Bumps Week

This week, I have mostly been metabolizing alcohol

29/07/23 94

28/07/23 95.5

27/07/23 95.3

26/07/23

25/07/23 95.1

24/07/23

23/07/23 94.9

22/07/23 94.6

21/07/23 95

20/07/23 95.5

19/07/23 95.6

18/07/23 94.8

17/07/23 95.9

16/07/23 95.5

Anyone insane enough to still be reading this will, I hope, forgive me for a couple of missing weight measurements above.

As I may have mentioned at some point, before I was a weary old man who worried about his weight, had unexplained tiredness issues, and got such monumental hangovers off such tiny amounts of beer that I have been almost teetotal for years, I was a young man in pretty much perfect health, a fanatical rower and a heroic drinker.

Last week was Bumps Week.

Rowing is the most tedious imaginable spectator sport.

I have watched Olympic finals with Great Britain in them, winning, and been bored half-way through. The race lasts about six minutes. Far too long.

Rowing is the most tedious imaginable spectator sport.

Except in Cambridge.

The local style is to line up eighteen racing VIIIs in a line, very close together on a very narrow river, and start the race by firing a cannon.

On the B of the bang, everyone tries as hard as possible to ram (literally to ram, contact is required) the boat in front. The boats are chased by madly shouting supporters on bicycles, attempting to communicate over the deafening noise with whistles, and watched by hundreds of spectators who unwisely stand on the very towpath on which the bicycles are hurtling, often milling around with very little idea of what is going on.

Which supporting is even more dangerous than the racing itself. Occasionally misguided boats crash at full speed into the bank, their sharpened carbon-fibre oarblades scattering picnicking families and the shrapnel from their disintegrating bows flying merrily around in search of unprotected flesh.

The course is about two miles long. My boat once went into a thornbush at full speed. The screams were appalling. Our bowman has never forgiven our cox for this incident.

Once the bodies and the driftwood are cleared, we do it again and again until the sun goes down. The last and fastest race is held in the dark, and afterwards everyone gets very drunk.

This goes on for five days.

In my culture, everyone is slightly insane. It is the best fun.

We go on and on about all the things that happened for the next six months, until around Christmas, when we start six months of plotting about how to win the next set of races.

Ever since grim fatigue gripped me in its cold embrace at the age of forty, I have had little to do with the Bumps Races, but this week an old friend asked me if I could hold her stopwatch and count down to the cannon while she pushed her college staff boat out into the carnage.

And I thought, "Why not? It will be nice to see everyone again."

I had forgotten about the drinking.

My recent discovery that as long as I avoid sulphites, I can drink as much hard liquor as I like has turned out to be a mixed blessing.

Once back in the middle of it all, like a elderly philosopher revisiting the site of Marathon with old comrades, I began to remember my youth.

I have been drinking myself stupid for a solid week, chasing racing rowing boats up and down the towpath on a bike, blowing whistles and shouting, eating all sorts of random dreadful things, passing out after ill-advised pizzas, staying up until three in the morning drinking gin and braying on about the old days, and capping all that by watching an outdoor production of Julius Caesar in a rainstorm which, while it might not have been the wrath of God as forecast, could at least have been interpreted as God gently hinting that a bit less emphasis on golden calves might hit the spot.

I lost most of my beard in an accident at a barbecue, I have broken a rib by cycling into a bollard while pissed, and I have contracted a nasty chest cold. Not a combination I recommend. I have not slept properly for a fortnight.

I must admit that I do feel a little foxed. But nothing terrible, and I have won many great victories at chess this last week so I think my mind is largely OK, at least.

One is only middle aged once.

Weight-wise, things have been most curious. I think I largely stuck to "No PUFAs, no sulphites, lots of salt", but apart from that I haven't been paying much attention. I've even been forgetting to take my morning weight and temperature measurements, a fault unforgiveable in a pretend scientist. What measurements I have made have been rather noisy. Alcohol seems to put my waking body temperature through the roof and my weight has been bouncing around madly.

And yet, I think I detect a continuing downward trend.

This morning, Saturday 29th July, my weight was 94kg dead. That's slightly lower than the lowest measurement I made in Wicken Fen, when I was not carrying any glycogen reserve. I'm pretty sure that I'm currently well supplied with glycogen and associated water-weight, and that seems to be about a kilo to a kilo-and-a-half's worth, pulling a number out of the air from the rapid weight loss seen at the start of both bouts of ex150ish.

That means that I must have lost something like a kilo and a half of actual body weight this month, whilst doing absolutely nothing to cause that, and eating roughly the same things that I've been eating since Christmas, which caused the fastest weight gain of my life.

I am worried. Lots of things can cause weight loss, and very few of them are good.

Soon I will get the energy necessary to face the NHS's appalling appointment-booking procedure. Soon.

I wish there was someone medically knowledgeable I could just ring up and pay for their time.