Now after that giant blog it's time for more.

Having today makes me miss going to uni and having the choice of whether I was going to go to lectures/tuts or stay at home, whether or not I was going to do that assignment or leave it another day/week. Ahh that was the life.

It was also the life of no money, constant stressing about not utilising my time wisely and losing sleep/confidence/weight(?) over exams.

In other news, I just went for a light swim in the pool in my building, I should use it more often, it happens to be a beautiful day outside too, the sun is shining and I think it is about 20 degrees, that gets my tick of approval.

So today I am taking off work sick, I felt pretty terrible last night and this morning. Although I do feel better now and it is only 10am! Hooray! But at 7:30am I felt brrrrrrr.

Anyway yesterdays training was pretty hardcore, I ended up waking up at 3:45am (yes that is right, only managed 4 to 4.5 hours max sleep too. :/ ) and bumbling around trying to jam food and water down my throat before fumbling out the front door to my car to burn rubber 20 to 30km north of my place to get to our starting point for our training. I have interesting routine now in regards to what I eat in the mornings now before I do my 30km+ hikes. I always make sure I have at least 2 big glasses of water before I leave home, I always eat something bready in the car on my way there (or at home if I have the time). I also make sure that I drink at least 600ml bottle of powerade/staminade type stuff before I get to the starting line too. All this is pretty difficult for a guy like me to do as I've always been a person that hates eating or drinking much within an hour of waking up, it is almost a form of torture on some mornings.

So anyway I got to the place at 4:50am, we were scheduled to start at 5am but no one else was there, I thought i'd take this opportunity to duck into the toilets while I was waiting, man I hate going to public toilets at sports ovals and things like that, but it is even worse when it is 5am in the morning and freezing cold and pitch black, I always feel like some sorta night zombie lunatic is gonna bust on me and demand my millions of dollars I always carry into public toilets. Anyway....

Everyone else rocked up at 5ish, one person was 20 minutes late, I was pretty annoyed at this as they all made a big fuss about starting at 5am and not 6am (our usual time), so that causes me to lose an extra hour and a bit of sleep and then I end up waiting in my car for over 30 minutes anyway, grr.

So we headed off in the dark with our head lamps which is always novel for about 50 metres until you trip over something because you depth perception using a LED headlamp is somewhat limited enough to cause you to think the ground is +/- 5cm. At around 6:30am we put them away when the sun has come up and continue on for another hour or so and get to our first checkpoint which was about 12km in. There were a bunch of people out with horses and we were thinking they were crazy being up this early getting into the whole dressage stuff, I guess they saw us and thought we crazy being up this early and we don't even have a horse.

We set off again waiting for the day to get a bit warmer as we were all a bit freezing. Started passing a lot of people who were also training for the event, chatted with my teamies about their lives, children, jobs and then about the pros and cons of myself having grown up being the son of two rural/remote medical gypsies and my 'interesting' music industry jobs. We got to our next checkpoint where we had a work collegue meet us with supplies, this was the first time we had ever had someone come down and meet us during training so it was nice, although I didn't actually need and supplies as I have gotten so use to bringing my own stuff (and over packing with extra food). We set off again, through a suburban setting for a while, then down a big wide fire trail to where we drop off a cliff all the way down to a foresty river area where we scramble along for a loooong time and then up and over a ridge down to a nice little seclued bay where a bunch of people were launching boats.

We rested for about 10 minutes, filling up on water our of some revolting taps and headed off again, only around 13km to go but my knees were killing me already and it was the toughest leg to do for the day. I chucked on my ipod for the first time during all our training sessions (we find that listening to ipods and what not can sort of kill the team spirit and conversation) through this dreary area of the track which is a long long slow climb over a few km. Somewhere in here I took some painkillers for my legs, the rest of the day took forever to finish, the last section took just over 4 hours as it requires a lot of scrambling and up/down/up/down climbing over stuff, it was a killer and everyone was pretty knackered. I got to the end and was glad I was finishing, but also chuffed that I managed to do over 42km in 11 hours (including breaks) without really injuring myself, I also felt I could have kept going, but I think 50km would be starting to push my limits for distance I can cover in one go.

I guess we'll see next weekend when I cover 50km Saturday and then another 10 or so on Sunday (testing how well we back up after a sleep).

Today I feel hella stiff my legs, left hip, lower back. This on top of feeling ill makes for a pretty 'meh' Monday.

So I am reading about the new Civ 4 expansion, playing some soccer management game on my mobile while playing Dicewars in another browser all at the same time. Have I gone strategy gaming mad?

I am bustin' out a blog for cat! Hoorah!

Man today I totally got F all done at work. What a jib.

I gotta get up at 4am on Sunday to hike 40km, I think I am going to die.

Just for cat, a blog.

So what has been going on with me aye? I've been going to work, doing lots of 30 km hikes on Sundays for my TW training and erm yeah....

So work, I don't have long left in my rotation, I still haven't decided where I am going next, but most likely to either work in a security related team or on a product project team, both sound decent and have my interest to an extent so it should be good. I must say I feel like I am starting to get my head around the whole "big corporate world" thing. It takes a big of adjustment learning to work and communicate with people who are very ingrained into the corporate culture, sometimes it feels like they are speaking another language or just throwing out acronyms and buzz words for the hell of it, who knows maybe they are?
Hurrr this is turning out to be another "go nowhere, describe little" posts. Hmm what else? I must say i've been given a fair bit of training in this job i've had, today I counted that in my almost 6 months i've been here I have had almost 14 days of training of various sorts, from photoshop training to user centric design, to public speaking to various other things, which has made me really glad I took this job as I really need it!

Hurrr I am so whacked out I think I might go to bed, I haven't had any form of caffeine for 3 days! Brr.

Today's Jerkcity strip is stealing my humour from years gone by.

My version of the Kyle and Jackie-O show/ads/whatever.

Edit: This image is a reflection of how annoying I find them, now you can suffer too.

So I need to blog, but what to blog about? I have so much to blog about but can't be bothered explaining the detail behind it. I'd like to talk about how my training is wearing me down in every possible way and I have serious doubts about me and some members of my team making it through without doing some serious damage to our bodies (hope I am wrong!) . I'd like to talk about my job, and how I am enjoying most aspects of it, but I still feeling like a lazy blob while I am there, I'm moving onto a new department in a few weeks which will be good for a change but not so good in the fact that I have a lot of work to do before I leave whilst trying to represent myself better than I have been so I can ask for a job back in the team at the end of the year (so far it has been the best of the rotations).
I'd like to talk about Ninja Spirit, as it is fun to play but is so hard to finish in the arcade version (as opposed to the PC Engine version). I'd also like to talk about how a family member was on the Qantas plane that lost a panel today, scary stuff.

Forgot the rest.

Bed time now.