I forgot to mention yesterday that there was a caveat to my clean bill of health. Nothing was found when they tested me on the treadmill, but because there was something going on they want to do an ultrasound of my heart and have me carry around an ECG for the day.

Both these should be good fun. I rather like the idea of seeing my heart pumping away on a monitor – it would be much more interesting than the lines and beeps of the ECG; and carrying around an ECG machine sounds like something from the future. I rather hope that it will be a device the size of a watch and that it doubles up as something that fires lasers or at least can take snapshots of the measurements and post them to Twitter. I may be disappointed if instead it looks like a car phone from the 1980s.

Despite these final tests, the doctor told me that I could get back to exercising as I had done before. So tonight I went back to the gym after a two week hiatus.

I thought that I’d reboot the New Rules of Lifting Hypertrophy programme having got about half way through before being told to stop. The plan for the session was the same as the one that I did on the 19th January. Four sets of six with relatively heavy weights. I started with the same weights as the last time and quickly realised that they felt super-heavy! I had to drop them down by a couple of pounds just to be able to get past the third set.

I finished all the exercises, but I can feel it in my abs. I may suffer a bit tomorrow.

Earlier I had walked over to the school to pick up Joel. Lily had been home all day suffering from a bit of a cold and was running a temperature. She seemed much better by the end of the day, so fingers crossed she’ll be good for going in tomorrow. I really can’t complain though. She didn’t distract or mither much at all. I fed her warm drinks through the day and sorted her lunch and in return she was tucked up on the sofa reading Goodnight Mister Tom or snoozing. She was no trouble.

When getting Joel I also bumped into Cllr Adrian Owens who was out delivering leaflets for his new independent group/party. He seems like a man re-energised by the electoral mountain that he has to climb, but seems determined to enjoy the ride while he’s at it. I have tremendous respect for anyone who goes it alone against the party system, and for those who work as independents – such as Jane from Station Road. It’s tricky, though, because for all their problems locally, I want a Labour Government to be returned at the General Election in May. Anyway, once the elections are over I’m sure that we’ll catch up for a coffee and he can fill me in with the gossip from the Council since I left.

So tomorrow I will hopefully be back running. I’ve got the training schedule for the 10k to pick up and I don’t want to leave it any longer than absolutely necessary before running again. Although just at this moment, I could quite easily sit on my backside for another week. It’ll take some motivation tomorrow to get out.