The morning was spent preparing for Jude’s trip to Africa. Jude had been packing while I was sorting out breakfast and lunch, playing with the children (i.e. playing on the Xbox with Joel) and generally trying to be helpful – but probably not.

We all dropped Jude off at Lime Street Station at about 1:20pm and headed back to Ormskirk with a long list of things to get sorted. No doubt I’ve missed something somewhere.

First off, a trip to the gym. To try and keep on top of things, I left the children in the gym cafe with enough money to buy buckets of hot chocolate drinks and crisps while I went off to get through my programme. They seemed to survive with only a small mound of wrappers and empty Starbucks cups when I returned.

I did my warm-up run (janathon – tick!). A quick one km run, coming in at about five minutes. Then on to the the hypertrophy programme, “B” programme, week 2. I think that I need to take out the pull ups from the main body of the programme because they don’t fit in with changing the weights and reps. It just felt a bit easier doing four lots of six, rather than three lots of 12 (or whatever it was last time). Apart from that it seemed to go very well. I wasn’t completely knackered at the end of the session, despite upping the weights and dropping the reps. However, there’s a bit of a niggle in my right knee, which I’ll need to keep my eye on.

Then we were off to Morrisons – “Awwww Dad, must we??”. We got stuff to prepare the basis for the week’s meals and things for the children’s lunches.

Back home and I realised that the tomato sauce that I was going to prepare would take much much longer than I had planned. It involved skinning and de-seeding 2.5kg of tomatoes. Which I set about doing, but it was well past six when I was finally bunging the proto-sauce into the warm oven and considering my 30 minute walk. After some considerable soul searching, I opted for a chinese take out. There just wasn’t time for getting everything else done and wait for the sauce and then cook.

Joel wanted to come on the walk again, and so we headed off into the evening darkness with Joel picking up where we left off last night. “So, Dad, if you were a wizard, what would be your special powers?”. I wanted to be a sorcerer, which didn’t seem awesome enough – but we covered quite a few topics on our 30 minutes meander around town before reaching the Ormskirk Fish Bar.

Dinner sorted, it was almost time for bed. Somehow during this, both Joel and Lily had sorted out their homework and so they pottered off to get ready for the night.

And so I’m finally sitting down at about 10pm with a couple of cans of diet coke, pondering whether or not to make some coffee and preparing the work that I need to have done for 9am tomorrow morning. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, but I haven’t felt like there has been time to get it done. Perhaps if I hadn’t embarked on the tomato sauce I might have started earlier; as it is, the sauce looks more like a yellow olive oil goop rather than a rich red tomato sauce. Let’s see if an overnight spell in the oven improves things.

So that was day 11 – 1km run, 55 minutes strength training and 30 minutes walking.