Half marathon; a work in progress.

I am pleased to say that this week's running went as planned, and i have done five 3 mile runs one of them including a very long and steep hill. All these add up to about 15 miles in one week and I can feel my body beginning to adapt to the ongoing physical stress it has been exposed to over the last few days and i am becoming fitter, being able to run more easily for longer and my heart becoming stronger. I hope to keep up this training and in the next two or three weeks up the distances to about 30 miles per week.

Santiago.

Band of Horses

Sitting here in my candle lit room, i think i am going to chill this weekend and leave the big run to monday evening, a grueling nine miles should do the job! Will be going out for a few drinks tonight so that should be awesome. For now just browsing and downloading a few tunes, recent "band of horses" album has a few good hits!

Have a brilliant weekend!!

Santiago.

Long time no see

I guess it's been a bloody long time since my last post. I could blame it on the fact that I've been busy or just admit that i was a little lazy. The truth is i wasn't really inspired to write much during the last four months, and when i came back on to this and saw that my domain "traviajero.com" has been taken (my domain rights ran out and i failed to renew), well then i definitely lost all motivation to write a new entry.

However, i now feel like i am ready to write some more posts so i will begin 2011 by telling you guys a little bit about what has been happening. December was a little crazy work-wise. As you may know i work in a family butcher's shop in Hawkenbury and we sold somewhere in the region of 600 turkeys and hundreds of other orders. It was many long days of hard work to get the preparation on track and have all the fresh meat orders prepared for when people came to collect them. We managed it though and all that hard work paid off by adding a few naughts to my bank account. I have been juggling my time between that and spending time with a very special person I got to know and in the last few months have become very close to, I am delighted to say that she is now my girlfriend! Well, these news are a few months old now but it's never too late to announce good news. We are planning a couple of weeks away somewhere and providing I pass my driving test next week (19th) then the idea is to drive to the Swiss Alps and spend a few days skiing and driving around Europe. I will no doubt be posting such events on here and gladly get this blog back on the right track with more travels.

Last but not least, i have joined the Tunbridge Wells Half Marathon on February 27th which i am training for as of a couple of weeks ago. I have joined the local gymn in order to do a few upper body workouts and get me ready to take up rock climbing for real once i get my driving license here. I have just got back from the gymn tonight and tomorrow I plan to run eight or nine miles around town in preparation for the marathon. It feels great training for something real that is going to be happening in just a few weeks time. A real sense of achievement comes from all the hard work of running more miles than i have ever done before. I will let you know how it goes tomorrow and how many miles i managed to struggle through.

That's all for now, please keep checking back as I promise I will keep this updated regularly from now on!

Good to be back on the blog,

Santiago.

"Follow your heart,

and nothing else."

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Simple Man (1973).

For some reason i have lost my traviajero.com domain to a random generic and utterly useless vaguely travel related website. As good as a name it was i'm not too sure

Just a few words of wisdom

"Stress comes from negative thinking. The sooner you learn that the better your life will become."

I was thinking about this today as I went for a 6 mile run. I think it's important to think positively, however much a pile of shit your life is. There is only one person in the world who truly has the worst life, so it's pretty much guaranteed that there are many, many people, who are in a worse situation than yours. Just think positively, look ahead at the good things to come, whether these good things will happen in 5 years or 5 decades, act on and live your dreams. If you stop thinking positively you will start doing the opposite, and this will most likely lead to stress at work, on the drive home from work, at home, when trying to sleep, and it never ends.

I think I will keep working until the beginning of February and then perhaps take a couple of weeks off and drive across Europe. I was DJ for a party on Saturday which was absolutely brilliant, the feeling you get when the whole party is dancing to a 1985 remix of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" is overwhelming and is one of those memories that will stay with me for a long time.

That's all for now, keep your chin up and smile because life ain't worth it any other way!

Santiago.

It seems ridiculous that it's mid-September already, it seems only yesterday i was on a lonely road in South America hoping that the next car will be driven by better person than the two hundred odd that have just sped right past me as if i was invisible. Eventually that kind person would come, and things would move on a little further on down the line. Thing are well on track now and this full-time job is putting enough pennies in the pot for things to get done. I've paid a ridiculous amount of money to insure the car so i can now drive it with my provisional licence, in a few weeks hopefully i'll be good enough to pass my test and gain that little bit more freedom. I'm planning a week off work to celebrate and just go somewhere, perhaps north Wales or southern France, i've not yet decided. I'm going to be buying a state of the art professional video camera aswell and resusitate one of my favourite hobbies, and with enough determination turn it into something a bit more economically sustainable

Telegraph Road

A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness
Built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
The other travelers came walking down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back
Then came the churches then came the schools
Then came the lawyers then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their load
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road

Then came the mines and then came the ore
Then there was the hard times then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river ...

And my radio says tonight it's gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
Six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow ...

I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I got a right to go to work but there's no work here to be found
Yes and they say we're gonna have to pay what's owed
We're gonna have to reap from some seed that's been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the telegraph road

I'd sooner forget but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don't seem to care ...
Well just believe in me baby and I'll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
'cos I've run every red light on memory lane
I've seen desperation explode into flames
And I don't want to see it again ...

From all of these signs saying 'sorry but we're closed'
All the way down the telegraph road.