A1 Speech: Post Mortem

It’s been a while since my last speech. My A1 speech was my first ever humorous speech. Whilst I’ve always tried to work humour into my speeches before, this speech was different in that I really had to keep the audience laughing. It didn’t really work.

Around the middle of my speech, I began to get a little self conscious. I looked down, and then thought to myself, “Why am I looking down…?” Big mistake. I lost my place in the speech, and my performance was a shambles, even by standards other than my own. Why did this happen? Well, as always, my speech was too long, and I was struggling to stay on time. As a result, I couldn’t implement the pauses that are necessary for a humorous speech. Without the laughter, I lost my confidence.

In terms of what I can learn, I engaged in a ridiculous amount of procrastination whilst preparing the speech, which is something that I’ve been doing since the beginning. I continually beat myself up for doing that, but that is definitely counterproductive.

Still, I have a few more attempts to get it right. I can’t be too hard on myself, because my perfectionism is what is causing much of the procrastination. I’ll just pat myself on the back for having made it this far in Toastmasters so far, and keep pushing on. I have the humorous speech contest coming up soon, so there is a lot of preparation to do.

Training Update

My training has been going okay overall. I’ve increased the weights I’ve been using steadily, and have also been making good progress on the cardio front. Last Monday, I ran 14.4 km, in line with the marathon training, although I nearly killed myself doing so. My runs are getting a bit long, and as I go to the gym without having eaten, and also doing weight training beforehand, it’s going to get tougher and tougher.

At least I learned from that mistake, and I’ll definitely be eating and not weight training before my long runs from here on out. Unfortunately, Shi Da gym is only open Monday through Thursday, which is terrible for my progress. I might have to move the long run to the night time, but I really dread the humidity in Taipei.

As long as I follow the training program, I can’t see why I won’t be able to make it for the marathon. It’s important not to push too quickly on the long runs, but they are taking up a lot of time, and I get pretty bored during them. As they cross the two hour mark, I’ll have to think of a new strategy. Learning Chinese is an option, but I can’t see myself paying attention for that length of time.

My weight gaining target is not going well though. Not only have I not gained weight, I’ve lost weight. I couldn’t believe it! I eat a ton, going to the gym, pretty consistently, but I can’t seem to put on the weight. I know I’m getting stronger, because the weights are feeling less heavy, so that must mean that my muscle mass is increasing, and my fat is decreasing. Nevertheless, the clear drop of around 1-2kg is demoralising since I’m trying to move in the opposite direction. Perhaps what they say is true – that cardio training and gaining weight are at odds.

Anyway, I have to be eating much, much more. Despite being a vegetarian however, eating lots of greens doesn’t appeal to me. I’m a ‘hard gainer’ type, and I’ve heard I shouldn’t worry so much about eating ‘good’ carbohydrates – just eating will be good enough. Still, all this eating is hard work, and time consuming.

August Goals

I think the goal setting thing is working out for me overall, but I want to keep things very simple for this month.

So I won’t set any rules for myself, and the only thing I want to keep to is sleeping on time and consistently – making it to bed by 11pm each night and getting ready with reading.

The main goals I will set should be very attainable.

1. Continuing on from July, and having completed my 12km run, I’ll move on to the 10.5 mile, 16.8 km run according to the marathon training program. This shouldn’t be too tough, though it may take me around 2 hours… [gulp!] I also aim to complete the 10k at the end of the month in under one hour.

2. I want again, to be waking up before 7.30am every day, starting today, which I didn’t manage last month.

3. I don’t read enough, especially fiction. I want to read one book a week from now on, and I’ll begin this month. So four books this month! I’m currently reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

July Goals Summary

I set myself three rules for July. I only managed to keep one of them.

The first was to take Sunday off, in order to increase my desire to program during the week. I’m happy to report that I broke this rule, and did a little programming last Sunday!

The second was to do 20 minutes of ProVoc every day. This proved to be harder than I had thought. Whilst I could do it much of the time, ProVoc soon became a little dry to me, and listening to music while I did it didn’t help that much, seeing as I needed my full concentration. I’ll revise this goal in a later post.

The third was that I couldn’t use the Internet once I disconnected. This worked great. Although towards the end of the month, I would find myself reluctant to turn it off, all I needed was that single use of willpower, and then it came as a huge relief.

I’m pleased with the rules I set, and I’ll try to revise them for August.

In terms of my goals,

I did run 12km, last Tuesday, and it proved to be surprisingly easy. I was hardly going at Paula Radcliffe pace, and even more depressingly, not even half Paula Radcliffe pace. However, I did 12km in about 80 minutes, which was satisfying – doing it was far more important than doing it quickly. In terms of speed, I’ll be running the Nike Human Race on August 31, a fun 10k, and I hope to run that in under an hour.

Waking up before 7.30 was easy during the week, but at the weekend, I faltered again. Annoyingly, Shi Da gym only opens four days a week, which is pretty disgraceful, and I’ll be looking into a membership somewhere else, if they’re cheap enough. Without the constant gym attendance, I just wanted to sleep. So a resounding fail, but at least the ease at which I managed to wake up on the days I did is encouraging.

I only managed to write my A1 speech, which I’ll deliver next week. My A2 will be a storytelling speech, which doesn’t inspire me much. At least it should be relatively easy to write.

The programming went well – I managed to program my target of five hours every week. Although my calculator hasn’t been touched, I managed to learn a few important Cocoa concepts last month. I’ll need to push a lot harder this month.

Overall, I’m keeping up my result of failing to achieve the goals that I set for myself Still, as long as I keep going, I know the process will work in the end.