#Janathon Day 6 – The Annual Nose Bleed

The thing with Saturdays is it can be quite hard to fit any other exercise in once I’ve been to Roller Derby practice.

We have off-skates training at 10:30 am, and I’m in no way dedicated enough to get up early and do Park run, and by the time I finish and get home it’s gone 3 pm and all I want to do is veg out, and possibly drink some beer.

I’ve tried wearing my TomTom to skate in the past, but it’s quite bulky, and frankly, the TomTom strap is rubbish and it ended up getting broken. I bought a generic unbranded strap on Amazon and it felt a little sturdier, so with the addition of a little safety tape I decided to wear it today and see if I can hit my 500 points that way.

I could, and therefore today’s photo should technically be of my feet wearing skates, but I forgot to take a photo till I was walking home, so instead here are my post-Derby feet and my kit bag.

Saturday Derby sessions vary in intensity depending on what we are working on. Sometimes they are very high energy and intense, other times the focus is more on skills, so a lot of the intensity is in learning to do new things or improve skills. Today was one of the latter sessions, so while my heart rate may not have been sky high for the whole session, it was challenging mentally and physically.

Today I also managed to have what I now believe must be my annual nosebleed.

A few years back I went through a phase of getting nosebleeds a lot. I had a very unpleasant cauterising procedure, then never had one at all until in 2016 we travelled to Newcastle to play a Roller Derby game. I had a nosebleed part way through the game that just WOULD. NOT. STOP and didn’t get back on track till the final jam and used all of the poor medics gauze to plug my nose up.

Then no more nosebleeds.

Until at the start of 2017 we went to play a training game in High Wycombe and a few jams in, yep, there it was. I stuffed my nose with tissue until it stopped, and then there was nary a nosebleed for a whole year.

Until today.

I ran through a pile of bloody tissues, and then attempted my 27 laps in 5 minutes clutching a tissue just in case, and still managed to come out with a PB of 30 laps, so yay me and yay nosebleeds.

I also nabbed those 500 TomTom points part way through my laps.

You’ll have to ignore the speed and distance stats, I had to use treadmill setting on my watch as it mysteriously fails to have a Roller Derby practice setting.

I just took the watch off once I’d hit my 500 points. We moved onto more contact stuff and I didn’t want it to get caught and damaged, so I expect I would have like another 5 bajllon points if I’d kept it on. Just saying.

Anyway, nosebleeds aside, I had a great first practice back for the year and managed to only have a very slight case of helmet hair on the way home.

Ok, now I look at it again it’s far worse than I thought. I’m calling it casually tousled.

In other news, for the first time this afternoon, my stomach is feeling almost normal. So I’m planning to test its resilience by taking it to the pub, so who knows how tomorrow will be.