Training... after a fashion

This week was a breakthrough week for my training. Sort of.

I've been getting back into the cycling groove (8.5 miles each way to and from work, I'm trying to do 2-3 days a week). It's actually quite hard to combine cycling for training and commuting purposes. In London, you quickly reach a level where the main influence on your journey time is how many red lights you stop at. So the temptation to sprint when you're approaching a light that you know might change is very high, and there are a lot of lights on my route. Which means I tend to spend a lot of time with my heart rate well above the optimal training zone.

It's stupid, because if I could be disciplined enough to ride within my target rate for a couple of weeks, I would very soon be fit enough that I wouldn't have to worry about it. But I don't, so it takes longer to get fit.

Nevertheless, there's a magic point where you find you can go quite hard and still keep the heart rate in more or less the right spot, and I've hit that point this week. Now I just need to keep going.

I've also been doing some exercises as part of my morning routine - press ups, crunches, various variations on "the plank" and - crucially - pull ups (we have a stairwell that is just the right height). It was seeing these latter efforts that caused 2-year-old son-and-heir Gregor to declare that I was "like Sportacus."

If you don't own a toddler yourself, this may not mean that much to you. Your reaction might be "Jason can't type and why the heck is he letting his two-year old watch Kirk Douglas epics with homoerotic subtexts?"

If you do own a toddler, you might nod sagely. Sportacus is the hero of Lazy Town, a muscular exercise-addict with an Icelandic accent, a moustache to shame Terry-Thomas and a uniform that looks like Biggles reimagined by Steps. Lazy Town, with its wholesome promotion of teamwork, sharing and fanatical devotion to aerobics, was the most popular children's TV programme in the US of A last year (it was in the newspaper, so it must be true). Sportacus is, for toddlers bewildered by the sudden disappearance of Greg Wiggle (which is a whole other story), the hero du jour. For a dad to be described as "like Sportacus" by his offspring is A Big Thing.

In my case, the comparison is, of course, completely inaccurate. But delusional is different from delightful, whatever Neil Gaiman thinks.

And no, I still haven't put on my walking boots.