neurorehabilitationFromTheTrenches

This has been a very frustrating weekend. There is no trike; not with me anyway. Claire called the Dreirad Zentrum on Thursday and they, sadly, confirmed that it wouldn't be ready for collection before Monday, and since Claire will be unavailable to collect it during the week, and since the Dreirad zentrum didn't offer to deliver it, on account of the inconvenience that they had caused, I will have to wait another whole week until I can start mastering it. In other news, this weekend saw me take part in another workshop. This time, instead of physiotherapy and Bobath. it was Ergotherapy (occupational therapy) and Perfetti . Perfetti is a method of rehabilitation, typically Ergotherapy, that focuses on cognition as it relates to movement. I wanted the focus to be, where possible, on walking. I believe that as soon as I can walk independently with the cane; it will have a snowball effect that will exponentially improve my physicality. Thankfully, Ergo therapists there, concentr

...Happy Birthday to the blog. So, in this special birthday (11/May) edition, I will share my Blogger statistics. I have been keeping my eye on these for a while, it's interesting to me, and hopefully you too, the blog articles that don't get much traffic and those that do. This weekend I'm off to Berlin to meet some friends. I'll name the group members in case I manage to rope some of them in to submitting a guest post. Here goes: Sean Tack, Adam O'Shea, Declan Barry, Cillian Cahill, Dan Wolfe, Darran Diskin, John O'Grady, Mick McEvilly, and then some fellows I don't know, yet, from the Whatsapp group; Simon, Emmet, Robbie, Barry, Craig Atkinson, Ray Reilly and Joe Hasset, then the following ambiguous characters: Am?, 0851246*** and 0863710***. Overview This is simply a snapshot of the most important statistics, according to the Blogger engineers. That graph in the top left reflects the fact that there was a spike in May of last year for obvious rea

I want to ride it where I like. This morning I made the first steps toward getting a tricycle (or Dreirad as it's known in Germany). Claire and I went to the Dreirad Zentrum in neighbouring (to Bergedorf) Wentdorf to try one of them out. I was shown out to the car park with my tricycle and permitted to go for it. The brake was unfortunately on my left handlebar but I was assured that this could be easily amended; also, I wasn't as confident on it as I dreamt I would be. My left foot kept slipping off the pedal if I wasn't paying complete attention to keeping it there. Again, the sales person had a solution for that too, he would ensure my left pedal could be replaced with a more secure alternative. There was one snag; I would have to wait two long weeks. That sucked, but they needed to order it, so what could I do? I had hoped to have it for this weekend. The wheelchair's days are numbered. The tricycle will come with much more independence. Eventually, Claire wil

I finally finished Born to Run by Christopher McDougall yesterday and this will be a review of the same. I say review, but opinion piece is probably a better description of what this will be. There will also be a Sillytrain competition with the following parameters: 1) The deadline is Tuesday 14th of May, @23:59 CET (GMT+1 hour). 2) Only entries with a score >= 4, will be considered. 3) Attempts should be left as a comment, please include an email address. I'll contact you for a postal address after you win. 4) There is only one winner, so the highest score wins. 5) There will be a bonus additional prize for the winner, if it's not Jimmy Treanor. 6) The theme of any submissions should be running. 7) The main prize is a brand new copy of Born to Run. 8) In the event of multiple winners, assuming validity, the first entered will be accepted. Born to Run is an extremely important book to me, it has everything; it's well written; suspense? Check; humour? Ple

Time for another guest article. This time we're lucky to have a distinguished triathlete, whom I met on holidays, talking about training.  Guest Blogger: Calum Pinder One thing which replicates itself again and again in training literature is the advice that you should do 80% of your training at a low intensity and the remaining 20% at a high intensity, purposely missing the middle. The argument goes that if you train in the middle you are repeating the same workouts at the same pace at the same distance and seeing no improvement yet introducing fatigue which hinders your future gains. If you polarise then it means you can smash the hard stuff (20%) which creates potential for improving fitness, then carry out the easy stuff (80%) well, which both creates an endurance base and allows your body to adapt to the 20% you’ve previously put it through. I’d been considering where this repeats itself across non fitness related ventures for a while. In economics there’s Pareto’