Shoot Up or Put Up

After a summer diet consisting pretty much exclusively of whisky and protein I now resemble the character Greed in gory chucklefest Se7en. There are now two alternatives for me – I can either be tortured to death by a particularly inventive serial killer named John Doe, or I can cut out the whisky and do a bit more exercise.

After giving it some thought, and consulting with my wife, I’m going to go for the latter option.

The main problem with this is that I’m really not much into working out. The main flaws are that it’s boring, sweaty and time-consuming. Also in Scotland it’s not very nice outside after mid-September. And exercise hurts. Oh, and did I mention it’s as boring as hell?

I’m not a team player type of person and so the chances of me joining some sort of exercise or keep-fit club are next to zero. After all, if I wanted to spend a lot of time in a small room with a bunch of sweating, hairy men I would go to a Turkish prison.

So to try and combat these problems I’ve taken the effort to clean out our garage and turn it into a sort of pseudo-gymnasium. The effort of doing this left me puffed out and sweating like stalker focusing his night-vision goggles on an unsuspecting neighbour. Anyway, it’s given me more than enough room to put my bike up on its roller-wheel thing and I’ve set up an old set of speakers so I can connect up my MP3 player to provide phat choons (as I believe the young people of today call the Hit Parade).

So that takes care of the legs, but what about the top-half? After a considerable amount of research on the Intermaweb (about three minutes in reality) I came across “Shovelglove – the Sledgehammer Workout“.

Essentially the Shovelglove exercise regime consists of making “useful” movements with a bloody great sledgehammer. These useful movements consist of things like churning butter, chopping a tree down or driving in fence posts. As the author points out these movements are silly; but no sillier than, say, riding a non-moving bike or climbing a set of imaginary stairs in a gym.

I also quite like the concept of doing only 14 minutes of the regime at a time. The reason for this is that no calendar, such as Outlook, has an appointment period of less than 15 minutes – therefore at 14 minutes the session is the equivalent of no time at all.

The most important thing, however, seems to be the naming of your sledgehammer. After a quick look on godchecker.com and I had settled on “Magni the Mighty“. Rrrraaaagh! Prepare yourselves for the new slimline Timmy!

Professional cyclists - very difficult to take pictures of when moving fast

I’m a huge cycling fan. So much so that I even occasionally go out on my lovely Genesis road bike and tootle about the Pentland hills, which is always rather nice. But every July everything stops while we have the wondrous Tour de France and I’m always glued to the box to catch up on the latest developments.

It’s slightly different this year in that, for once, a British cyclist – the very talented Mark Cavendish – has actually won two stages already and is likely to break Chris Boardman’s British record of eight stage wins. However, being a sprinter he’ll probably drop out before the race hits the mountains and is unlikely to actually finish anywhere near the top of the rankings.

Also worthy of note is the truly remarkable Lance Armstrong. He won the Tour a ridiculous seven times, then he retired – having reasonably earned the right to a good rest. However, now he’s come out of retirement and entered the race again. I suspect he’s doing this just to take the piss. But he’s already looking to be a serious contender – probably much to the chagrin of Alberto Contador, supposedly Armstrong’s team leader.

Anyway, the thrills and spills of the Tour reminded me of Team Type 1 – a professional cycling team mostly made up of people with Type One diabetes. They’ve also recently expanded to include Team Type Two which is, you’ve guessed it, made up of competitors with Type Two.

As a diabetic I’m afraid I don’t find many things that raise the profile of diabetes particularly inspiring. If I read about a diabetic who raises £500 with a sponsored parachute jump, it’s undoubtedly a Good Thing, but it hardly makes me leap off my chair and be proud to be pancreatically-challenged.

However, my attitude is somewhat different when it comes to Team Type 1. I think this is because their determined aim is to seriously compete at a global level and they will not compromise simply because some of their pancreases don’t work. Given that cycling is surely the greatest and hardest endurance sport out there, I do actually find them hugely rousing. If they can train for and compete in a professional bike race with no ill effects then surely I can make it through the day in my office job without too much of a problem!

Team Type 1’s stated aim is to enter the Tour de France, and I’m hugely supportive of this. If that happened it would raise the profile of diabetes in a hugely, immeasurably positive way. And nothing would make me prouder as a diabetic than to see Team Type 1 heading down the Champs-Élysées in Paris thrashing the hell out of Lance Armstrong!

Allez, allez, allez boys!

http://www.teamtype1.org/