It’s the weekend that kicks off the last week before we go to Italy, and no matter how I try to be productive and enjoy the Irish summer, my head is 100% counting down the days, and I’m making plans and lists of the weekly markets, gluten-free restaurants, and local festivals around Pescara.

This has been a very unfocused week, and we’ve also been busy with some advanced tech geekery, aka setting up an own server to replace our existing, dysfunctional, web hosting. This is also the reason why I didn’t post last week. The weekend was 100% spent testing things, and I didn’t have much exciting to share either. I enjoyed some solid gym workouts during the week, and one attempt of walking (we were back to 15C, rain and wind), but that was it.

This week has been more productive in terms of fitness, but every day has been a gift of new problems on the server, so I’ve been rather distracted. Now I’m happy to say that everything seems to be working, and this blog is on the new server since Thursday. I’m absolutely stunned by the step up in speed and performance especially in the admin panel. And I can upload photos without glitches! Yay for being married to a tech guru!

There may be dead links or image urls here and there, so bear with me while I fix things.

My own performance could have been better but overall it’s been a good week. And the summer weather is back!

The summary shows I got some good things done after all:
Monday – gym
Tuesday – walking, 3,4 km
Wednesday – gym
Thursday – walking, 4,9 km
Friday – gym
Saturday – walking, 7,26 km
Sunday – walking, 6,2 km

Monday

I had trouble sleeping, but my watch didn’t agree. Honestly, what do they base that sleep score on?! I didn’t fall asleep until way after midnight and was quite drowsy when I got up in the morning. I continued being quite tired during the day but did my best to load up with carbs, water and caffeine, and took electrolytes in one of my water bottles to the gym.

I actually had a lot more oomph than expected. I enjoyed those deadlifts and felt good with the form, and my lower back/glute didn’t complain. And again, the Bulgarians felt good! I’m not saying they are easy now, but I have no major issues with them anymore. I have nothing in particular to complain about with this session.

Tuesday

The weather looked good in the morning. And since the forecast said rain in the afternoon, I went for a walk in the morning. I went down the hill and towards the “cow road”, since we’re now into the season of the Montbretia in bloom and it’s the perfect season to photograph the little abandoned house. It was cloudy and quite warm outside, and while I was on my way the clouds started clearing.

Except, when I had come almost halfway, it started raining. First some quiet drizzle but as soon as I got onto the gravel road, the raindrops became larger and heavier. I turned back and went back home. It was a nice walk (3,4 km) but no cottage was photographed. At least I took some photos of my favourite gates.

As you can see the sky was quite angry, and in the late afternoon there was a nasty thunderstorm with a massive downpour.

Wednesday

Back to the gym! We may not have hot weather like the US or even Sweden (my parents had 30C/86F), but we have a quite high air humidity. My gym is SMALL, as it’s meant for mostly one-to-one sessions, and sometimes entering the gym is like walking into a wet blanket. Today was such a day.

I always love the hexbar, and today I felt stronger with the two dumbbell pullovers than I have in a while. Most exercises felt good except the Renegade row. I’ve accepted that these will be sh*** as long as I have that issue with my left arm, and I’ve stopped being frustrated over it. I’ll work my way back to good Renegade rows when the arm has settled down.

Thursday

Today our true summer weather was back. I went for an almost-5k walk with a friend and we had a good chat so almost no photos were taken. But there were cows, and I played with my camera’s flippy screen to see if I could take a photo from above while holding the camera over the fence. I usually adjust focus after the autofocus has done its job, but this time realised my autofocus is actually very good and accurate. I could only move the focus point in place but while holding the camera up, I didn’t see at all what was actually in focus and not!

The rest of the day was all about, you guessed it right, tech stuff.

Friday

What a lovely morning! We had around 20C already at 9-ish am so I spent some time in the garden with the camera. I have a new piece of gear for my Sony camera and I’m exploring some macro/closeup photography right now. I’m not greatly successful but I’m making progress! FYI, bumblebees are extremely difficult to photograph. They move a lot, rarely stay in one place for long and are very easily distracted as soon as you get close.

I’m not overly excited about this one, it’s not as sharp as I want it to be, I had to crop it quite tightly because it’s so hard to get close enough, but it’s definitely one of my best ones so far. I’ll keep practising and we’ll see how it goes.

In the afternoon it was time for the gym. Yet another muggy day! But I did ok.

Sumo squats! I love them. I’d like to get back to the heavier stuff. The lower weight is because of the lower back/oblique/glute oddness I’ve had recently. My trainer calls it “the troubles”, haha!
But I have no serious injury, I can keep training, and this weight is a good maintenance weight so I have nothing to complain about.

Chest press has been my strongest exercise recently but today was not my day. The dumbbells felt like 5 kg heavier than usual once I got them in my hands so I suspected I wouldn’t do well with them. I pushed through and managed 12 reps in the first set but then could only do 8 in the remaining two sets no matter how hard I tried. Some disappointment! But my front delts were still sore since Wednesday and I’ll be back in action next week. Also, inclined is a bit harder.

Everything else was good! I was especially happy with the shoulder exercises because both of these are SO TOUGH at the end of a hard workout, they are both with weights a bit beyond my comfort zone. But I was able to push it quite well and get a good pump with both even if my body was screaming to stop, and it sort of made my day.

Saturday

Today I got out for a really nice walk! You may remember that some week ago I went for a 9,5 walk and my shoes got stuck in the tarmac? Today I wanted to do the same loop but in reverse direction. I wanted to go to the abandoned cottage along the “cow road”, photograph it properly, an go for a longer walk. Now it’s Montbretia season, and everything, EVERYTHING is pretty out there. Walking along the country roads is stunning at this time of the year. It’s almost a shame going away!

The weather was stunning but cool enough to keep the roads intact, lol. I enjoyed about 20C and the traffic was very light, so it really was the perfect walk.

Today the cottage was photographed.

I can’t get enough of the Montbretia.

And all those other colours again!

Last time i walked here, I turned back instead of doing the loop, and I was disappointed to see that the actual loop is actually shorter! I “only” walked 7,2 km today.

I made up for that by doing some gardening. Nothing big, but we went to buy geraniums to fill up the space around our new patio, and I did a few other things too. I ended up walking about 19000 steps this day.

Sunday

Today I enjoyed a stunning walk on my favourite trail by the sea. It was cool-ish when I got there, but when I got out of the woods it was warm and with a beautiful haze. I walked to a certain point and turned back, then went to meet my husband at the café. The walk was about 6 km and absolutely perfect!

That was the end of a quite decent week! How are you? How did your week go, fitness-wise, weather-wise or else?

Thanks to Kim and Deborah for hosting the Weekly rundown link-up!

Please note… for the moment e-mail doesn’t work from our server. So I’ve disabled the comment reply subscriptions for now. Let’s hope we can fix it asap.