From Byway to Highway

An eventful week not quite over, and with more to come at the weekend.

Firstly, training started in earnest last Sunday. Much huffing and puffing in an attempt to make myself hypoxic for about an hour. Even I'm questioning the sensibility of doing this to my body on a daily basis over 3 weeks. Whatever I'm doing with free radicals, I seem to have at least proved that doing this stresses the immune system. By late Sunday evening I had the mother of sore throats, followed the next day by a full-on head cold.

The training itself ( after all, this is what I created this blog for ), consists of 60 second bursts of hypeventilation, followed by a full-exhale static ( which ranges in duration from 30 seconds up to 135, and levelling at about 120 ). So over one hour, this roughly equates to 20 minutes of oxygenation, and 40 of de-oxygenation. I would rate this as being more aggressive than the IHT training I underwent last year, although I'm not wired up to an oximeter and pc in order to compare. Certainly the side effects feel quite similar to IHT - rushing noise in the ears and micro-sleeps being two examples.

As well as biting the hypoxia bullet last Sunday, I also jumped on the Broadband bandwagon. It's not the 8MB highway currently being paved through the ether, but a somewhat thinner 512KBps service. Fine for me and the Elf, though, and it means we can both simultaneously exist in cyberspace under the same roof. The router arrived yesterday, and to my ( pleasant ) surprise, it turned out to be a BT wireless model. All I need to find now is a pcmcia wireless network card that matches, and we should be up and running by the weekend.

Obviously a week of much-wanted deliveries, the Olympus PT027 ( underwater housing ) arrived today. Not yet unpacked, something else for me to fiddle about with at the weekend.