Monday Jan 22. 67kg

Back in a routine, eating has been more regular and I've managed to put on 1kg this week. I'll be happy to get up around 68 / 68.5 as I can easily drop a kg in the sauna for the weigh in.

Sunday morning up a little later than I wanted to be. Didn't get out the door for my Sunday 4.5k run until nearly 8am. Looked pretty grey and miserable so I donned the long leggins and long sleeve T which I regretted about 20 mins into the run. Stuck with the 5min/1min intervals and walked the best (worst!) part of Reynolds road hill. The last K back saw my heart rate starting to climb into high 160's and so on advice from several coolrunners I dropped back into a walk until my HR came down and then back up to a very slow jog until the interval was complete.

The afternoon's show jumping class was great for my confidence. Taken back to basics and not just herded over the jumps, we walked and trotted in 2 point for a good 15 minutes which is excellent for balance and gets the load off the horses back ready for the jump. Its pretty taxing on the inner thighs and today I'm well aware of it! My lower back is also a wee bit sore, no amount of back conditioning work prepares it for the jarring of so much trot work over the past 2 days. Mojo was very well behaved, taking the little grade 5 jumps in his stride. We even managed to canter over a couple of them. Gill brought along her Olympic gold medals to show everyone - very impressive. Started to bucket down just as we riding home - and I was wishing that I'd made the effort to float him down. Never mind, still would have go drenched unloading him up at the paddock. All in all a satisfying 2 day clinic.

Benching with Shaz today at the studio at 11am. Will take off for an early lunch break to get this done. Packed the Metal Shirt into the car. Now the real work starts. We will be purely working on bench technique with the shirt for the hour. Tonight I will finish my bench training, skipping the main exercise, as I will have already benched heavy, just doing the supplementary and accessory work. Normally today would have been Max squat day, in a way I'm glad of the extra day's reprieve for the sake of my lower back - main exercise for this cycle is Good mornings working up to a max triple.

Team meeting with the new boss at 9am this morning. So far he's been pretty good, leaving us to do our jobs and understanding the pressure I was under last week with both the boys (my colleagues) working from home on Thursday, a nasty P1 and a stressed out account rep on my back about some script that was not packaged in one of our releases. All in a day's work.

Right - 8am and I need more coffee.....

Vicki xxx