Sports Day just aint want it used to be

Here is Junior Trigirl 2 in action on Sports Day at school. It is not how Tirgirl remembers it from her childhood. Where are the three-legged races, sack races, egg and spoon races or even just running races? These days schools worry about health and safety and everyone being a winner. The best race was 'dress a clown'.

Sisterly love

Ahhh, how sweet! Here are the two Junior Trigirls having a cuddle after their bath today.

Girls just love shoes!

The Junior Trigirls wanted new party shoes as birthday presents, and they got them in the sales yesterday. They love them.

Junior Trigirl 1 is modelling her shoes above, but Junior Trigirl 2 was too busy to have her photo taken, so Junior Trigirl 1 had the brilliant idea of simply placing her pink shoes in the picture.

Trigirl does not think she would have been pleased with shoes as a birthday present when she was a little girl.

First specs for Junior Trigirl 2

Poor Junior Trigirl 2 got her first pair of glasses today. They are pink. She doesn't like them. Not many people know that the Tooth Fairy has a cousin called the Glasses Fairy. She is paying Junior Trigirl 2 a visit tonight.

Gym babe

Junior Trigirl 2 is extremely happy because she has had her long-anticipated first gymnastics lesson today. She has been begging Trigirl for months to take her to the classes. Trigirl finally gave in when she realised that she and Junior Trigirl 1 could go swimming at the same time. Other than this one big success, pretty much everything had gone slightly awry for Trigirl today. Trigirl will treat herself to a soak with her new bath bomb tonight.

Gifts galore!

Trigirl was showered with presents yesterday:

1. A crossword book from her Dad (he said it was a little known fact that it was Daughter's Day)


2. A bath bomb from her Mum


3. Home grown veg from her Mum and Dad (YUM, YUM!)


4. Flowers from M (pictured above)

Trigirl says a big THANK YOU to Mum, Dad and M. Apart from the veg, all were a complete surrpise.

Trigirl started working on her first crossword before going to bed last night - she likes doing that at the end of the day. Now that she has a whole book of crosswords, she can allow her Dad to do the one in her newspaper when he is visiting!

She is looking forward to having a fragrent bath with the bomb (great idea, Mum! And very thoughtful. It will go down a bomb).

She is also very pleased with the flowers. If she didn't seem very excited at the time, it was because she was very surprised to receive them. They, and all the other presents, really made her day.

Trigirl writes while she bikes

Trigirl performed an amazing trick yesterday evening. She managed to rewrite something while cycling!

She had started this particular piece of work for her client on the train and hadn't finished it. While out on her bike, she wasn't consciously even thinking about it, but a better way of writing it entered her mind as if by magic. As soon as she got hime, she scribbled down all her ideas as quickly as she could, then she jumped into the shower and rushed off to her pilates class.

Later in the evening, she sat down and typed out her piece properly. And it was good.

Workingirl

Trigirl went on a business trip to London today. She was visiting T, her 'work friend' (as the Junior Trigirls would say). Here is T finishing his picnic lunch.

T and Trigirl get on well and even share their packets of sandwiches - he chose tofu and she picked egg, so they had half each.

She doesn't think T is going to be very pleased with this picture. In the flesh, he is a good-looking guy!

Junior racing pride

Junior Trigirl 1 is EXTREMELY proud of her medal from yesterday's race and took it to school today to 'show and tell'. She insisted on wearing it on the bus on the way home, and showed it to several of the other passengers.

Trigirl is slightly taken aback at the depth of her feeling. She has done races and got medals before, but has never seemed quite so pleased as this.

Racingirls (and boy)

Junior Trigirl 2 took this lovely photo of Trigirl, Swimmingman and Junior Trigirl 1 with their medals from the Orpington 10K race and the 2K Family Fun Run.

Trigirl and Swimmingman are extremely proud of Junior Trigirl 1 who really enjoyed her 2K. She took about 13 minutes.

Trigirl completed the 10K race in 52:13, which is about 30 seconds slower than last year. She is pleased with this time because she must weigh at least 7lbs more than she did then.

Swimmingman also seemed to enjoy himself and did well too, but as Junior Trigirl 1 is keen to point out, he was not as quite as fast as her!

See pictures of Swimmingman and Junior Trigirl 1 in action below.

colour me beautiful

The Junior Trigirls just before washing off their face paintings from the school fete.

Tirgirl is one handshake away from....

... Maggie Thatcher! She realised this while out on her early morning bike ride. She passes on all her sports mags to a friend and he currently sees her almost every day. Perhaps the Iron Lady herself is reading Trigirl's hand-me-down copies of Cycling Weekly?

Hot pedals

Trigirl whizzed through her 20K bike time trial today in just over 49 minutes. This was a good time for her, especially given that she had NUMEROUS holdups, such as a temporary traffic light near her house (that switched to a very lengthy red just as she approached it), a closed cycle path that forced Trigirl to cross a main road, and slow moving traffic on a fast downhill stretch. If the conditions had been better, this definitely would have been Trigirl's fastest time.

Schoolgirl

Trigirl volunteered to go on Junior Trigirl 1's school trip to Hastings, which was today.

Here are Trigirl's four charges in a rare moment of calm sitting on the beach, eating their lunch. Junior Trigirl 1 is on the right.

There were 64 kids on this trip. Although Trigirl only had four lovely kids to look after, she couldn't relax for a moment because it was very hard to constantly locate her four, among a constantly moving crowd of 64.

Trigirl did enjoy getting to know some of the kids better, but she is not in a rush to go through such a anxiety-enducing experience again.

not so crawling crawl

Trigirl completely amazed herself today. She did a 7x200m interval swim in 38:45, which is more than two minutes faster than it took her last week.

This is not exactly Olympic medal winning, or even triathlon medal winning speed, but nonetheless, she is extremely impressed with herself.

And how has she achieved this amazing step forward? Apart from churning out about 3000m a week, she has got herself a 'Becoming a Faster Swimmer' DVD by former Olympic swimmer, Tom Jager. She has only watched part of it, but it seeems to have helped.

For more info on this DVD, see amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Becoming-Faster-Swimmer-Vol-Freestyle/dp/B00063E77I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1245237102&sr=8-1

Trigirl is happy to lend this DVD to her friends.

After school sun, tv gets a break!

Trigirl gets sick and tired of seeing the Junior Trigirls sitting on their bottoms watching tv, especially after school. Today, the sun is out and the kids are playing in the garden instead.

The picture here shows them in action. And they had their tea in the tent. Three cheers for summer!

Not as gruelling as it seems

Every morning, Trigirl opens up her training programme to discover what type of workout she is scheduled to do that day. She was a little shocked yesterday when she discovered that she was due to do a 30 minute interval run followed by 1200m of swimming drills. This looked very punishing on paper, but actually Trigirl did not have any trouble doing all this.

"I want to hose the bikes, Mummy!"

Here is Junior Trigirl 1 'helping' Trigirl to clean FIVE bikes (Trigirl's two, one for each of the Junior Trigirls and one of Swimmingman's many bikes). Trigirl thinks Cycle Chick G will be proud of her.

The Junior Trigirls subsequently had lots of fun with the hose. Let's just say that Swimmingman got caught in the crossfire and ended up looking like he had wet his pants (see below).



Trigirl has now recovered from her post operative sleepiness.

woozy

Trigirl is in a post-operative woozy state today. She had a very very minor op this morming and was put to sleep for about twenty minutes.

Swimmingman picked her up from the hospital at lunchtime. She then lay on the sofa and watched her new ' how to swim fast' DVD by Olympic gold medallist, Tom Jaeger. She was surprised to learn that it is better to have your fingers open, not closed or even cupped while swimming front crawl.

Trigirl is pleased with her swimming this week. Yesterday, she did a 7x200m interval swim and it took only one minute longer than last week's 6x200m swim.

Trigirl is bored this afternoon. She feels too mushy to concentrate on anything but too awake to go to bed.

Pilates gives Trigirl a second wind

Trigirl arrived at M's pilates class feeling exhausted yesterday evening. By the end of it, she felt completely invigorated and ready for action. To prove it, she did 1.5 hours work after getting home. Trigirl has rarely experienced such a complete turnaround as a result of pilates

All bricked up

Trigirl had a very good brick sesssion (a bike ride immediately followed by a run) yesterday. Normally it takes her five or six or even more minutes to settle into the run, but this time she just zoomed off.

He returns

Swimmingman came back from Canada yesterday, laden with maple syrup flavoured goodies, a lovely new running top for Trigirl and numerous other pressies.

exhausting day

Both Junior Trigirls fell asleep instantly after a tiring day spent stroking goats and playing in the park, and walking up hill and down dale to the local children's petting farm.

a touch of glamour

Trigirl went out for dinner yesterday evening with M and Cycle Chick G to celebrate M's birthday. Trigirl loves going out with the girls and wants to do it again soon. Since it was M's birthday, Cycle G arranged for a car and driver, drinks with strawberries floating in them, and a quartet of waiters to sing Happy Birthday.

After a night of far more glamour than Trigirl is used to, she has come back to earth with a bump, starting with changing a wet bed at 7am this morning.

Happy belated birthday, M!

Happy Birthday, Mum!

It's Trigirl's Mum's birthday today! Here is Trigirl's favourite picture of her Mum, snapped in all her youthful gorgeousness in 1965.

Unintentional tri

Trigirl has, without meaning to, virtually done a triathlon today. She cycled to the leisure centre, did her 600x200m interval swim, rushed out of the pool, pedalled fast to a shop on the other side of town, zoomed back home, threw her bike in the garage and then she ran to school to collect the kids. Phew!

Junior Greengirl

Trigirl found Junior Trigirl 1 doing the gardening after school today.

She has always felt that Junior Trigirl 1 was interested in gardening, but nonetheless she was surprised to discover she had helped herself to a pair of scissors, found some gardening gloves and was just getting on with it.

run jog run jog run jog etc

Trigirl spent 15 minutes running intervals today. Enjoyable at first... but then it is hot and tiring.

Swimmingman flew to Canada on business yesterday.