February 28, 2006
International flavour
It's been a long day today and right now I feel totally shattered. This week is International Week at uni so my timetable has been altered slightly to accommodate some guest lecturers that have travelled from partner institutions around the world.
This morning I had a couple of hours of salsa which was actually really good, probably the most enjoyable dance style we've done so far, plus I found it much easier to pick up and could almost do it in time to the music! Following that we had our usual 2 hours of gymnastics, but this time we had a guy from a university in Hungary take the session. No wonder the Hungarians are pretty good at it, their sessions are like an army PT workout! There's no real fun or enjoyment to it, they just practice the techniques over and over again, focussing particularly on core strength from a very early age. We were hanging off wall bars and climbing ropes with arms only, which now means my hands are dragging along the floor behind me when I walk.
If that wasn't enough physical activity for one day, I ended up having to participate in the practical lab session for Physiology. Today we were testing anaerobic energy systems and I had to work on the bike at maximum speed for 30 seconds. Now that doesn't really sound a lot, but as it required quite a high resistance setting and after what felt like an eternity spinning away the lecturer said there was another 15 seconds left, I can tell you 30 seconds is a long time!
Still, at least it went without any hitches, unlike the last lab practical a few weeks ago when I had to again work on the bike but with one of those big tubes in my mouth to measure my breathing data. I had to work at different exercise intensities and my breathing output collected in different bags for each intensity. The problem arose on the final bag when my mate Stu turned a valve to direct the air into the bag the wrong way, preventing me from being able to breath out! I could suck air in, but there was no way my exhaled air was going down the tube. Frantic pointing at the tube in my mouth kind of gave him the impression that all was not well, along with my bright red face! Before he had time to sort the valve though I had to remove the tube from my mouth in order to stay alive, but that corrupted the test data a little bit. I fair trade off for my life though.
Onto something slightly different now. I've been checking my website stats quite a lot recently and have noticed that my traffic for this month is almost double that for January, which is mainly down to Phoenix Tales. I recently entered a shot in the Photo Friday 'Baby' challenge which has generated a lot of traffic. Also, I seem to have made it into the Top 100 Newcomers list on Photoblogs. Not too sure how great an achievement that is, but it's the only accolade I've received to date, so I'll take it!