My week at Tough Love Central Station (Part Three)

Wednesday 4 Feb

A swim and a spin bike session were on my triathlon program for today. However, I was somewhat tired and decided I wouldn’t do the swim session. I had a 1 hour PT session booked with Cherie Horne for 5:30pm.

I arrived at Harper’s with about 10 minutes to get changed and to warm up. I had done about 5 mins on the tready before Cherie walked over to me. I must have looked a bit anxious and scared. “Are you nervous?” she asked. I said I wasn’t. But maybe I was? [Craig says to me “you’re always scared – you got to stop that]

CH: “Have you done any training today?” [I just realised Cherie and Craig have same initials – how quick am I to make that grand observation? Clearly a blonde in my past life. Clearly.]
Jules: “No.”
CH: “Good.”
Jules: “I was going to but I was tired this morning. I thought I’d save my energy for you.”
CH: “Is there anything in particular you want to do tonight?”
Jules: “No. Anything.”
CH: “Have you done any work with a pack before?” [I could see where this was going. Cherie knows that I want to climb Everest one day. Maybe in the year 2020]
Jules: “No, I haven’t.”
CH: “Have you done any work with a weight vest?”
Jules: “No. I’ve seen them, but never used one.”
CH: “We’re going to do some walking on the tready with the weight vest and give you a taste of the training I do. Sound good?”
Jules: “Yep.”

So, on goes the weight vest and I started doing some walking on tready with a minor incline. Then I did some sets of the front stairs. Walking down in single steps, and walking up in two’s. But we had some equipment malfunction issues. The zip had come undone. It wasn’t sitting right on me either. It was too big. And Cherie said it was old. [Harper – you lose another mark for old equipment. You’re down to 8/10 now. You lost one mark on Monday for your aging fleet of spin bikes!] I took the vest off and Cherie tried to fix the aging zip. Meanwhile, she sent me doing more front stairs sets. Running down, then walking up in two’s. She fixed the zip, I put it back on and we went back on the tready and Cherie had me walking at a slower pace but with an increased incline. I (stupidly) asked ‘what does it [the incline] go up to?’ ‘I don’t know’ was the reply. ‘Shall we try it?’ Cherie! You liar. You knew all along, cheeky Mountain Girl.

With a HR (heart rate) of about 160 bpm and a 7kg weight vest on, Mikey (Craig’s business partner and one of the many trainers), was on a treadmill doing some training of his own. He strategically decides to ask me: “So what have you learnt this week that you can take away?” I should have said “Not now, Mikey.” I forget what my response was. Probably just “Can I tell you later?” Cherie advocated for me saying “hey, her ticker [heart] is working hard over here.” I think by this point I was doing the highest incline of ‘12’ (?%) so I was working hard. I’ll return to this question of Mikey’s a little later.

After the weight vest stuff we did some stepper, arm grinder (1 minute of each and then repeating that). Cherie and I headed over to the mats near the boxing ring and Harper was hurting himself on various weight machines. He glanced over at me, a massive smirk all over his dial: “No comment today. What’s going on?” he said to me (referring to his web site/blog). “Having a day off” I replied. The topic of the post today was ‘trapped in the past.’ I recognised from this post, and from the mentoring session with Craig yesterday that I need to stop living in my past, that I need to wake up and live in the now – February, 2009. I don’t need to continue doing what I did yesterday, last week and a decade ago. I can create different in my world TODAY. All it takes is a decision. I need to think less, talk (and type) less and do more. I need to APPLY what Craig writes, not just read it and comment on it in my cheeky manner. I therefore made a conscious decision to take a step back and do stuff before I write too much more on Craig’s site. Hence, commenting on the RYL blog was off limits. I lasted about five consecutive posts ;) Although I cheated. While I wasn't commenting on the current posts, I had found some old ones and I was commenting on those (sure, girls are cool... but I so don't wanna be one, sitting at life's train station, just another life) and I revisited the over-thinker from a few months back.

We did some plyometric sit up thingy where we locked our feet together at the ankles and threw a medicine ball to each other. Shit, they’re hard, but I liked it. We did some military push ups (though the Jules-version does not count as a proper one as I don't drop my chest to the floor low enough), some (push ups) on my knees, then back to the plyometric-medicine ball-sit ups, push ups (think we did three sets of each). Then we both did some step ups on a platform step near the boxing ring. Some dumbbell bicep curls alternating with dumbbell hammer. We did a few sets of each of those. Time was running out by this time. Cherie had all this stuff she wanted to do, but there was no way we’d get through it all. I piped up and asked if we can we do some bench press. So we did some incline smith machine bench press using bar weight only and we alternated that with V pulldowns (like lat pulldown but with the 'v' attachment thingy). We finished with a team work game/exercise. Picture a boxing bag on the floor. In a push up position (but with legs out wide) and hands on the bag, both of us (attempted to) roll it. The bag wasn't symmetrical so it didn’t exactly rotate evenly. That was the challenge and why you required good abdominal control and why you needed to work together. I was physically fatigued, clearly, by this stage – notably my upper body and abs. It was funny though and embarrassing too (Cherie suspected it may be)! I kept ‘losing it’ and falling on my face. We didn’t quite get to the ‘line’ on the carpet that we were aiming for. My time was up after that. Awww! Why can’t there be 90 minutes in the hour instead of only 60! I did 5 minutes on the tready after that, then 25 mins on the spin bike, some stretching and then I called it a day.

At some point in my hour with Cherie, Craig was at the cable machine trying to look like he was exerting some effort and challenging his muscles in a round about kind of way and he said to me “look at this”, pointing to his biceps. “I get to see the real thing.” “Yep, they’re real.” (He had a singlet top on, so I really could see).


Today was about seeing what was possible, for me, physically, mentally. Here was Cherie, only a couple of centimetres taller than me, and she is one super-fit, super-strong chick doing AMAZING things – just check out her site to see what she’s done and what she will be doing over the next year or two.

Returning to that question of Mikey’s. What have I learned? Last night, after my session with Craig, I had jotted down some stuff. But when I got home tonight, I added to that list of stuff. I soon had a list of twenty five (25) things. About me. Though some of it wasn’t exclusive to me. It could be easily applied to anyone. But yes, here were 25 things about me. Shit. Does that make me weird? Dysfunctional? Did I just get crowned Miss Universe at the Inaugural Dysfunctional Pageant? I am where I am as a result of choices I’ve made, about my behaviours, about my habits and my thinking patterns. The good news? Here were 25 things that I have the control to change. It should excite me. It did.

Consider an elite athlete. Take the examples of a swimmer and a Tour de France cyclist. For swimmers, we’re talking hundredths of a second between doing a new personal best, between breaking a World Record and between first and second placing. For the gruelling three week Tour de France riders, we’re talking maybe a couple of minutes between finishing with the Yellow Jersey and being the runner up of the General Classification division. However, consider the massive improvement that a mediocre athlete, like myself, can make? I walked the majority of the 2007 Gold Coast Marathon (42.195 km) in 7:04. So, a 5:30 marathon, a 4:00 marathon is clearly within my realm of possibilities. I anticipate I will complete my debut Ironman Triathlon in 15:30. In two or three years I could be doing 12 or 13 hour Ironman’s just by doing the ‘right’ training, and by dropping the 15 kg that I need to lose to get to my optimal racing weight.

My four-part series on my week at Tough Love Central Station (a.k.a Harper’s Personal Training) will conclude with a cardio circuit that Mikey writes up for me on the white board and a lil chat afterwards with the mini-and-younger-version-of-Craig.