Seven Hours of Weightlifting!

Yes, I've just finished spending seven hours lifting weights. So I'm a bit stiff. I spent all day Sunday, except for one brief excursion back into town, at The Shopping Channel demonstrating the Bowflex Extreme. Over the course of 24 hours we did seven live one hour shows. Guess what? We kept the resistance pretty damn low...

Our broadcasts started at midnight Saturday, but I had previously planned to spend the weekend at a training camp with my triathlon club up in Collingwood. So I drove up to Collingwood Friday afternoon, had a nice 60K ride that evening and followed up Saturday with a 100K ride and 9K run. There are plenty of challenging hills in the Collingwood area, I even tackled Scenic Caves Road with a team mate at the end of the day. After a serious three hour nap followed by dinner out with the gang I drove straight to the studio. I've posted some photos from the day on my Flickr page.

Nice to see some good news from Mars: the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down safely on Sunday night in the Martian Arctic, which looks more like our Arctic than I expected. Nice for Spirit and Opportunity to have some robotic company. Although Spirit and Opportunity have been operating for an undreamed of four years the Phoenix Lander faces "death" in a few short months. It's Arctic location means that when winter sets in the Lander will likely be buried in ice and run out of power.

I mentioned above that I left The Shopping Channel studio briefly on Sunday. I had just enough of a gap between two shows to whip into town to watch that morning's Monaco Formula One Grand Prix with my friend Brian on his PVR. With gas prices at a record high ($1.27/liter!) I had to pause for a moment, but tradition won out over penny-pinching.

Monaco is Formula One's most glamorous circuit, but also the slowest. It's a crazy twisty city street course, with almost no view ahead for the drivers. Sunday's race was further slowed by heavy rain, which meant that the race ended by reaching the two hour time-limit (they almost made the full distance...). Because I only had 90 minutes to watch the race in anyway we used the PVR's fast-forward option except for when there was an interesting development. But there were plenty of those. The wet conditions and lack of view led to lots of spin outs and collisions. Although the Ferrari's started on the front row there was a lot of back and forth as collisions, repairs, pit stops, safety cars and weather changes came heavily into play. Lewis Hamilton overcame an early error to ultimately win the day, Kimi struggled for grip but was holding third when he had to accept a drive-through penalty, he eventually lost grip near then end of the race and drove into the back of Adrian Sutil's Force India car, ending Adrian's best race ever and dropping Kimi back to ninth. Massa started on the pole but events lead him to a third place finish behind Lewis Hamilton and fifth-place starter Robert Kubica. Kimi's poor result and Lewis' strong one means that Lewis has taken the lead in the Driver's Championship.

This afternoon will be my "big acting break", I'm shooting a scene for a Discovery Channel documentary about the human body. I'll be portraying a sperm, swimming in my triathlon wetsuit toward the Ontario Place Cinesphere (standing in for a human egg)! The things we do for art...

Listening to: Pork and Beans by Weezer from Weezer (their albums are all called "Weezer", this one's got a red cover). This song's video is a great collection internet memes...