Le Weekend..could anything else go wrong?

Still struggling from the previous weekend's over commitment, this week's training has been noticeable by its absence.

Track training on Tuesday and a desultory effort in the Thursday am spin class was the extent of my time on a bike. Which lead to a feeling of despondency...which made me less motivated, which meant I really couldn't be bothered to train, which meant...I was on a downward spiral.

Last Monday I took the plunge and bought a Tacx imagic thing so I can "ride the Alps" chase the metal man etc etc during the winter. I got it now cos it was going at a reasonable price. I would have got it working during the week, but the vendor forgot to give me the cables to link the thing to the computer so all was delayed. Of course I didn't have a computer free in the house, so I had to front up and buy a basic model and get that going...and that lead me by the nose to what was a completely disastrous Saturday.

Saturday I dunno..sometimes it feels like you're doomed.

• The first inkling I had that my stars were mal-aligned was trying to get the newspaper people to understand that I wanted to cancel the papers for 3 weeks starting Monday..they kept canceling til Dec 21st 2009!
• Then I got what would have to be the slowest checkout chick this side of the black stump...I kid you not..she didn't appear handicapped in any way..just incredibly slow..luckily I wasn't in a hurry and ended up staring in fascination.
• Then I picked up my computer and got it home, eager to chase the metal man. HA! HA! First there was a problem when the monitor showed that there was no signal...and it took me forever to realise there were 2 possible places I could plug the linking cable into . HOURS later all was fine and THEN I realised I needed the Tacx CD which they'd downloaded for me, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So hopping mad I fired off a fax to them (the shop was shut by now) demanding to know where my CD was. So that was the end of the day and no training whatsoever......blood pressure up though...headed straight for a beer too.
  

Sunday The next morning I went for a ride up the 1 in 20...clearly I wasn't going to be chasing any virtual racer this weekend and during the ride a light bulb went on over my head and when I got home I found the CD..in the Photoshop elements software box (they'd also downloaded that for me). (embarrassed grin).

• So I got the whole thing going. Downloaded the manuals, since I couldn't work out how to start the thing and away I went ...oh no! I didn't go anywhere. I'd got the course selected, the opponents fixed and we were all on the virtual start line. 5 second count down and my opponents shot away and I was left on the start line looking left and right like a total twat......groan...what now!!! HR on..yup, everything else ok..yup except for a really vital link..... So tomorrow I ring the vendor and find out why the computer is not seeing the brake unit....I tried another similar cable and it still didn't work so either something is wrong or I've missed out a step.....or I've downloaded the wrong updates , or something....
  
• In between all this, we hired a 3 cu metre skip to get rid of some of the garden rubbish. It was to be a joint venture between Alex and I. ...did I mention that on Thursday Phil flew out to Argentina to ride a motorbike for 3 weeks? (just in time to miss our 39th wedding anniversary). Anyhow the "joint" part of the venture got lost somewhere and now I'm totally lactic through carting barrowloads of heavy logs from the bottom to the top of our garden and then heaving them into the skip. The best part was climbing into the skip and jumping around to compact all the rubbish...childish fun...
  

The 1 in 20 ride revived my training spirits and I did 4x 3 min uphill efforts but I wonder how heavy gardening rates in the Performance management chart in WKO+?!