Forza!

I've had my first donation in Italian! How cool is that! The message is 'forza' which I thought would mean something nice, as it's from one of my lovely clients, so I looked it up with an online translating thingy. There are variations...

Farsi forza! means to pluck one's courage (yep, doing that...)

Forza d'animo is strength of mind - that wavers, I have to say... mostly between 'wow - 3 days to go!' to 'crikey - only 3 days to go...'

Fatti forza!, which is not a reference to my Lycra, but means chin up - come on!

'Lo devi fare per forza?' means 'have you got to do it?' which many people have already asked. There does seem to be a general consensus that I'm bonkers...

And 'forza' on its own simply means 'come on!' which is great! I shall repeat it as a mantra as I go round... although maybe not in the swim as I'll swallow too much water.

Today has been almost a non-training day apart from lots of knee exercising. I spoke to Steve the Physio this morning to say that my knees are still very stiff. His response, fairly reasonably, was along the lines of 'you've moved your kneecaps about an inch on each leg, of course they're stiff'. Ah. He also said to do the exercises as much as possible as the more I do them the quicker my knees will be unstiff. But not by Sunday... A nice swim in a rough lake and a 20k bike ride will be very good for loosening everything up, so it'll be fine. Steve the Physio is EXPECTING me to run the 5k and wants me to phone him on Monday to let him know I did it. So I guess I will! After last night's successful jogging (no problems today, hooray!) I am certainly intending to run the run. I'd go for a good strong swim this evening, but I've run out of day again... mostly because of taking BB to the vet after work for his arthritis checkup. He's fine, thank you, and he has more medicine...

I will be competing in exactly 65 hours....

I'm already making plans for future training too - we're off to Florence for a holiday so what better way to brush up on my Italian than to listen to the language CDs while I'm pedalling on the exercise bike? Fantastico!