Stockport 8s

hey everyone,
coming to you very foggy today. and im not talking about the weather! something about 4 day weekends are really dangerous to the concentration etc have felt all day that there is something seriously up with my focus. dont think im going to go to the gym today again, think i might pass out in the middle of the aerobics class, and sleep! that would be a hoot wouldnt it?! its all becuase i had an awesome weekend in stockport. i love the place, even if it is a bit of a hole! where to start with the story...
well lets start on the Thursday, thats when things went a little belly up for me. so i met the dear mrs arnold at the old school house bar where she was showing off her new scar (chicks dig scare) we popped over to the 51 afterwards to meet all the rest of her work crew, they seem nice if a little tough to talk to sometimes..then i whisked her off to the shebeen for dinner and a show, the show being my bro gig, MoJo (check them out... every thursday) so we ordered... em the service leaves alot to be desired, our burgers took over an hour to arrive... what?! then ealron arrives to add to our party and we lounged full on the couch right infront of MoJo who have recently recruited a keyboard player (i hope he stays.. he is awesome!) they were rocking out to a large crowd, mainly becuase it was holy thursday and every one was desparate to get the booze in before the drought... there was another band downstairs, so mojo were all about the electric set to be heard over the general hubbub. they were so good. coach chris joined us after a while a bit giggly from the success of dublinfest and had prob just caught cooties from drinking from the winning trophy cup..about midnight i bid everyone good night and trundled home with my car still full of bavaria that was destined for a raffle that didnt work out :( so it was 12.30 when i lugged the 5 boxes of beer, 1 magic box, 2 boxes of clothes and condoms and 4 boxes of glasses out of my car. this took a while, then i managed to pile them all onto the trolley that the porters keep for such emergencies, there was no porter though cos of the hour so i had to do this all myself..finally after much huffing, puffing and a serious lazy man load i managed to get the trolley into the lift, adn over to my door, but i couldnt get it in the door over the treshold so i yanked it wicked hard and one of the boxes of beer went bye bye and started to leak beer pee everywhere!!! aaaagh not cool!!! so finally i cleaned everything up, chucked the beer and the broken glass and packed my bag for the weekend, it was now 1.30 in the am!! crawled into bed to rest my eyes and was shocked awake at 4am to get the frak out of dodge and collect the girls.the adventure had begun!

we barely made our flight, apparently 1 hour is not long enough in the morning in dublin airport during a bank holiday! but we made it with minutes to spare and i didnt have to run once! sweet, promptly we all fell asleep on the 6.30 flight and looked a little worse for wear when we touched down in manchester. we then rolled out to the car park and found what looked like our taxi and it was open.. where was the driver?! we bailed in and he came running around the corner, apparently he had been waiting inside.. how did he miss us with our enormous bags? he brought us to the davenport hotel.. legend place, very into floral designs! it was still only about 8.30 in the am when we got there so the poor woman only had 3 rooms ready, people were sleeping in the other ones! so we drew straws and julie and i got the tinyiest room ever! but it had a bed and we promptly fell onto it and fell asleep! then it was time for our first matches.. we faced off against winslow and the blues in the rain, not a good start as we lost to both :( but as we were trying to warm up in the club house and chow down on some chilli and burgers and we met the people from the John Wig-Tour group. mental people we were all about the drinking games etc. needless to say the dublin girls (minus moi) got stuck in and bonded! that night we went to dinner in an italian that turned into a disco after the food had been served!! random! we rocked out and sweated out the food, fell into bed about midnight... then it was the tourney....
we dressed in 80s random gear and sweated our way through many games, we had so much fun, the games were only15 minutes and half pitch, there was loads of running, sweating (the outfits included tights!!) and laughes. we didnt do that well but we did manage to come 12 out of 16 and more importantly we beat the scots! even if it was only the junior team it meant something to us that got knocked out of the championship by the senior scots in teh euros! that night we split up and headed to dinner and the pub early expecting the girls to follow, about 10pm i was knackered so the little group of grannies headed home, only to see the others waiting at the bus stop outside our hotel!! the next day a group of weary tired ladies met for brekkie and headed out on mystery trail to team up with the scots and face off aginst the dutch.. my god we have a tough game in store for the worlds! they beat us fair and square but again it was good learning. we managed to scab a lift to the airport straight after the match (sweaty) and were early enough for our flight to get a burger king into us.. mmmm bad food!

so what did i learn? that england has better weather than us, better facilities than us, better skillz! what do we have... better looking players ;)

Great Ireland Run

so why would i, the person who HATES to run, actually sign up for another 10km?? its all to do with the blasted world cup which is ever looming. im in the gym every day working out, sweating away the fat in a bid to be at least as fast as the other girls when i get over there, competitive? moi?! never! so i signed up for the Great Ireland Run that took place on the 5th of April in the park. it was a lovely day but i was in a rotten mood, you see i had had some drama over the weekend with my car dying on the way home in the middle of no where in the country, it was something out of a slasher flick i tell you!! but anyway the long and short of it is that i got towed home and the car was pronounced dead on arrival. i had to enjoy public transport to get me to the run on sunday, whoop di do. i made it just, but i was luggin my weekend bag with me, the left luggage dude at hueston was off sick.. and yes i did wonder why there was only one such employee for the job? or why there werent individual lockers in the station, damn terrorists ruin everyting!
so i sweated my way into the park, people we getting buses inside the park to the starting line! disgraceful! so i soldierd on and finally made it! the reason for the bad mood? mom read the bus times wrong so we missed the first adn second bus... i had no time for brekkie and was starving.. so i stripped right there in the park infront of 11,000 people! not that anyone was bothered looking ;) we dumped our bags and set off to look for food, then i rethought that idea and threw an entire green powerade into me (have a wierd attachedment to them now.. hated them before) then wally and i had to pee, now all around the ditch were loads of guys pissing, so unfair, so we wandered down until we came across the ladies area, down we went and squatted and squirted like the best of them!! that done we split up, wally went to the fast area and ealron and i humbly stood near the back with the wlkers. just as we crossed the start ealron decided that he needed the loo! so i tol him to hold it and go half way through but he was having none of it and disappeared to the now empty portaloos! so i was left alone, with no ipod, the battery had gone in mine! the first 5 km were easy.. then to 8km was a hard slog that nearly killed me, there were hills!!! the last 2 were tough but you could see the end so not that tough... i did it 6 minutes faster than the first time which i was super impressed with, and i only walked for about 20 paces twice. i have signed up to do the flora mini marathon now, got very emotional during the race when i realised i need a running buddy who is willing to go my pace and tell me im great all the while i bitch them out of it! any takers???

the mini marathon is on June 1st, with the gym every day i think i should be able to do it in 1hr flat!! that will be shaving 9 minutes off my time.. think i can do it!!

lack of a social life

so i suppose you could say the my life definitely has changed direction in the past week. im not being half arsed about this gym thing at all and im so proud of myself! im in there every morning at 73.0 slogging away and up until this morning i was doing that un guided.. but this morning i got to meet with the delish Simon my trainer. i call him mine but he is just a free service that comes with the gym, i like to think he is mine though. he is well tasty! standing about 6foot 4ish and a long lean body at that, he is fun to watch when demo-ing the moves im supposed to be concentrating on! god im such a perv! so we went through my shoulders/back/chest and arms work out this morning, have another date with him next tuesday morning for some lower limb punishment!

so the classes, yes im going twice a day! have tried spinning, havent been back since the first time. tried out the body combat class with the crazy brazilian who needed us to smile and enjoy the pain, the polish (i think) aerobics teacher who has the perfect body, im in love with her! there is another aerobics teacher who is irish and has a far more complicated routine..she is a special kind of crazy!the body pump class with the weights wasnt as bad as i thought it might be, but i defo will have to up my weights for the next class. yet to try is the step aerobics (feel the burn), the circuit training (the delish simon runs this) and im sure there are others ones out there dying to have me sweat my way through their class.. give me time! the down side of all this running, jumping and lunging is that my knees are acting up. this is not good, think i have to visit a physio to get me some industrial strength knee braces, dont want to pop a knee cap during the world cup now do i?!

speaking of the world cup we got our april training schedules yesterday.. thanks John! we got a new coach here in Dublin, Kaityln is her name. she took us for a fun training over the weekend and although the atmosphere was light hearted i think we really got to cover some really important stuff which is great. we had it in bushy park and loads of people were asking about us.. big up Ireland Lacrosse!! then last night in a bid to put a little money into the ILF we had a table quiz, i think it was a huge success. the prizes were kindly donated by ealron from bavaria (handy to have friends in the business) and pam gave away a weekend for 2 that she had won in a previous table quiz. fun was had by all, even the cheaters who won, oh yeah im being contraversial but there was plenty of texting going on.. shocking! so the figures arent in yet but fingers crossed we did good!