Still alive

Survived the week thanks to Fi doing an adequate job of feeding me. However, I must admit I'm strongly looking forward to return of my beloved French chef, I mean wife, with her full bag of French cuisine tricks and other fringe benefits.

On the poker front, not set foot outside the house, but planning to play tonight's IWF satellite in the Fitz. From which you may correctly infer that recent attempts to qualify online have not gone to plan.

I've continued grinding the $50 Ipoker SNGs to get a large enough sample size to quantify my edge and turn it into an hourly rate. At the moment, it's clocking in around $30 which isn't bad but isn't anything to write home about either. That's two tabling so the next question is if I move up to 4, 6 or 8 will it increase. Phase 2.

I've also made some half assed attempts to get back into cash at $5/$10 and $10/$20 but despite being (marginally) up I just can't get back into online cash. When I think back to this time last year when I thought it was the best thing ever, I wonder what happened. I guess I just got hooked on donkments lol. Cash just seems mindcrushingly dull now. Of course maybe the fact that my win rate was much higher this time last year has something to do with the mood swing, but it's almost like I'm afraid to try cash again seriously in case it turns out the hourly rate is so high I have no choice but to concentrate on it. Fear of success, as my sports psychologist would say.

Speaking of sports psychology, I need a pick up quick before the World 24's. Training this week has been abysmal, culminating in an utter fiasco yesterday. The idea was 20 mins warmup, 5K hard, 10 mins easy, 3K hard, 10 mins easy, 4K hard, 20 mins warmdown. My mind just seemed to go in the middle of the first 5K, I couldn't hit the pace, and just stopped. Managed to get myself going again but pace was beyond awful, 30 seconds/K down on where it should have been. So bad I decided to quit and started trudging home disconsolately. A few minutes into that I came to my senses and started the run again. I managed to finish it in terms of the distances but the pace stayed bad. It improved about 5 secs/K but no more. Maybe I'm just missing my mate.

Was thinking of running a competition of Boards to get people to guess how far I'd run in the 24 hours with the person coming closest winning a 5 or 10% stake in my next major tournament (probably the IWF) but have decided against it on reflection. It's probably best to keep a decent degree of separation between my running and poker worlds.

Also, congrats to my international team mate Eoin Keith who absolutely hockeyed the record for running the complete Wicklow Way a full 4 hours faster than the previous record. With Tony Mangan recently breaking the World 48 hour readmill record (and Dean Karnazes failing to break it live on American TV - Kelly and Regis no less - during the week), these are glorious days for Irish ultra running. Not that you'd ever know it from the local media who are more interested in third rate GAA footballers who are the pride of their local village.

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