Extreme Dude

Geeez-sus I'm f*cking boring. It occurred to me during an email detailing my previous weekend. Went to the gym, watched war doco's, ate healthy food despite the lure of the various curry menu's on top of my fridge, and went to the gym again. I even deliberately ignored calls because I knew the lure of a beer would be too much. At least that's what I'm telling the courts, what really happened was that I spent the weekend lying low and not answering the phone as a matter of life and death - at least it was a matter of life and death for my mate. But I don't mind, he is far more important than me.

But I reason that this amount of Boring-ness will pay off once we get to the mountain in Everest and I join the extreme sports crowd. I know I'll only be walking and then playing cricket, but at that height, playing chess is extreme.

Which is a strange motivation as joining the Extreme Sports crowd is something that I have never, ever wanted to do. I was once in Morocco with a bunch of surfers. Surfers, individually, are generally nice guys with a relaxed take on the world. Surfers en masse are, without doubt, the most BORING bunch of people you will ever find. They are limited to 3 words 1) adjective of choice is 'Epic', 2) Emotion of choice is 'Stoked' and any form of elation/celebration is displayed by giving the devils horns and making the 'yeeewwwwwwwwwww' noise. And their only topic of conversation is boring personal surfing anecdotes. For example, 'That reminds me of this time when I was at this secret spot that only the locals knew about*, man I was stoked they took me there, and it was perfect left-handers and I just pulled into this epppppic barrel and I looked at the blue wall and I was just like ... yewwwwwwwwwwww' - This behaviour is not exclusive to surfing. You can interchange BMX/Rollerblading/Basejumping/anywhere-it's-appropriate-to-take-crystal-meth-and-call-everybody-dude and it will fit nicely. Butting in with a boring personal anecdote of my own that relates to an off-break I sent down in the 'right areas' will be an interesting addition next time around.

As for proper news, things are hotting up. We got a mention on cricinfo (that's me to the left of Brett Lee) this week, and Gray Nicolls have agreed to supply us with some cricket kit, which will be in-turn donated to the local schools in Nepal. With any luck we could see some of those kids representing their country one day. We also have a major meeting coming up where fundraising mechanisms will be announced and so will the team captains. To be honest, I have no idea who these captains will be (always assumed it would be Wes and Kirt), but it should be an interesting decision and lead to whole lot of homo-erotic cliché’s about 'getting behind him' and 'full backing' and 'whole lot of men under me' etc etc


*No surfer will ever admit to surfing anywhere other than a local secret spot

The Long and Arduous Moving Walkway

Walking up an escalator this morning hurt. And not for the normal reasons of having to think of new excuses to avoid the unwashed students asking for just 5 minutes of my time with their infuriating cheeriness and wacky leg-warmers and good causes and.... other things that make me sound like Mr Scrooge. I've recently upped the ante with the leg weights during my boring visits to the gym. So not only are the people in the gym subject to unexpected bouts of flatulence as I strain ever sinew, so are the commuters behind me as I struggle valiantly to lift my legs up the stairs the following morning.
And so begins what may be a tedious 8 months of healthy living and constant exercise. And sticking true to my Kenny Bania character, I revel in telling everybody that I'm not drinking, not eating skin or sauce on chicken, and talking about the amount of reps I'm doing. I reason that I'm a pest no matter what the situation, so at least health & fitness is a valid topic to annoy people about, and if I didn't have the motivation, then I wouldn't go to the gym and end up having to wash myself with a rag on a stick after taking up a Marlon Brando style attitude towards my own body.
The first tests of my endurance will be coming soon, in the form of a 10k fun run and a 3 peaks challenge. I'm seriously thinking of starting litigation over this whole 'fun run' thing though. Whoever thinks running is, in any of it's incarnations, a form of 'fun' really needs to experience a few of life’s finer points. Such as midget-tossing or strip-bars.
The 3 peaks challenge will be a nice little taster for trekking. This will involve scaling Ben Nevis (1344m), Scafell Pike (978m), and Snowdon (1085m). And yes, I deliberately chose the most foreboding pictures for dramatic effect. Whilst this sounds fairly achievable individually, I must stress that we are doing all 3 in the space of a weekend. Which equates to 14 hours trekking and 450 miles driving. Without the undoubted help of unleashing the awesome power of apples.
Then again I could scrap all that and take the route suggested by my mate Luke, which involves threatening the Sherpa's, getting them to make a bamboo throne, sit on said throne, and have them carry me the entire way up whilst I whip them with the fervour of a hungry arctic explorer hurrying along their huskies. Both options have their merits.
On the fame front, I'm currently being outdone by Glen. Prick. I'll beat his crappy south london paper. Just you wait. But never fear, I won't let jealousy get in the way, especially from some weird looking, girly-voiced beardo who so often lets his captain down with poor shot selection and an inability to land the ball in the other half of the pitch when he is bowling.

Of Heaven and Hell

The elusive fourth blog post. My mate Dom predicted a while back that I would go the way of many other well-intentioned blogs and abandon the idea after realising that nobody was interested and it was merely a pointless self-serving exercise that makes me think that people are laughing with me when really they are commiserating my certain failure. But if I gave up every time somebody started to get sick of me, I would've walked straight back out of my first day at school the moment I realised that my impassioned wailing wasn't drawing attention anymore. But I stayed there. I wet myself. But I stayed there. And I plan on staying here too. Just like my Irish mates taught me too.

In an effort to start getting serious about my health for this thing, the 2 weeks leading up to last weekend signalled my first ever attempt to abstain from alcohol for a set period of time. I've always giggled at the irony of Priests sprouting abstinence as the gate to heaven, when to me denying yourself something you really, really, really want is my idea of hell. But far from being the hellish experience of withdrawal and temptation that I'd predicted, I breezed through it and even managed to dodge the vodka grenades that the lovely guys at work had dropped into my lemonade. Who said you couldn't have fun with drink-spiking?

I know 2 weeks is only a baby commitment, but I also had an adult commitment to go and get myself obnoxiously drunk at both a farewell on Friday, where I attempted to spike both Kate and Laura's drinks, and an after-cricket-final-lets-get-as-drunk-as-humanly-possible-because-we-lost event. But, and even with the mature questioning of my sexuality from Jim and his mate Phil still ringing in my ears, I've since vowed to stay off the drink completely until the 29th of August.

I definitely feel better for it already, although like a true ex-addict who replaces the sharp prick of a shared needle with the quick fixes of a rambling evangelical or bottomless cups of coffee, I've taken to drinking far too much soft drink. So I no longer have it in the house. What's the next addiction? Probably Porn. Or Gambling. You have to buy into the whole addict lifestyle if you want to blog about it.

So now it's back to the gym properly. I opened my Gym bag yesterday and thought I'd smelt the Apocalypse, which indicates it was either a very long time since I've opened that bag or a very long time since I've washed my gym kit. I'd say a combination of the two is closer to the mark. I'm back to the gym tonight. And considering my arms are still stiff after having swung a light cricket bat on no more than 17 occasions on Sunday, it may be 2 or 3 weeks before I'm able to type again. Which would no doubt please Dom, as there is only one thing he likes more than talking about his family link to the Blue Wiggle, and that's recalling how he knew something that has just happened was going to happen long before it ever did.