This week I wanted to tell you about a new nutritional meal planning package that Roger Alsop Personal Training is promoting. Now I know blogs aren’t supposed to be about product promotion but I hope you’ll forgive me as I’ve written so many about running I wanted to focus on something else this week. This particular package helps you to plan your meals around your goals and dietary requirements. It’s not about restrictive dieting, but about eating real food and once you’re familiar with the process it should add to your weekly food shop planning exercise.
The tool allows you to set your own preferences, omitting foods you don’t like and even create your own recipes, should you want to. Once you’ve gone through the initial setup and dietary preferences it can create a meal plan for you, which can then be converted into a shopping list. You then track your progress against your goals. It has other resources too, calculating how many calories you burn off during exercises, and it’s growing all the time.
Promotion over, take a look at www.rogeralsop.co.uk/nutrition for more info, and a video. If you’re interested get in touch, I’m in the process of creating paypal for it, so that should be available soon. Oh and I’ve set the price quite low, initially, because it’s a new concept.
I know there are some regular readers of this blog, so another apology from me, because there wasn’t one last week. I decided it was time for me to treat Carole and myself to a romantic break, so I went away for 10 days. It was a little bit like history repeating itself for me as I revisited places I’d been to before, but they were all new for Carole and they’re really nice places to visit anytime. As you’ll know, I may take holidays from Cheshire but I don’t take holidays from training, however I made the decision to give myself a little break, maybe take a few days off and on the days I trained to just train at ticking over level – but it didn’t all go to plan.
We went to Slovenia, starting in Kranjska Gora, where I had been skiing back in ’92. It’s a lovely little town with very little to do, except walk up big hills, which of course we did. We had a great view of the mountains from our hotel balcony but I’ll admit now that I was a little less impressed with the food at this hotel. We stayed here for 3 days and I did two runs, running up to the Jasna lakes, using minute reps with 30 second recoveries to justify only doing about 35 minutes of running.
After 3 days we moved onto, what I consider to be the most romantic place I’ve been to, Bled. Bled is a real attractive resort with a lake, castle and island. Have a search on the internet for pictures of it, if you don’t believe me (I would put some of ours up but I’ve been too busy setting up the nutrition package to look for the camera). I stayed here in 1997, I’d just started running again after fracturing my foot, and found the 4 mile circuit around the lake pretty good for training. This time however there was a small problem I hadn’t anticipated. The World Rowing Championships were being held on the week we were there. Whilst it was pretty good mixing with so many elite athletes, just like at Pennington Flash, it did mean a portion of the Lake road was sealed off and the diversion took you up a steep hill, adding a further mile onto the run. However, to be honest, it was just what I needed, allowing me to, justifiable stretch out my run a little further and make it more of a workout. After a few days I did get a little problem with my Achilles, but changing my shoes to a lower heel seemed to have cured that, I’d better keep my eye on that though.
I’d really gone to town this time, staying at the Grand Hotel Toplice, last time I was here I was staying lower class but went to the bar, which has huge bowed windows with a spectacular view, for a drink each night. Another plus was the fact we had a balcony on the lake side of the hotel. Carole was impressed, and so was I. The hotel was great and, unlike the previous hotel, the food was pretty damn good too, if a little strange at times. One of the other nice things about this hotel is that it has a pool fed from natural springs, but boy is it cold. I remember last time I couldn’t face getting in but this time I braved the elements and followed up with a sauna. It was in the pool I got chatting to Canadian, Ron Gibson, who’s son, Robbie, was in the Canadian 8. They ended up with bronze, with Germany getting the gold and Great Britain the silver. Ron was leaving before the end of the week and passed on his tickets to me so that we enjoyed a day at the races, on the Friday. I also had a brief conversation with Quin Batten, former rowing gold medallist, who just happened to be having breakfast at the same time as me one day.
Of course, being out of the country meant missing out on a few things, like the rain. We missed most of the World Athletics Champs, we tried our best to catch up with the highlights but Eurosport’s coverage was pretty dire, I was particularly disappointed when they concentrated on field events whilst Mo Farah was trying to win the 10000m. Thankfully we got back home in time to see him win the gold in the 5000m, better coverage from Channel 4 but still not up to the standard we’re used to. Good to see a gold for Dai Greene too, in the 400mh. One other thing I missed was the 6 month anniversary of the Pennington Flash Parkrun, but I understand my age grading rival, Jeff Whittington, won the race, again stretching his lead even more in the age graded tables.
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