The last week of term was busy with finishing off uni work, tramping around the wilderness collecting river water samples, packing, and travelling home (with long delays), and as a result I only managed a disappointing 3 hours 35 minutes. Over all 10 weeks of term I’ve done 107 hours and 35 minutes, so on average I have met the 10 hour weekly target this term. Here’s the week’s breakdown:

Monday 13th: 15 minutes opening preparation for a Team 45 45 league game, 2 hours 15 minutes playing that game

Tuesday 14th: I listened to ChessFM live commentary on the London Classic for a while, but I do that quite often and haven’t been counting it towards training time

Wednesday 15th: 4 hours playing chess variants, eating mince pieces, and drinking mulled wine at the Durham City Chess Club Christmas Special – although some of the variants were close to real chess, I’m not going to count any of this as training

Thursday 16th: 10 minutes of Chess Tempo problems

Friday 17th: 15 minutes looking over the interesting Anand-Carlsen game from the London Classic, 10 minutes playing 2x 5 0 games, 15 minutes researching the Vienna Game (I had a game against it at the Classic)

Saturday 18th: No training worth recording, though I did go into a G-Star RAW shop and embarrass my girlfriend by telling the shop assistant I was only there to admire the poster of Carlsen 😉

Sunday 19th: 30 minutes watching Shirov’s King’s Indian DVD

I will post the details of my holiday training schedule soon.  This week will be disrupted by family descending on us for Christmas, but I should still be able to fit in a decent number of hours before that happens.