Had a nice swim today, the pool was empty.  The machines were all full today, the first time I’ve seen it like that, and unusually today they were all young women.  Normally there’s a good cross section of old and young, fat and thin, men and women (actually I haven’t seen any fat old men there yet) but today it was all young thin women.  Presumably all the other body types have better things to do on a Saturday.

Also I found a corner shower which was Big And Roomy.  Lovely.

Have decided to use their towel service, I don’t need a huge towel so I can manage with their postage stamp.

The bad news is, my ingrowing toenail is now acting up. I think this was probably brought on by my trainers. Have cut away a sharp sticky-out bit but it’s time to make a fuss at the docs. I’ve told them over and over again that it’s grown back, I now need to make them do something about it.

Today I went to the Johnston Street branch of Habit to drop off my direct debit mandate, pick up my joining gift of an Adidas sports bag and try out an air walker.  The woman on reception showed me how it all worked, checked I was happy and then left me to it.

Bloody hell.

It took me five minutes to figure out that I didn’t understand how it worked. I got the settings and all that, and was able to admire as well as utilise the handiness of the different handles. I was able to plug in my headphones and listen to BBC World, Sky Sports or Juice TV, that was OK. But making the footplates move – that foxed me. I thought you moved up and down, which was tremendously hard work, but after a while I realised that you skate, or cross-country-ski. That was a LOT better.

After that it was a matter of getting through the remaining 15 minutes. God. I made it, with a couple of mini-breaks. What am I saying – with LOADS of minibreaks, but only about 5 seconds each. I reduced the resistance a bit, which made stopping and restarting less difficult.

After a while I found the heartrate monitor thing, and found my heart rate was 142. I was pleased with that because apparently according to the wee sticker I had been staring at for the last 5 minutes, this meant I was in the “cardio zone”, whatever that means.

When my 20 minutes were up I set it up for another 20 minutes and did it all over again

JOKE!!!!! gosh I’m so witty

I staggered off to the changing rooms and took about 20 minutes to get showered and changed. Then I staggered down to Podna’s work so that we could go home.

One thing that worries me – as I got going I felt a pain in my neck that feels like it’s running along a blood vessel – the carotid or the jugular (which one is on the left hand side of your neck?) so I’ll mention that in my assessment on Monday. I have felt this before – when I was reeling in when deep-sea fishing. It’s still throbbing a bit now so that’s a bit scary. If the exercise I’ve chosen is too much for me in the physical condition I am currently in, I can look into weight training (I was wondering about that, and read a poster at Habit today convincing me it’s a better way of losing weight) and if that’s no good, I’ll just stick to my swimming.

Feeling quite good about having done this, am looking forward to the assessment on Monday.

I used the pool at Habit in the Majestic Centre today.

It was fantabuloso. I loved it. I was only in for 20 minutes. I swam 10 lengths in that time.

The showers were great too.

I’m going to really enjoy this. I intend to use the pool every Tuesday and Thursday. The other days I’ll use the equipment in Johnston Street.