Octopus' Garden

I woke up with this song in my head and kept humming the same first line over and over again while at the gym today.  "I'd like to be under the sea/in an octopus' garden..."

Aside from that I've got nothing much to post. Today was supposed to be a rest day, but work and life commitments on Wednesday means I'm too busy to workout or even run so I've swapped Wednesday's CT session for today's rest day. I did a relaxed 30 minutes on the elliptical at level 10 and a slow pace followed by 30 minutes on the reclining fixed bicycle-thing at a fat burning level.

I've got 9 weeks until my 10k race so I've worked out a training schedule which I'm going to try and post. It's unleashed the geeky side in me and I colour the cell green when I've done the session and note far/fast etc as well as how I felt afterward.

Anyone else do anything like that to log exercise?

ETA: To add further detail, the schedule's based on the about.com Advanced Beginner 10k training with an interval training session once a week.

Ambling Alp

About a year ago I was getting a lift home with a few colleagues when this song came on. It blew me away, I loved it. And I was introduced to the genius that is Yeasayer and a song which is named after an Italian heavyweight boxer Primo 'Ambling Alp' Carnera, references the German heavyweight boxer Max Schmelling, and American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis's fights with them which came to symbolise the fight against fascism, although Schmelling wasn't a Nazi and emigrated to the US. It went straight on my gym playlist.

So today I did cross-training. 30 minutes on the elliptical and 30 minutes cycling.

I've heard about a 5k on the 15th which I'm going to enter to see if I can break 24:30 to gauge how well I've progressed on my aim to run the 10k in 50 minutes. I'm feeling confident, to be honest.

Adagio for Strings

Today's cross-training and my left calf was feeling a little tight so I decided to go to my local pool for a swim. Over the speakers they played all sorts of thumping techno music, which made the pensioners grumble a bit. One of the tunes was this drum-thumping mix of Adagio for Strings which copies what William Orbit did, but overpowers the melody with a generic drum beat. Listen to it, it's awful.

I find Barber's original movement difficult to listen to while sitting still, but the languorous chords makes it very difficult to settle into a rhythm while running, unsurprisingly since the piece is supposed to be played slowly.

Some may find this sacrilege, but I like William Orbit's remix perfectly well, and the added beat makes it easier to find a rhythm when running. He speeds up the tempo a tad and uses a basic trick of splitting the longer notes into repeated shorter ones. It's a simple trick used to great effect to create movement in the remix while avoiding making it farcical by increasing the tempo too much.