Unleash the Monkey Army

On Saturday 9th April I went down to Exeter for only my second ever indoor rowing competition, the Fitness Matters Devon 1k and Team Relays . Competition is the official description, I never made any bones about being competitive! If this is your first visit to the blog, welcome! Long-time readers will no doubt be stunned to know that I've been giving the event some thought. Because I'm a caring sort of guy, I'll share those with you. The Concept 2 indoor rowing machine is pretty much the gold standard of rowing machines and has been setting the tone for 40 years now. If you've ever set foot in a gym you'll know what I mean. It looks something like this     and you're pretty much always guaranteed to be able to get on one, no matter how busy the gym is. There's a reason for that! They're pretty much despised by the gym cardio junkie and the meathead (and all stops in between) in equal measure. They're self-propelled but against resistance and am...

The Lance Armstrong "affair" continues to swirl around, resurfacing in between other news stories as people hit another juicy section of the 202 page USADA report. Never being short of an opinion, I felt the need to share mine. I do need to be careful here, so let me say, for the record that, as a result of my borderline coffee addiction I may have come dangerously close to the IOC limits for caffeine, I have never knowingly taken any banned substance, nor have I condoned it in people I have trained or trained with. In fact, one of my many limitations in sport and life has been not being nasty enough and being too willing to play within the rules. And when all the hand-wringing, moralising and soap-box grandstanding is done, whatever else we may think, anabolics, peptide hormones, growth factors, Beta-2 agonists, diuretics, blood doping inter alia are categories of banned substances or methods. And, for example, if you compete in a regulated sport and enjoy a Camberwell carr...