Justin Discovered

This is the second part of my thoughts about completing an Ironman. You can read this on it's own, but I have my initial thoughts before talking and thinking it through a bit longer in the first part. Here it is: There are a lot of fantastic responses here. I've been mulling over this since I wrote this and then some more after reading the responses. This ended up being quite long, it's really for me, but perhaps it will help others step back and recognise what they've achieved also. Firstly, something that I didn't make clear initially; I had a great time doing the training and the event, I have zero regrets. I also just got my event photos and I was clearly pretty stoked to get across the line. On to my thoughts after a bit more introspection. I've done two marathons and two 70.3s before this and they were all tough and felt like hard work to get to the end. Obviously, my pace was quicker in those, but it wasn't a huge amount quicker. So it can't be ...

I posted this on a Triathlon Facebook Group I'm a part of, it ended up being quite long and I think the immediate post-race thoughts and then the more considered thoughts may be of interest to others. This is the first part: So I just finished my first Ironman on the weekend and it doesn't feel like much of a big deal. Going into it my goal was simply to finish. I had a rough idea of how long it should take me, but that was mainly just so my cheer squad knew when they should expect to see me, I'd made a point of not shooting for a specific time. In the end, my swim was right on my prediction, bike was a little faster and run was a little slower so overall I came in at a little over 14hrs which was where I expected to be. I'd been told to expect to feel like quitting etc. during the run and I'd have highs and lows. I didn't feel that way, I really didn't have any mental challenges or physical ones besides feeling a little light headed and like I was goin...

I've just started getting into woodworking, I missed out on doing it in high school and my Dad can make just about anything from metal but has limited woodworking skills. As a result I'm fairly good with my hands and quite proficient with metal work, but I know about as much as Jon Snow when it comes to woodworking. I've started my first project and one thing that has become clear is the need for good dust management. I also read an interesting article [1] on the  Fine Wood Work Association (WA)  website on the dangers of wood dust and efficacy of the various management options. It's made me quite conscious of it and at the moment I'm wearing disposable dust masks that I'm sure do close to nothing except be annoying, especially on top of my beard. If I get right into woodworking I'll likely look into a proper dust extraction system, but that's a rather expensive option to jump into straight off the bat. At the moment in addition to the fairly useles...

Checking level One of the first woodworking projects assigned to me by  Ash  was shelves for the toilet. She gave me a few photos to show what she had in mind and when she went away I decided to get it done for when she came home. Installing wall plugs They're pretty simple, I bought one length of dressed pine for the actual shelves and another length of dressed pine for the supporting edge that they would sit on. This design would only work for shelves the length of the wall, as long as the wall isn't too long. The supporting edge is cut the length of the wall and then two shorter lengths the width of the shelves minus the depth of the supporting edge. I cut the exposed end of the supporting edge at 45 degrees for a nicer finish. I drilled through the supporting edge and marked the wall where the screws would go. Wall plugs were knocked into the wall and then screws put through the supporting edge into the wall plugs. Test Fit The shelves were simply cut to...

I'll write stuff here at some point. In the meantime, here's a photo(that needs to be correctly resized) of one of my dogs, Lenny. Also, here's some more random text just to have something here to test formatting and see what it looks like. There's really no reason for you to be reading this, I'm just typing stuff so that there's something other than just gibberish. Not that this is terribly different from gibberish, it is intelligible though, just not very useful or interesting. Just a little bit more writing should do it, there is almost enough here to use as my test post. Maybe just one more sentence. Actually, perhaps just an extra paragraph, you can't have a blog post with just one big block of text. This paragraph will be a bit shorter than the previous one, but it will have a couple of sentences. Look at that, it already has a few sentences. This is the last sentence I think. No, I was wrong, this is the last sentence. Lenny, ready for bed. ...