Stefanie's

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I think I’ve been having a “low-key” phase. Training-wise. I am not sure how I feel about that. I have done a fair amount of walking, and a few isometrics.
I miss running like crazy. It’s been… ummm more than one year?.. Since I last ran free.

I played tennis yesterday, on clay, and that put me down as well, as I can’t run to the ball without irritation.
It’s nice though… smacking the ball. My levels of concentration have gone up a lot lately, I just wonder how good I would be if I could actually use the full court freely!
My cross-court forehand is still pretty amazing, btw.
And my backhand volley has never been this stable.

I am pissed off with this knee of mine, and I haven’t actually complained about it for a long time, but tonight I can’t sleep, I don’t want to read, I am too tired to paint, and too energized to do nothing.

I have 6 paintings in progress, I love them all (so far), I wonder when I will finish them.

The same as I wonder when I will fulfill my dreams.

Never. I make them more difficult every single day!

I got accepted into a well-respected Phd, found out yesterday. Next week I will compete for another phd, I guess I like having 2 to pick from… Well, that starts in January. It gives me 3 more years (at least) to figure out what I truly want to do in my life, if that ever has to be resolved, really…

I ate pizza today. I am tired of crapness (in general). I think I will put myself through detox starting tomorrow.
Hard to detox the mind though, especially living among human beings.

Bob Marley says it best: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds”.

Training journal? Whoever said this is not training…
Mind, body and soul…

I’m phasing through a plateau.

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:wink:

you know i think the same, it’s my motto…

don’t think at the down or you will get down more…
think positive !

life is good

ps. i’m in a down phase too LOL

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I know :wink:

Of course… ! :o

It’s a nice theory, I agree!

Stop preaching then and get to work :smiley:

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I had Chinese food today.

I enjoyed my fortune cookie saying:

“Do not give up. Every beginning is difficult”.

Lucky number: 24. Always has been.

:cool:

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I’m almost embarassed to post here any more, but what the heck… it’s my journal!

Not posting does not mean not training, training is my religion afterall, especially since I have come to dislike organized religion. :eek:
I do believe in God though. Although He has become a lot more “abstract” since I’ve known him when I was a child. It’s the trend with traditional art schools as well: you start drawing realistic figures, then you experiment with abstraction until you develop the style that feels most “at home”.

I’m not home now, btw! I’m in Milan taking phd admission exams, yesterday I think I did pretty well, although my right arm needs physical therapy from writing for four hours straight. Who writes freehand these days… If I hadn’t been taking studying notes in my notepad for the past 3 weeks, and “practicing” hand writing beforehand, the poor Italians would never be able to read all those pages that I wrote. Yesterday was good though…

I am training with isometrics, still. I don’t even want to step on the track until January. My knee is doing a lot better (since I’m not “trying” to even stride), and maybe if I keep it like this until the end of December, I will be a happy camper by the start of 2009. Regardless, upon my return home I am going to see a specialized knee doctor and have him look at all my MRI pictures one by one, because honestly, noone has done that yet. Maybe there is something in there that’s causing the re-injury, who knows. One more reason why I dislike doctors so much. Most are in love with their label only, but are not nearly perfect at what they do.

Milan weather is crap these days. There’s wind, and there’s rain, and it’s 10 degrees colder than Greece when I left. And it’s gray. It suits my watercolor style though!

The people who are renting me the little apartment I am staying in love me :p. First day I had lazagna, and now I have home made cookies, made with cereals and grains. They bring me umbrellas, new tea bags every day (I consume about 10 daily…), they re-fill my cereal boxes and bring me fruit … they escorted me the first day to the University, they make sure every day I am ok. Nice people… Complete strangers.

So I try and do isometrics in the morning and at night. I do think my right quad is weaker, it’s less toned, and it has a slightly different shape than the left when I do a wall sit, so there are things to be fixed (of course…).

Just in case I do my phd here, I found a nice track in the center, by the Castello, that looks like the Colloseum from the outside, I found it very inspiring and lovely =) Although I don’t like the fact that it is open only for certain hours… In Greece you can enter a track at any time even during a Sunday, here tracks lock up every weekend and certain times… oh well!

I made a new friend from Serbia, and another Italian one. I think I am much more social “off -base”, or I find more interesting people when I travel, who knows… but I do get bored of people pretty quickly, unless they are super special ones… !

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so see you next monday… hope we’ll have some time to train together.

enjoy your time in milan…

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Yeah, so I’m gonna meet this guy, if anyone knows anything dangerous about him that I should know, PM me as soon as possible!! :stuck_out_tongue:

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See if you can find this reference:

Title: Risk Factors and Mechanisms of Knee Injury in Runners

Name of first author: Stephen P. Messier

Journal: Medicine and Science in Sports and Medicine, Vol. 40, No. 11, pp. 1873 - 1879, 2008

If not, e-mail me.

It’s not the solution to your problem, just some ideas…

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[i]Thanks NIk, I’ll take a look!

Days here have been good. I’ve been funded for my phd, which is nice :slight_smile: I start in January. Hopefull a new beginning for many things, ahhh :o (that was like a long exhale).

I don’t know if this is an obsession, a love, an addiction or all of the above, but every time before I visit a city, I go to Google maps and try to locate all the tracks.
There is a nice track at the campus where I’ll be doing my phd, which I visited yesterday. There I made friends with the janitor/ex-long jumper/current youth coach, Bendis, a very nice guy with whom I was talking for long. He is going to help me out with any contacts I need about running competitions (God permitting… :rolleyes:), getting membership, and things of that sort… I am still not used to the idea of restricted track uses… I said before, in Greece anyone can run on a track at any time of the day, typically. For this track I visited, you pay a small amount to run on the GRASS only, and if you want to use the running track and weights, you pay 100and something per year. “What if someone has paid for the grass only and dares to step on the track? Do you shoot them?”
“No, we use javelins…”… :D, he said.

He mentioned a few times this Italian coach in Milan called Aldo Maggi, who specializes in hurdles and said has coached some 10.2 guys as well. I tried to do a search on him, but I find information on insects, bugs and concepts of evolution :confused: He trains more at the Castello, the track that looks like the Colosseum, which I visited two days ago, but then if all this above information is wrong, it is all rumors and not my fault ! Anyway, Bendis wants to introduce him to me, because apparently he knows everyone! Nice person.

So question of the day: Anyone know who Aldo Maggi is? [/i]

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Morning iso’s. My right upper leg is really weaker… And to think that it used to be just the opposite back in the days…
Walked a LOT around Milan today, I think I was walking for 3 hours all together.

I’m really starting to appreciate coffee-drinking on the go, in a coffee bar. It seems like a necessity around here.

I had insomnia last night. I managed to sleep for 3 hours and saw almost 10 dreams… there was also a mosquito buzzing at me, really annoying… if I recall correctly, I assassined it this morning at dawn :rolleyes:.

I accomplished some productive work today, yay. Now all there’s left is 8 pages of illustrations, for an unfixed deadline that has already technically passed :confused: (if that makes sense…)

And I’m letting a guy go out with me, wowsa :o, I must be entering a new phase since last year’s Greece man-denial. :rolleyes:

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To cover the purely training part, yes, ISO’s again this morning. I’m surprized I’m not cramping any more during the nights. Must be the gallons of water I drink!

I spent all my around-noon time in a sandwich cafe, reading the KeyConcepts download, while consuming a big proteinfull roast beef sandwich and a couple of espresso’s :o
KeyConcepts is very pleasurable and clarifying training-reading… I highly recommend it. It would probably spear you from 85% of all the CF training questions you ever had in mind to post on the forum… And it’s applicable to many sports!!

I really have no reason to be in Milan these days. There is an oral exam scheduled tomorrow for me, but I have already received funding for my planned phd, which I have decided to accept, so I’m just wandering around half the day, sucking in the italian culture, and then doing illustration work the other half… And doing lots of thinking, which I hate!

Wandering yearly between two continents since I was born, trying to figure out and absorb all the positives of each culture I come across, I must say that the first italian feature I am anxious to embody, is the language, which just sounds lovely. Other than that, so far I generally find the italian culture very hard to trust, and must admit that I am a bit intimidated. Honesty is a term I like to go by, and not just hold it there as an abstraction… I was hanging out with a new French-Albanian friend yesterday, who settled in italy seven years ago, (very good ex-long jumper), and he was telling me my already acquired impressions of people talking a whole lot, and meaning perhaps less than half of what they say. His perception is that people do it so much, that you have no choice but to bend in, in order to survive. Hopefully, my un-blendifull nature will leave this feature alone!

And then there’s these Milanese new acquiaintances who will ask me “why the hell Milan”, which immediately reminds me of the tired New Yorkers of the United States who would ask me “why the hell did you leave the Greek paradise for this chaos”, which then links to all the bored New Englanders of Connecticut, who would comment and say “why the hell CONNECTICUT, from all places”, leading right into the Greeks, who after recognizing my dual citizenship and NY connectivity, will open their eyes wide and think that I must simply have gone nuts for returning to Greece, and “what the hell are you gonna do with yourself here” …

:confused:

Where the HELL is best to go… I go where I want to, or where God puts me, or wherever I have the misforture or fortune to be, it’s best to just stop questioning our every move and every act and every decision, and just LIVE life the way it is and appreciate each other with honest words that we actually mean, so that we don’t pass this stupid life wearing a stupid mask that only reflects the ugly inside part of us…

:mad:

There, I’ve had it.

So who’s perfectly happy with where they currently live?
Whoever you are, I am just sure it’s not the place that is perfect, but the fact that you have reconciled with yourself and your surroundings, in a truthful way. And next time you see a foreigner, don’t ask “why here”… Be sure there is a good reason for everything.

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I met the “Godfather” …Talks just like him !!! :stuck_out_tongue:

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wise words for one so young :smiley: (and that isn’t meant to be as patronising as it may appear).

I live here becasue it suits my family and on a good day it is stunning, unfortunately there aren’t that many. If I were single I would live elsewhere but I would never trade my fantastic wife and children for anything, without them I am incomplete.

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You get my point :).
But WHERE would you live if you were single, huh??

On another note…
What is it with these subconscious alerts of ours… This morning I had to get up at 8, I never heard my alarm, I had to be out the door by 9 to meet my ride and catch my plane, and I awoke myself at 8.56 …

Back to Greece again now. Went STRAIGHT to work from the airport :eek: But my first class didn’ show up!! Yay for me. CF posting instead… Although… :mad: if i knew, i would just go home and eat some FOOD, but heck… I’m being paid, so whatever… jelly croissant and double espresso will do…

Amazing how things change in one single week… my “guardian-angel” principal quit the job, and now I’m surrounded by solitary nut cases… But who cares… I’m not going to have this job for too long before I settle in Milan for a while: Which brings me to one unpleasant task, as program leader: find teachers to substitute the 4 classes I teach :eek: Of course, I could just leave when the time comes and let them hanging, but that wouldn’t be nice… would it…
I just feel strange towards my students. They do enjoy my teaching a lot, not to be braggy… but it’s something that I do well.

I’m not going to have time to train today.

My training might change SOON, btw :slight_smile: When I am certain about my plans, I will let my journal know…

I am looking forward to new beginnings…as always.

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Hard to say as I would travel and work overseas (probably in various locations) which something I have done very little of.

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Well when you do, be sure to meet me, you’ve given me some much appreciated advice through recent times… :slight_smile:

Today and yesterday were both non-ISO days.
(BEAR WITH ME PLEASE, I KNOW IT SEEMS THAT I’M NOT RUNNING TRACK ANY MORE, BUT I WILL BE COMPETING THIS YEAR… >> in track…)

I just biked to work and back today (total 40minutes), thinking that my city is looking really beautiful lately… And much much sunnier than Milan. I am looking forward to January though.

There are so many things I want to finish off before the end of this year.
I’ll use this journal space to brainstorm my tasks, to serve as an immediate future check list… It actually helped last time I did it, so:

  • Finish a Track-Club Logo design

  • Finish children’s Book 3 illustration corrections…

  • Make children’s Book 3 cover. (then maybe I can finally get paid for this Book???..

  • Finish children’s Book 4 illustrations (ughh this one is a larger task…)

  • Make children’s Book 4 cover…

  • Finish a friend sprinter’s painting.

  • Finish Javi’s painting to send to the U.S. Poor man asked for it a century ago.

  • Start and finish a Virgin Mary for my track friend.

  • Will most likely have to start and finish a large Nature Painting for another track friend…

  • Finish the Felix painting (*)

  • Finish the African painting (*)

  • Finish the other African painting (*)

  • Finish the Quantum painting (*)

  • Finish the Blue painting (*)
    (whyyyy oh why do I start them all simultaneously… :frowning: … p.s. * means they are not commissions, but I won’t feel good if they are not done, and I’m not taking them to Milan to finish, so…).

Then I have started reading so many books simultaneously… I feel like a schizophrenic :o
So I need to finish:

  • “The Field” (more than half way through…)
  • “The Divine Matrix” (recently started it…)
  • “Biology of Belief” (recently started it…)
  • “CF Elite Concepts” (half way through…)
  • “How to win friends and influence people” :o(half way through…)
  • “Think and Grow Rich” (i know… :o)

OH, ANOTHER THING!

  • Learn some “baby-Italian”. :rolleyes:

This is all starting to look impossible, but lets see…

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Finished work yesterday and my bike wasn’t there… !!! :mad::mad: I was sooo irritated. That was a nice bike… daddy had brought from overseas too :frowning:
Whoevere I see riding that bike in my city is receiving some muay thai… I have till December to find him/her.

ISO’s today.

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[i]Yesterday was awful.
My Thessaloniki “guardian coach” (who’s never gotten the chance to coach me, except for 1 week) sent me to the national team doctor to look at me, who told me that my muscle complexion is too tight to be training for track at the intensity I want to be training, and that causes my injuries, and I should just forget about it, go home, and take up swimming to maintain fitness.

I am over him today though.

My sisters dragged me to the mall for a change (what is it with sisters… I never even told them about the doctor…) , I bought me nice things, I feel better!

So… Plan W … [/i]

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… Check List Checking:

  • Finish a Track-Club Logo design

  • Finish children’s Book 3 illustration corrections…

  • Make children’s Book 3 cover. (then maybe I can finally get paid for this Book???..

  • Finish children’s Book 4 illustrations (ughh this one is a larger task…)

  • Make children’s Book 4 cover…

  • Finish a friend sprinter’s painting.

  • Finish Javi’s painting to send to the U.S. Poor man asked for it a century ago.

  • Start and finish a Virgin Mary for my track friend.

  • Will most likely have to start and finish a large Nature Painting for another track friend…

  • Finish the Felix painting (*)

  • Finish the African painting (*)

  • Finish the other African painting (*)

  • Finish the Quantum painting (*)

  • Finish the Blue painting (*)
    (whyyyy oh why do I start them all simultaneously… :frowning: … p.s. * means they are not commissions, but I won’t feel good if they are not done, and I’m not taking them to Milan to finish, so…).

Then I have started reading so many books simultaneously… I feel like a schizophrenic :o
So I need to finish:

  • “The Field” (more than half way through…)

  • “The Divine Matrix” (recently started it…)

  • “Biology of Belief” (recently started it…)

  • “CF Elite Concepts” (half way through…)

  • “How to win friends and influence people” :o(half way through…)

  • “Think and Grow Rich” (i know… :o)

  • Learn some “baby-Italian”. :rolleyes:

Training-wise: ISO’s here and there.
Subscribing to a gym tomorrow for a month, because I want to do some spinning classes for tempo reasons and weights. And kickboxing 2-3 times/week. Until January, when things will change.

I’m surprized if anyone is still reading this… :rolleyes:

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Now that Krasnayafleur is gone, where else are we going to get our drama :wink: