn't do that, but consider this entry my little own homage to a guy who made me (and possibly many others) smile and laugh very often while reading his books.
If you want to know more about towel day and the advantages of carrying around a towel with you, take a peek here.
I could give you many many histerical passages from this guy but I don't have enough space so I'll only give you one that stuck with me for no apparent reason. You might not even find it funny but it gets me every time so shut up.

'If I asked you where the hell we were,' said Arthur weakly, 'would I regret it?'
Ford stood up. 'We're safe,' he said.
'Oh good,' said Arthur.
'We're in a small galley cabin,' said Ford, 'in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.'
'Ah,' said Arthur, ' this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of.'

For this and much more simplistic humor, pick up a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy today.

V (for Vienetta)

10k: pwned!

Today I ran the 10k Great Run here in Manchester. My goal was to run it in under an hour and guess what? I did it! Official proof follows:

Ok, so it's not official. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Not bad for 10 days training, huh? Actually, when I say 10 days training I really mean 4 which is the number of runs I did before the big day. The runs where: 3k, 5.3k, 10k (on treadmill) and 7.5k respectively.

Despite finishing within the hour I actually couldn't manage to do it all in one go. By the 7th km I had to walk for maybe 400m. Dunno what happened, the legs were just asking for a rest. After that, I resumed the running only to find out that my left knee had other plans. Apparently it didn't like the cooling down at all and wasn't quite ready to let me run again so I had to walk for another bit. When I saw the 8k marker I decided my knee would have to put up or shut up, besides, I knew that if it just warmed up again it would be fine. The last 2k were a struggle but I didn't stop again til the end. When I saw there were 200m left, my watch was marking 59:00 so I had to change gears and run a little bit faster to finally finish in 59:58. That was a close one, eh?

When I finished I finally started to feel all the cold caused by the rain that fell during most of the race and the pain in my knee flared up a bit. I guess (hope) it'll go back to normal after some days' rest. The moral of the story is that next time I should start training way before than this year to avoid these kind of problems.

I leave you with some pretty pics:

Before the race
From left to right: Sodel, Edgar, Alex, Victor

After the race; soaked with rain and sweat

With the medals!

p.s. The guy who won it finished in 27 minutes. Next year, when I take performance enhancing drugs I'm gonna pwn the bastard!!! :P

Breaking News!

A couple of hours ago my hotmail account was upgraded to a mindboggling 25 megs of storage. How about that? No more deleting bigger than 10k messages or friends getting emails returned from my account! It's savin'-every-fuckin'-email-palooza from now on!

According to my research, I was the last living creature in the universe with a crappy 2 meg (not that 25meg isn't crappy; yahoo, google anyone?) account. In fact, I think even Tom Hanks's character in that movie Castaway had a 25 meg account.

So, let's give a big hand to the hotmail staff for upgrading my account 2 years after everybody else's. It's about time, dickheads!!!

10k

I'm planning on entering a 10k run here in Manchester with some of my friends. The race is this coming sunday, the 21st, and we decided to start doing some running last thursday, a whole 10 days of training!

On Thursday, seeing that the day was nice for a change, we decided to go to the park for a run. That was my first run in like a year maybe and quite obviously after 3 exhausting kilometers I was ready to sell my soul for an oxygen tank :P The first thought that sprang in my mind was You're nuts if you think you'll be able to run 10k in a week's time

Friday we decided to run along the same course as the day before to see if we could push it a little bit further. I must say I had very low expectations after Thursday's experience but the human body is an incredible machine, and it suffices to give it only a little practice to remind it of its capabilities. I ran around 5.3k that day.

Saturday I didn't run because I was hungover from a damn Johnny Walker bottle, but I did play some squash hangover notwithstanding. On Sunday (actually since Saturday), the weather reverted to its usual rainy form, so I just couldn't be bothered and didn't run that day either.

Yesterday, the weather was still wet and shitty so we decided to go run on the treadmill at the sports centre. I set the treadmill to a 10kph speed and started running setting myself a goal of maybe 6k. To my surprise, once I got to 6k I felt I could still keeo going, so I did. I decided to go for 7.5k and managed them with still something left in the tank so I went for more. Once I reached 8k I decided I wasn't going to stop until I reached 10k even if they had to take me out in a stretcher. The last k was very very hard but I actually managed it, I was listening to some music and I kept telling myself 'Just 2 more songs, 2 more songs' (6 minutes). 10k in an hour, I know it's not remotely impressive for a proper athlete but for me it's pretty foockin' good. I had never run more than 6k in my life and that was like 5 years ago when my statistics lecturer at uni made us enter a 6k run in order to get extra credits hehe.

Now it's only left to see how hard it's to translate 10k from the treadmill to the street. I'll keep running this week, maybe a big run on wednesday, a very short one on thursday and another long one on friday and we'll see how it goes. I'll let you know if I finish the 10k on sunday.

Víctor

ps After the 10k my left knee was (still is) nagging me a bit, I'm gettin' old :'(

pps Running on the treadmill is booooooring

Today...

- Today, I lost a small part of myself.

- Today, I learned that some things in life abandon us and never come back.

- Today, I realized I'm never going to be the same person I was yesterday.

- Today, I saw how every action one takes has a consequence.

- Today, I accepted that in this life nothing lasts for ever.

- Today, I caught a glimpse of what 'falling to pieces' really means.

- Today, a part of me died.



-Today, I started to shed the dead skin cells I submitted to such a huge amount of sun rays over the 5 days I was in Portugal. I mean I don't think tanned is the best way to describe my state, I'd say a better description would be toasted :P

What? What were you guys thinking I was talking about? Surely you didn't think I was gonna get all deep and philosphical on you, did you? ;)

I had a great time in Portugal. I watched a lot of tennis. I'm not gonna bore with the details since I know probably most of you are not really interested in tennis, but I will say this: I took pictures with my two favorite players, I shared transportation with many others and I had VIP tickets which meant access to the sponsors' lounge (open bar included) and access to the press room (where we were actually allowed to ask questions). All in all a pretty good week of tennis, the only downside being that since I spent most of the day at the tourney's grounds I was left with very little time to actually visit Lisbon and go to the beach but that in turn only means I'll have to go back someday for the sightseeing :D

Farewell skin cells, you will be sorely missed and held in fond remembrance; godspeed.

I'm off to Portugal!

For more details go here and read the post titled "I'm going to DisneyW- Estoril". Some days under the sun will do me some good ;)

Víctor