Changing of the guard

Guest post by my wife

This weekend marks the commencement of the London 2012 summer Olympics, the pinnacle of global sporting events bringing together the greatest athletes on earth.

In this case, because it is British, it also brings us this.



The olympics is unique in the sense that it is one of the few sporting events occurring once every 4 years.

Things change dramatically after 4 years. This Olympics Australia's old swim giants Ian Thorpe, Geoff Huegill, Michael Klim have all been ousted by their younger, lesser known counterparts. Ditto for Michael Phelps by Ryan Loch. In some instances, very publicly and humiliatingly (to see what I mean, see Thorpedo's documentary, which I suffered through with Kevin)

And then you have these young stars coming out of nowhere. This girl is 16.


I suspect some of these giants will feel a little like this.

In any case, to put it into perspective, sport is sport. By definition, sport is
"Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively". Which means it can also be something like this:


So maybe we do take it a little too seriously sometimes? Anyhow, have fun watching the Olympics!

Rocky start

My first week under the training program for Ironman WA got off to a rocky start. I did the Wally Cairns cross country run in King's Park last Sunday. The run consisted of 5km laps, I planned to 15km but decided to stop after 10km as my left achilles felt a bit tight.

It got worse after Tuesday's interval run session and I skipped most of my running sessions for the week. I visited Nathan Doig for a massage and boy, did he live up to his reputation! It hurt like hell and it was the only time I wished that a massage ended sooner. But it's a testament to his magic hands and I feel much better now.

I have a feeling what started the sore achilles was probably the cold weather. It takes ages for the muscles to warm up and I probably copped it in the run session on my first day back. Coming from a place of average mid 30 degrees to consistently sub 5 degrees temperatures on the morning must have shocked my system.

It was so cold that my Timex watch, which is only just over a year old gave up on me on one of my morning rides. I took it to the shop to have the battery changed and the screen came back to live but somehow frozen. The guy at the shop couldn't figure out why it was so and refused to refund my money. Anyway, I took it home and after removing the battery and placing it back in several times, it seemed to be working again. All except one button, which I can live without.

Yesterday, a friend of ours celebrated her birthday at Make Your Mark Art Cafe. Pottery painting - a great idea, all of us had fun! And I rekindled my love affair with my hobby during my teenage years - art. And dare I say, my art teacher will be proud ;)

Thanks Tasha for having us, and happy birthday!

Wedding and honeymoon

We're back in Perth, it's been a week already. The past few weeks have been hectic, but it was all worth it. Very happy with how the wedding turned out, many thanks to family and friends who put in the extra effort to make it all happen. Here's some pictures courtesy of Pok Xian, Siang Chee, Pei Yee and Li Choong from their Facebook pages. And a slideshow of the wedding morning by our camera maestro Aaron Chin.

We had our honeymoon in Krabi, half in Koh Lanta, an island about 2 hour journey from Krabi town. And the other half in Krabi town itself. We were lucky that it was fine weather as we were told the week before there were heavy rain and strong waves. Snorkelling and visiting the night markets were fun. So was finding a massage parlour that wasn't dodgy and offered extra services. Making Li-Ann climb 1,237 steps up the Tiger Cave Temple was only fun for me haha, as you can see from her annoyed look in one of the pictures below.