If memory serves, the orbital sander can also bring a woman, fully clothed, to orgasm in less time than it takes to bring a kettle to the boil.
30th January. DIY & Ultrasound Therapy
In the absence of an NHS Physio appointment less than a month away the Bosch PSS 230 orbital sander can do double duty for enhancing the recovery rate of damaged tissue usually present in an injured area.
29th January. Three Weeks In A Fucking Limbo.
To be honest I couldn't care less if I never saw another chimney again or listened to another woman's concerns about "How it's going to look when it's finished."
Course if I'd had a properly boring career with an index linked final salary pension I could now be choosing to take early retirement and a golden handshake.
In fact now I do feel like I've retired.
Isabelle says we should go away with SAGA for my 50th.
26th January. Heart Rate Training.
I hear The Otter is warming to the Heart Rate Monitor concept of training as per The 'Rat' Fink.
"I can't get beyond 120 on the bike."
That's hardly surprising with a big floppy pulse that until recently only quickened at the sight of anything Chinese, Beefy and crispy.
When a sprint finish would be the first plate of the All You Can Eat Buffet.
22nd January. The Flipper Police
The 'Rat' Fink is a strong advocate of training sized flippers for a variety of swim drills, which would be a relief for the shoulder problem.
However it was likely with the level of Health and Safety fascism operating at the Leisure Pool flippers would be outlawed.
Tonight with only two public lanes operating the rest of the training pool was taken up with some sort of junior swimming club with piles of associated gear including flippers.
"D'you mind if I have a shot of your fins?" I said to some teenager in lane 3.
"Sure no problem."
I managed one length before the flipper police came in.
"NO FLIPPERS ALLOWED! NO FLIPPERS ALOUD!"
Aw fuck off.
21st January. The 'Poof's Way'.
The latest medical setback has of course had an unexpected softening side effect: a grudging acceptance of the importance of Gradual Adaptation or the 'Poof's Way'.
Too much 'proper' exercise of the injured joint in question will result in about a years recovery time, not enough and I'll be stuck with a painfully frozen shoulder probably for another year.
Similarly, completing the 112 mile bike section with a brutal no-train approach fuelled by fortified wine and a manly diet of sausage rolls for the marathon would probably lead to further medicalizations.
The 'Poof's Way' shares a basic element with the Franklin 'Way of The Termite' ie tiny mouthful by tiny mouthful until the house collapses.
20th January. Time Efficient Training.
E.H. appears to have dropped The Otter like a hot potato following the results of the inaugural sunday morning training session.
"Alarm issues."
The Otter's tendency to lie a-bed after a few stiff whiskies the night before apparently didn't sit well with E.H's time efficient scheduling - no room for dead weight.
I am now, despite all the various physical handicaps, attempting to adhere to Don 'Rat' Fink's 'Ironfit' program, follow it to the letter and success is more or less underwritten.
The 'Rat' illustrates the science with profiles of successful acolytes, one chap has two kids and works 60 hours a week with a 2 hour commute as a high flying investment banker with Lehman Brothers...
Yeah well, talking of crashes, the demands on his time must be not inconsiderably reduced.
19th January. Like a Diseased Salmon In The Shallows.
A welcome return to The Leisure Pool - 'where summer never ends', (yeah right) at 7am.
Eschewing the activity in the 'fast lane' I head for the opposite side labelled SLOW.
I float about at the shallow end not moving much like a migrating salmon that can't make it up the fish ladder at Pitlochry.
18th january. Poirot Draws A Blank.
In the Insurance based 'Mysterious Case of The Man in A Ford Granada Scorpio' last night's return to the scene of the crime exactly a week later revealed rien de tout!
There was a car parked in the right place but this proved to be a car that never moves anywhere.
Then an idea! Au millieu de la nuit!
Un homme dans ses annees soixantes avec un chapaeu 'Trilby' et un manteau de voiture 'camel', peut etre il ya un personne qui allez regularement a l'eglise local Church of Scotland toutes les Dimanches?
Certainment!
Je dois conduire ce matin immediatement a Auchterarder et passez un bon inspection des voitures a cote de chaque eglise.
Un coup de genie!
Mais.
Rien de tout... aussi...
Zut alors!
17th January. Outta The Game?
Last week I was down and out of the running because that knoboscoposcopy thing was going to reveal half a pound of cancer in my cum gland.
The week before that God had forgotten to give me two kidneys, an Ironman in the Sud de France would be certain death from dehydration and so on.
This week condemned to swim with one arm for life I'll be lucky to ever front crawl more than 20 metres in a heated pool for pansies let alone 2.4 miles in the sea.
But these are just additional challenges! to be overcome on the road to reaching one's personal goal! of becoming... an IRONMAN!!! Of course!
And to think for a while I thought about shutting myself in the hen house with the Buell fired up just because I wasn't ever going to be 'right' in the shoulder department! tch tch tch...
16th January. Orthopaedic Shakedown.
Dr B. is scrutinizing an X -ray of a left shoulder which looks exactly like something off the Internet for the purpose of illustrating an Acromioclavicular joint separation.
"Once that scars up you should have full range of movement but there are some cosmetic concerns..."
"You mean I'll never look good in a little black strapless number?"
14th January. "A Lot of People Have It."
'How's it going with that pissing blood thing?" said Dr F. - not in so many words, as he greeted me from behind his desk. I had to bring him up to speed on the latest medicalization.
"Ah yes AC Joint Separation, had one myself playing rugby years ago before I was a Doctor, a lot of people have it" he said raising his left hand cheerfully above his head to show full restoration of mobility. "Creeks a bit." he added.
"I don't think it was as bad as yours though." he said, feeling the degree of prominence on my left shoulder.
"The thing is, d'you think I'm fucked for life?" I asked, not in so many words.
"Well when it heals the scar tissue is more subject to wear and tear."
"Aw fur fucks sake!"
13th January. How Triathlon Ruined My Life.
Swimming's out, so is cycling, so is running, all that's left is walking.
Even that's proved a bit crippling, especially downhill, the bike must have stopped but not me - still glued to the pedals.
Now we're into Last of The Summer Wine sad old spazzy git territory hirpling 13 miles for a cup of tea and a chat, maybe a digestive biscuit, if you're lucky.
No longer 'In training' for anything, no longer 'in work', what the fuck AM I doing?
Hell I'm IN RECOVERY.
12th January. The E.H. Fan Club.
"He'll need to get that bike time down." relayed The Otter from E.H.
(The Otter's intentions with regard to E.H. are beyond the scope of this blog.)
I don't actually know E.H. apart from as a blaze of winsome Lycra passing me on a carbon bike.
As a finisher of Ironman France this is advice based on her own experience.
So there we are, I slam into a Ford Granada at speed in the dark.
I'm not worthy.
11th January. Bloody Annoyed.
According to Young Doctor at A&E what I'm suffering from is an Acromioclavicular Joint Separation.
Basically the force of shouldering a Ford Granada driver's door at about 25 mph has resulted in the damage of, according to the x-ray and Young Doctor, about 50 to 70% of the ligaments that attach the shoulder blade to the collar bone.
"Is this one of those things that will end up as something that will never be quite right?"
"Well you'll probably always have a bump on the shoulder but it shouldn't be weaker."
"It'll take at least a month to recover."
"A month!!"
"Jeezuz H.!"
"Yes you have to rest the arm in a sling then come back to the fracture clinic in a week."
It's gonna be GREAT!!
10th January. And Then It All Goes Horribly Wrong - Again.
Like an Israeli missile on course for a cellar full of Gaza residents or a suicide bomber who just pulled the pin, what was going to happen was going to happen, it was written.
Frame by frame the final moments before impact past with enough time to think 'This is going to hurt.'
Crash, Bang, Fuckit, what a fracture!
Immediately after the event instead of an assortment of virgins there was an older male saying something about how he HAD been looking for lights. This was presumably after performing a U-turn in his Ford Granada, not before.
Yeah well he hadn't seen me on the Raleigh Team Banana, the head torch lay on the wet tarmac of Auchterarder High Street still shining like the bright light of an endoscope...???
5th January. The Cystoscopy Challenge.
"Have you had this procedure before sir?"
"No."
" Leave your socks and shoes on, trousers and pants off, gown on, ties to the back and dressing gown on." says the first nurse.
Then a second more attractive nurse appears, dark-haired, 20's, might have been in Gray's Anatomy, her job is to effectively be chatty and hold the patients hand on the operating table whilst Mr H wields the Cock-o-Scope or Prickviewer, whatever it's called.
"Most people say it's not as painful as they imagined." smiles the attractive nurse leading me to the operating theatre.
"Well I'm about to find out" I reply, glancing round at the high tech gear - everything you need to take a person to pieces and hopefully put them back together again.
Anyway if you've seen anything like a Steven Seagal movie involving a S.W.A.T. team, the device in question bears more than a passing resemblance to something that can be poked through a room ventilator to look for terrorists.
In this case Mr H is going to be having a good look round the inside of my bladder.
I put it to Mr H. when he's about halfway there if he's ever had the procedure himself?
"Not as such."
(Quite)
Chat turns to running and triathlon as the attractive nurse warms to the task of directing the patient's attention away from the fact that a middle aged bloke is shoving something the diameter of a Suzuki petrol pipe up the inside of the patient's knob.
"Nothing wrong" is the verdict from Mr H. when it's all over and nothing on the CT scan, apart from the fact there's only one kidney.
"Was it as painful as you thought it would be?" says the attractive nurse leading me back to a world without bladder cancer.
" To be honest I didn't really want to think about it."
2nd January. I'll Never Be Able To Keep Up.
"I'm actually quite hungry." ponders The Otter as we approach the "Specials" blackboard at the Glen Clova hotel after a mere couple of hours of sub-zero cycling.
Two family sized steak pies washed down with fifteen cans of Foster's all in the previous afternoon and no doubt a half bottle of some cask aged Malt as a wee nightcap.
And yet that strength paradoxically can so easily (and in fact did) become a complete corruption leading to Physical Weakness.
On the other hand those of us who suffer from that bugbear of the aspiring endurance athlete; Natural Weakness are completely self-limiting when it comes to food intake.
As we mount up and pedal off I try not to be sick leaning on the ridiculous Tri-bars over a stomach bloated with homemade macaroni cheese.
1st January. New Year's Day Triathlon.
First of all a happy new year to anyone that continues to read this, I was going to say drivel, but verbal diarrhoea might be closer.
Talking of bowel movements I think it might have been a record for pre-race ablution yesterday and that was with a complete abstinence from Hogmanay 'Value' chicken wings in acid reflux style sauce.
It was a CONCLUSIVE WIN in the Otter Series as The Otter picked up a DNE which is one up from DNS which is one up from DNF.
It was all going to be too much to sacrifice supping on Your Other National Drink... diddums.
A sub zero air temperature was masked by the stillness however there was quite a current of moving air on the downhill section from Arthur's seat.
The decision to not bother with gloves made the application of the brakes difficult with two blocks of Wensleydale for hands and might have proved fatal for dogs, pedestrians etc wandering about on the road, especially by the third lap.
On the whole the result was Fairly Shit, which is better than Completely Crap.
No tomato juice visible from the Old Man yet and I think I was first in the One Kidney age group category.
However it does seem unlikely I could ever complete an Ironman.
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