The book I read to research this post was Triathlon Training For Dummies by Deidre Pitney et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is primarily for novices looking to enter their first triathlon for which it recommends doing a sprint event which if you are a good athlete you can do in 1 1/2 hours although some take up to 4 hours to complete. It's also of interest to those looking to up the type of triathlon they do and the ironman events cover more than 140 miles and take around 15 hours to complete. Triathlons are a combination of running, cycling and swimming over various distances. In the ironman events they run a complete marathon in addition to the cycling and swimming. If you are looking at increasing your endurance at running you should try fartlek which was developed in Sweden and consists of a combination of walking briskly and running which stops your body coming to a complete stop when you are worn out and is done over considerable distances. Swimming training in a nutshell should consist of trying to cover a distance in as few strokes as possible and you should aim to do 25 m in 14-16 strokes, many novices do it in 18 or more. At the beginning ignore how long it takes you and work on that at a later stage. The cycling should be done at a reasonably low gear to prevent lactic acid build up in your legs that too should focus on covering a distance with as few revolutions of the pedals as possible and look at reducing your time later. With both swimming and cycling these are the biggest factors in speeding up your time. With diet you should focus on complex carbohydrates as opposed to simple ones as that helps endurance. A lot of people don't realise fat is a nutrient and you need a certain amount. Energy drinks are important and you should twice what it appears will cure your thirst although obviously this is supplemented with water. I really enjoyed this book and thought it makes a great blog although I have no plans to do a triathlon at least not for the time being. It does contain a lot of information on health and fitness in general.

The book I read to research this post was Behavioural Economics For Dummies by Morris Altman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is about a subject that has only recently started to be taken seriously and in certain other quarters especially among economists alot of people dismiss it. With economics it's often assumed most people will respond to market forces in a certain way often favourable to the economist which simply doesn't happen. You might find a product is the best of its type on the market and gets favourable reviews but sells poorly. Equally you might find a company making good profits and its products doing well but its shares perform badly. Of course this is about human nature and this book would best suit someone interested in economics. This book is about why people are so fickle and is there a way to predict what is going to happen. Interestingly if someone has to give up a small amount of money to gain a larger amount most people won't risk it because losing the money upsets them more than the potential happiness they are set to achieve by the profit. Equally some people were asked if you lost $50 you were due to buy a concert ticket with would you still buy the ticket and most people said yes but if they lost the concert ticket most people said no. This book only delves into this subject a little as it is a very complex subject and the book isn't as easy to understand as some for dummies books. A final point is if a country has rich ores and mineral resources you would think it would be wealthy but many countries have corruption and bad government which keeps the general populace poor. Equally some countries are the complete opposite where what mineral wealth they have is well managed.

The book I read to research this post was Pour Your Heart Into It by Charles Schultz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. A while back I reviewed Onward also by Charles Schultz about how he came back into the CEO job at Starbucks and helped make the company much more successful. This book is the prequel to that book and is about how he started the company and follows his first stint as CEO. Charles had a holiday in Italy and came up with the idea of trying out having restaurants that specialized in gourmet coffee. In Italy they had these places where they had newspapers for you to read and had gourmet coffees like espresso which served a discerning clientele. He thought the same could be done in Seattle, Washington. Seattle was facing a bad recession with one of there major employers slimming down its workforce from over 100,000 to just 38,000. Initially when he was working in a restaurant he talked the boss into turning part of it into a gourmet coffee section but had only been given a small area which was so tiny customers had to stand and there was no tables. They did however get some coffee machines. He left this company and started his own gourmet coffee restaurant. He had difficulty getting financing. They ran at a loss for the 1st 3 years due to the amount of financing needed. After that they made a profit and later he was able to buy the company he used to work for and he took their name Starbucks as the name of his company mainly because it was better known but also because he liked the name. Later on they started a mail order business for discerning coffee drinkers. Eventually they even invested in their own research and development centre where scientists would try and develop new products centred around coffee. I really enjoyed this book and it's a reasonable length at around 340 pages but is also a wealth of information. I think this book is even better than Onward.

The book I read to research this post was The Samsung S4 Manual The Complete Galaxy S4 Guide To Conquer Your Device by Daniel Forrester which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is written in an easy to understand way and although it's only 68 pages certainly covers all the basics with this smartphone. The processor is a quad core 1.6 GHZ so is only a small upgrade on the S3 but the memory has gone from 1 GB to 2 GB and the software is much more efficient so the phone is much faster at doing things. It has a rear 13 MB camera and a front 1.9 MB camera and has technology incorporated to let you take several shots and combine them into 1 photo and also there is a built in eraser app that lets you remove moving objects from the background if they are a bit blurred for example. It runs the Android 4.2.2 operating system called Jelly Bean. I think as updates become available you can upgrade that as time goes on as with most smartphones. The case and the bezel to this phone are smaller but the screen is actually bigger which does mean things like the keyboard might take a bit of getting used to as they are bigger than the previous version. I did see a review of this phone in a technology magazine and it was rated as the best smartphone available. I enjoyed reading this book and I know it's quite a new phone but there doesn't appear to be that many books and ebooks available about it although I am sure that will gradually change.

I am reviewing the fantasy novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This is one of the funnier installments in the Discworld series. The Discworld series is a fantasy series about a world which is discworld and populated by various entities like dwarves, trolls, vampires, humans & other things. I think certainly most of the books would appeal to all ages and Terry in his own unique style does away with logic in favour of humor and they are very funny. The story to this book is his take on religion. A god called Om is communicating with a young student at the local boarding school and he tells the monk in charge that they need to travel to a far off land over desert and ocean and convert the people to the Omnian religion. Of course he has got the om word because it's a well known mantra in transcendental meditation and does make a good name for a god. Anyway a group of them including a tortoise make the journey but all doesn't go according to plan and some of them decide to settle in the far off land where they have their own ideas about religion. I think it does have a reasonably happy ending. I did quite enjoy reading it and some of the humor did make me laugh aloud.

The book I read to research this post was Rail Centres: Sheffield by Stephen R Batty which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. Sheffield is one of the great industrial centres of Britain not to mention one of its biggest cities. It's famous for its steelmaking especially cutlery although nowadays and not mentioned in this book and like many big cities in Britain is going through a transformation. Anyway initially in the steam age Sheffield almost missed as George Stephenson although a renowned railway engineer wanted a 2 3/4 mile tunnel in one place and a very gentle gradient on the railway when asked to design a railway for this city. This resulted in an estimation for a huge amount of money that potential weren't interested in footing the bill for. In 1840 another engineer was asked to design a railway and he suggested cuttings instead of tunnels and a slightly sharper gradient, which with trains becoming more feasible seemed alright, but this brought the price down. Anyway over the next 50 years Sheffield become a major railway junction linking up places like Hull, Liverpool & London. When one of the railways was being built, a tunnel was being constructed and collapsed and 7 workers were able to jump clear but 6 workers died. I did really enjoy this book which is a worthy addition to the Rail Centres series.

The book I read to research this post was The Thaxton Branch by Peter Paye which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. Peter is an expert on the history of the trains in Eastern England and worked for British Rail for many years. Thaxton is a small town in Essex that is now very much part of the London commuter belt. In times past it was a major wool and cutlery manufacture centre in Britain. In fact it is rather remote for getting coal to this area otherwise it may very well have developed into a major cutlery centre like Sheffield. A railway was built here which used the legal definition of light railway which exempted it from a lot of the rules normal railways had to follow which made it viable. A plan went to the planning office for a London to Edinburgh line that would pass through here but it wasn't taken particularly seriously and several other routes were also submitted before a final one was accepted. When the railway was built as a branch line from Elsenham to Thaxted there was 1 goods train & 1 mixed train per day and the rest were passenger trains. This line is approximately 10 miles long and eventually succumbed to competition from the National motorcoach service which started running coaches here from 1920. Nowadays there is a bus service here just once a week and it is the classic case of a small town that has been drastically changed by economic pressures within Britain. The nearest fairly big town to here is probably Bishops Stortford. I really enjoyed this book and apparently it was the first book written by Peter although later he wrote a second edition.

I am reviewing the novel Gone by James Patterson which is a very good thriller which I bought from kindle. This novel is the 6th installment in the Michael Bennett series where we have a policeman in who serves in New York who lost his wife to cancer but who has 9 adopted children all adopted by an Irish nanny called Mary Catherine who is devoted to her job and has a bit of a crush on Mike. At the beginning of this book there is a big gangster take over where a load of dons in the mafia and their families are wiped out. The man responsible is hispanic and offered a deal to the dons some time ago but it got scoffed at. It starts off a bit like the James Bond where we would see a terrifying baddie and think how on earth is in this case Mike and his family going to deal with this even though we know he is going to come out on top. Anyway apparently Michael broke the nose and arrested the hispanic gangster some time ago so he and his family along with their nanny go in hiding. Their only hope is for Mike to help the FBI find these crooks which means working with Emily Parker who is a past love interest and a bit of a rival to his nanny and he is going out with the latter. There is also at least one informant within the police effort to find this man which means the baddie knows everything including where Mike's family are. The baddie also kidnaps and kills people in a bid to get back at Mike. Of course it does have a happy ending. I did enjoy reading it and it keeps your interest throughout, not to mention there is lots of tension.

I am reviewing the book The True Peruvian Route by Mark Horrell which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Mount Aconcagua is just about in Argentina and is very close to the border with Peru. It's the highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere at a tad under 7,000 metres. This book is about an ascent up this mountain by the author and an assorted group from several different countries some of which were a bit inexperienced. They went with a peruvian guide who had discovered this route up the mountain some years ago. The traditional way up Aconcagua is called the Polish Glacier Route which was first climbed by a polish team although technically it doesn't follow a glacier. The other route is called The False Polish Glacier Route which the author renamed The True Peruvian Route and is the best route up the mountain because it avoids the ice sheet which tends to go hard when it doesn't snow and it becomes difficult to drive anything into it like spikes. Their guide held the world record for the most ascents of Aconcagua at 56 & apparently on 3 occasions when he was taking a more gentle approach up the mountain, a stray dog followed him to the summit. Someone did joke that maybe the dog has climbed the mountain more times than him. According to Argentine law there is a basecamp part way up the mountain, manned by doctors which examine you to make sure you are able to climb the mountain. These doctors are quite junior and a bit inexperienced about altitude and sometimes make the wrong decision at least according to the author. Often the climber is the best judge of whether he is capable or not at least when an experienced climber. I think he might have a point there. Apparently Mark has a web site at http://markhorrell.com .This book isn't quite as good as the one on Columbia but is still pretty good.

The book I read to research this post was Cocuy Sniffing In Colombia by Mark Horrell which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The title to this book is a bit of a joke because as most people know most of the world's cocaine comes from Colombia and many addicts come to this country for that reason. The author being white was accosted by people selling coke but he is a mountaineer who writes about his experiences and that is why he chose to visit. This book is quite short but is quite informative and tells you quite a bit about the recent history of this country. Bogarta is the capital of Colombia and has 7 million people and is situated on a plateau 2,600 metres high. Colombia is starting to find its feet as a tourist destination and until fairly recently it was very risky to venture outside this city due to kidnappings of both tourists and locals by guerrillas and drug lords who controlled much of the surrounding area. They used to also force families in those areas to give their sons to them as members and if they refused they killed the entire family. Fairly recently the government sent 20,000 troops in to drive the guerrillas back into the lowlands so much of the country is now relatively safe. There is a novel which was made into a film called Clear And Present Danger by Tom Clancy which is based on this war in Colombia and also stars Harrison Ford and is very good. Anyway getting back to Colombia the author climbed the 2nd highest peak in this country and toured much of the mountains and glaciers surrounding Bogarta. The glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate and it won't be long before they vanish completely. He does also say he'd love to climb Colombia's highest peak but tourists are banned from that area which is owned and populated by indigenous people or a tribal group. The author is writing a feature length book about his ascent of Mt Everest which he did recently but has written quite a lot of short ebooks about his visits to various mountainous areas around the world. They are normally priced quite cheaply.