My Cardiac Rehab exercise sessions are now over, I’ve been refereed to the local gym and I’m on my own. The sessions helped me understand my breathing. so I can now tell when I’m reaching a point that I shouldn’t go beyond. It’s far less strenuous levels than I’m used to, but means I can go swimming, cycling or longer distance walking with some degree of confidence. I’m looking forward to visiting the plane wrecks on Bleaklow Moor soon. I’ll be off swimming next weekend.
Next medical stage is a check up with my consultant in a couple of weeks.
Peter Bargh
Sights & SoundsPhoto shoot with up and coming model Chloe Bleackley at the Turbine
Sheffield Wednesday vs Nottingham Forest
I went to my first game in years… Sheffield Wednesday vs Nottingham Forest. An average game of, as they say, two halves…both with little action but a fair bit of drama from the Notts side who seemed to foul a lot and wasted about seven minutes of injury time.
The game started with a goal in 3 minutes to the away team, but Wednesday pulled back to make it one all in 39th minute. Those moments were about as interesting as it got.
Watched Sheffield Wednesday against Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough with Will and Ryan
Went to a Buddhism taster session at the Loyal Trooper in South Anston with Stephen Rodgers
I bought the Louder CD by tauchsieder a few weeks ago in a sale at Head (ex Zavvi) in Meadowhall. I’d never heard of them but it was one of those lucky stumble upons. If you like unusual slower music that’s verging on ambient you’ll find this a great album. What’s even better is having looked around I spotted it is now available for free download along with both tauchsieder’s other two CDs on Last.fm here: tauchsieder
Well it wasn’t pigeons that I heard squawking today in the garden. When I heard the loud shrieks I thought “oh no the kitten’s got another bird”, but this time it was quite the opposite. To my surprise I saw a very worried kitten running away while being dive bombed by a thrush.
The kitten, called Diesel, eventually froze in the centre of the garden and stared in amazement as the thrush began to hop closer in circular motions, shrieking all the time. In the background, in just about every bush, was a group of blackbirds, seemingly egging the thrush on to attack. It was a surreal moment that I’ve never seen before.
After some time Diesel plucked up courage to attack. The bird missed the leap and proceeded to taunt poor Diesel from a nearby bush before diving down like a Spitfire over the kitten’s head. I decided to get the camera and managed to take a few quick snaps before Diesel came to running to me all shook up.
I’m not sure how they situation had occurred but I think tonight maybe he will have nightmares.
The final stages of my rehab program have come in to play. I’m now attending a Cardiac Rehab Exercise class at the hospital.
It’s a series of 12 sessions aimed to teach you how to exercise correctly following a heart attack.
The process is like a circuit training session on sedation.
The first session was strange. A class of 12 or so middle to older aged people all shuffling about for the 15 minutes graded warm up.
The warm up, it’s explained, is to slowly get your body and heart ready for some moderate exercise that follows. The warm up is less strenuous than walking into the hospital, but it’s using each muscle and gradually building up to make you ready for the circuit that follows.
The circuit is a series of cardiovascular based exercises, that takes about 30mins to complete. While doing the circuit you push a little to begin to deepen your breathing, with an aim to reach a moderate breathing level. One where you can still hold a conversation without gasping. It’s all measured on the Borg scale. A scale introduced by Gunnar Borg that rates from 0 to 10 (o being nothing at all and 10 being extremely hard) We have to aim for 3 4 or 5 (moderate).
The circuit is followed by a 10 minute structured cool down. The warm up in reverse.
And then it’s tea and biscuits.
You have your blood pressure and heart rate read before and after the session.
Having been a fairly fit person all my life I’m finding it difficult to adjust to this very sedate process, but I’m doing as told.
Once the session is complete I can go off to a normal gym and start to build up my fitness program. My aim is to become fit enough to climb mountains again. I really want to revisit Striding Edge, but for now I’ll have to stick with places like Millstone Edge (that’s where the photo above was taken yesterday)
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab.
You simply enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize you by fitting you into to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data.
The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
I tried it to see how the internet sees me.
Here’s the result – click on the photo to enlarge the detail.