If it’s not raining, it’s not training

19May 2014 by Ronny Allan 1 Comment

Only a week left until Chris and I set off on our 84 mile trek across Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England. We’ve been training for this since January 2014 and probably covered sufficient distance to have walked the wall 5 times over! Didn’t stop us going for a fast short walk this morning and despite the heat there was no sweat. I think we’re ready 🙂

For the last few days we’ve been thinking it might be tougher if this heat continues. Only a month ago, we were saying it might be tougher with all the rain we were having! We had a few occasions where we got wet but we just had to get on with it – fortunately our back packs contain the ‘full monty’ of wet weather clothing – so we’re prepared for all eventualities.

It did bring back some memories for me though as in a past life, I’ve had to do quite a bit of activity in the pouring rain! In fact daft as it seems, there is lot to say about military phrases such as ‘If it isn’t raining, then it isn’t training’. If it rains each day during our walk, it won’t seem so bad if we had encountered this during our training. Ditto with heat I suppose! Do I have a preference? If you push me, I’ll go for heat!

On the subject of military training, I just had lunch with 2 very old friends who were on a long specialist training course with me in 1983/84. We had a really good laugh – some of it at our own expense. We chatted through some famous (and infamous) incidents which mostly occurred during training. We decided life is too short and will be meeting up again and trying to widen the attendance to others.

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Geekie Words

I’ve had good feedback from people saying they do enjoy reading this section of the blog as I try to make it as simple as possible to understand. However, don’t forget, these are my own views and/or my own interpretation of Geekie stuff. See my home page for an amplification of this (click on Home at the top of the blog).

Tumour

An abnormal mass of tissue that results when the growth of cells exceeds, and is uncoordinated with, that of normal tissues around it. Tumours can be benign (not cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). Tumours are also sometimes known as ‘neoplasms’. If you wanted to know more about how malignant cancer develops, I found the Cancer Research UK site quite good as it includes short videos, see here: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/ This really is the ‘geekiest’ of subjects!

Trans-Arterial Chemo Embolisation (TACE)

I blogged about Embolisation here: http://wp.me/p4AplF-2e. TACE is a type of embolisation where they add chemotherapy to the mix. In doing so, it provides a targeted and additional punch in the nose to liver tumours. I was scheduled to receive one of these but it had to be curtailed as some post surgical changes were interfering with the normal routes to the liver and it was aborted due to the risk. The possibility of further embolisations has not been discounted but the operation would be trickier. This isn’t on the horizon so I guess my remnant liver tumours are behaving 🙂

Tenerife

Chris and I must like it there as we’ve been about 4 times and we’re going back this year! I always feel much better out there and I sometimes even have a beer – rock and roll 🙂