Hello there! Yes, that’s right, Ellen and I are back from Amsterdam.  And yes, thank you, we did have a lovely time, and we ate our body weight at least twice a day for the duration of the whole trip.  I’m not going to dwell too much on the trip itself, as I’ll be doing a pretty exhaustive review of the whole shebang over on my other blog.  But in terms of the food, any attempts that we made to try and be sensible went out of the window around the time we sat down for our first meal on the Monday night.  After that it was hearty meal followed by beer followed by hearty meal and rinse repeat until we came back.

In fact, despite all our protestations that we would be back on the diet as soon as we boarded the plane, we couldn’t help it when we got to Leeds train station and ended up binging on a Burger King meal, which despite tasting at the time like the last meals of the condemned, were actually deeply unsatisfying and bland.  So after all that you can understand that we were both a bit reticent to step back onto the scales after six days of mass consumption.  We needn’t have been though, it turned out that all of that abuse had led to me putting on a pound and a half, and Ellen remaining the same (she was a little less gung ho than I, and also had the benefit of her magic pills) but for both of us it couldn’t really have been any better.  And we both agreed that after eating so much, it would almost be a relief to go back onto the diet.

So this weekend we’ve been going back onto the regime, and as well as this I have decided to step up the exercise regime.  I mentioned before that I may be deciding to do yet another stupid challenge, and while I still have not decided 100% whether or not to do it, I may as well tell you that the challenge in question would be the York 10k Run For All, which is (as you can probably discern) a 10k run through York.  This would represent a huge challenge for me, seeing as I haven’t run any further than for a bus since I left school, and could well be described as chronically unfit.  The exercises I have been doing so far have started to turn the tide a little, but not enough to enable me to do anything on this scale.

So yesterday, I headed into town and loaded up on chavtastic running bottoms and running shoes, and also got some weights and one of those bizarre Abdotrim things that make sit-ups look easier but don’t actually make the act of doing them any easier, mainly for Ellen.  I had intended to start the running yesterday, but after carrying all that stuff home (including 54kg of weights) I was positively knackered.

So today I dressed up in all of my finery (as shown above, and don’t I look lovely!), and embarked upon a short run.  I had done a bit of research into starting to run, and the general consensus was to start off with a five minute walk, then jog for either a minute or two, then walk for two minutes, and repeat that cycle for half an hour.  So off I set, feeling like a complete pillock in my get up, staring at the CardioTrainer App every 30 seconds, until I had walked for five minutes, and then I proceeded to run.

For the first 30 seconds I was fine, then the whole of my body seemed to start screaming at me to stop.  Anyway, the first run lasted for 1.15.  Then I managed a 1.30, and a 1.45, but then it was a struggle to do over a minute.  But still, I managed to keep it going for a full half hour, running every third minute.  According to the CardioTrainer I went a total of 3.4km in 33 minutes, travelling an average of 6kph and burning a total of 198 calories.  So not too bad.  But I have a long way to go before I am ready to decide whether I can do this run.  Certainly I will be doing something before the end of the year, but I am going to keep up with the running for a few weeks and see how it goes before I make any concrete decisions.