Out for a walk this morning and shot some video clips, also had a short chat to the lady who was painting Alnwick Castle, seemed like a nice soul. Finally got around to writing a testimonial I had promised for which I was pleased about, he seemed pleased with it which was good, he deserves a leg up I reckon.

Had a right struggle this morning with Lorena's PayPal login when I tried to change the password so that it was more secure. These things never end up being as simple as they should be but I got there in the end but I thought I had really fouled it up at one point!

Went to bed for an hour after lunch as I was feeling very sleepy and felt far better for it, I'm a great believer in sleeping when you are sleepy.

A friend of Lorena's kindly brought us some maple syrup back from Canada so I reckon that must be good stuff. Came just in time because one of the bottles I have is getting very low so it was good to be able to have a top up!

Our neighbour has sold his house after just one week! Such a shame that we can’t sell the cottage as we would easily sell this house and be able to really get ourselves sorted out, hopefully one day.

Discovered today quite by chance that you can make widescreen recordings on the iPad simply by doing a double tap on the screen before you start the recording and this changes the video aspect ratio which is brilliant as I prefer widescreen and I think this wil make things better for looking at stuff on the HDTV. Plan to do some more tests with this.

Watched some home videos on the AppleTV this evening which was great, brilliant way of looking at all our stuff. I have also linked the AppleTV to Flickr which allows us to run sideshows of all our material over the Internet rather than from the iPad, another brilliant development.

Today I am planning to establish some baseline information by performing the "Count Test" that I developed in order to determine my first ventilatory threshold (VT1). Once that has been established I plan to spend several months training at around VT1 and I will repeat the test periodically, as well as regular FTP testing, to see how I am progressing. I am going to follow this approach because back in early 2011 I found it delivered excellent and consistent increases in my FTP which is what I need to concentrate on for a little while before improving my endurance when the weather improves in the spring. This is going to be my focus over a period of time where FTP improvements are required and where it is likely to be more difficult to train regularly outdoors. Here is the graph of how this approach worked out in the past, along with the VT1 test protocol I devised in 2011. As can be seen from the graph for the same average HR for these sessions (red line) my average 60 minute power and PWR consistently improved and I was not starting from an untrained state at that time.


PDF of VT1 test information available for download here:


PDF HRV report from Kubios Software available for download here:

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Video uploaded to YouTube: Shaggy Ink Cap


Video uploaded to YouTube: vJournal 16 September 2014


Facebook Updated: September 16, 2014 at 11:21PM Linked the AppleTV to Flickr which allows us to run sideshows of all our material over the Internet rather than from the iPad, another brilliant development. Pretty much ready for the nursing home so I can sit back and enjoy all this stuff!