I’m writing this as I’m on the trans-pennine train to Yarm and the beautiful North Yorkshire. Off to visit a friend who I haven’t seen in 20 years – I’m very much looking forward to it. No reason to think it’ll be anything other than brilliant fun.

It’s a long way, though. Four hours on the train and given a mishap with ticket machines yesterday morning I had to catch an earlier train to be able to pick them up at Wigan. So much for internet goodness. As an aside, the ticket agency – thetrainline.com – were very helpful this morning after I had a bit of a moan on twitter. They refunded the Burscough to Wigan ticket which I’d had to buy and were gracious and helpful in the process. I can’t fault them.

The long journey is a bit of a blessing, because I’ve got to write up a few things for work in preparation for next week. The problem with working on projects that are drop-dead urgent is making the time to be able to properly prepare and track them. I’m getting better at it, but it’s easy to finish one project to find that there are a handful of other drop-dead urgent projects that need some attention. Improving my ability to prioritise is one thing, but improving my ability to negotiate more time is actually more useful and results in a job better done.

It feels like I’m slowly turning into a manager, which is reasonable I suppose, as the longer term project was to try and get away from by-the-hour paid work which had ultimately proven to be a problem at mytechie.

So for Janathon I had to get some exercise in before heading out to travel at 8:45. It felt late when I got to bed and I could have easily have had a lie in after a busy week. Instead I crawled out of bed and re-did the New Rules of Lifting break in workout “B”. The one that I had done on Thursday. It feels like it’s more of an upper body workout, compared to the “A” which is more lunges and squats.

When I was walking around Manchester Picadilly station this morning I thought that my legs felt stronger, and I’m guessing that this is the inevitable consequence of all this exercise. This is good. I think that my next step is to moderate consumption of all things tasty and not good. If I’m going to be able to do a marathon then I’m going to have to get better at those long runs, and that means losing some weight.