Sheepishly shuffling back to Blogger

No relevance to the rest of the post - a wall in
Germany that makes music in the rain.  I
want to visit here please!

Hi. Clearly, my first sentence has to be an apology for quite how long it has been since my last blog post. Hopefully, some of you have been following my Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or JustGiving pages, all of which have been updated with much more frequency than this poor, abandoned little blog. But for anyone who hasn't had a update since (ouch) Feb 28th, I am sorry.

I am not sorry about how much work I have been doing because training is going well, both group training and individual. So in this post I will give a fairly brief overview of how things are going and what we've been up to.








Group Training 
Remember my colleague who agreed to be our PT to prepare us for Tough Mudder? Mr
Martin Fuller, advocate of the millions of press-ups, sit-ups and the dreaded Bleep Test (lovely picture of Martin there, by the way). Well, he finally said that we had done enough individual training and he would like us to work as a group for the lead up to TM. This, due to an unfortunate concatenation of events, ended up being schedule for 5.30 am on a Monday. Yup, 3 hours before I need to be at work, we have to do the most draining workout I have ever completed, in whatever weather happens to happen. Guaranteed to make me a happy woman! We have been doing this for three weeks now (fourth session tomorrow morning) and so far they have gone like this:

          Week One: Run up a hill. Keep running up the hill. Encouragement from Martin, apparently we are near the top. That was a lie, girls, just one more stretch. Jump over a gate (and back again, and once more for luck). Stop moving so have to do ten press-ups and ten crouching star jumps. Finally get to the peak then do shuttle runs (sprint downhill, jog uphill). Run over the hill, down the hill then back up the hill by running up a flight of steps (at this point my brain was swearing at whoever decided to build those steps but I had no breath left to voice this opinion). Repeat this last section from the bottom of the steps in a time limit (one minute less to do it in). Run back to the car-park, sprinting the last 100m (ish). Throw gloves at Martin when he lies about how many turns in the path there really are. Sprint a bit more. Collapse in a sweaty, aching heap, feeling like death. Sarah and I did this session and she did considerable better than I did: I felt t=like my legs were going to fall off for most of Tuesday!

         Week Two: Beach runs. Mostly consisting of running across the stones which doesn't sound too hard until you try it. The stones shift and slide under your feet making you run slowly and with a strange, almost flat-footed, gait. Also "smilies" - run down from the top of the stones, around the bottom of the groin avoiding the waves if you can, and back to the top. Look, I drew you a picture:

Like my picture? This is a Smiley - run down the stones, across the sand, around the groin (avoiding the water if you want!), and back up to the top.

Martin also bangs on about recovery time and, in order to improve our ability to recover after obstacles, insists on making us do walk/jog/run drills. This is also not a fun thing to do across stones. In fact, apart from sitting on stones and admiring the sunrise, the stones are definitely not the most fun part of any beach, period. In addition, the sun did not properly rise until we had finished so we didn't even get to enjoy that. Participants: myself, Sarah, Kariss, Hannah, Kenny. Didn't hurt half as much as after week one, although I did notice some of the others walking a bit funny, ha!

        Week Three: Mostly as week one except with even more uphill running (didn't think that was possible but Martin is good at this kind of thing, which includes finding deviously difficult routes up hills). We happy few: Kariss, Sarah and me.

Other Stuff with friends
Another colleague has introduced us to climbing at Boulder Brighton - the kind of rock-climbing that doesn't require ropes or harnesses. We think it is fantastic fun and are telling ourselves that it is as good as an upper body workout, even though Kariss keeps coming home with grazed knees! She's more reckless (and better at it) than I am. 

Boulder Brighton - follow one colour to the top, that's one climb! Green (far wall) is the easiest climb. Yellow/Black (corner climb, mid-picture), is quite easy. White, orange, pale purple: all too hard for me!

My sister plays for a local netball team, The Emeralds of Lancing, and she coaxed Kariss and I along to a couple of their training sessions. whilst not as physically draining as some of our work-outs, they keep you on your feet and moving for a good hour of running, jumping and, in my case, desperately trying to catch the ball!

Individual Training
As I work in a school I am sometimes asked if I would like to go on residential. This year I was asked to join the Year 9 residential to Wales where we hiked up two mountains 

Sugar Loaf looks really big from a distance! But, at              Twmpa or Lord Hereford's Knob. we went up the                  

          596m, it doesn't quite measure up.                                     left side (out of sight here) and walked                                    

                                                                                                       across to the peak in the middle. 

(at least we called them mountains because they are nearly as big as a hill could possibly get!), rock climbed and abseiled on a cliff, gorge walked and canoed. Oh and played rounders, long ball, slack-lined and did what felt like ten tons of washing up. Although it was brilliant fun sometimes the kids needed quite a bit of help, encouragement and cajoling, especially to get up the last little bits of the hills, so I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home on Friday! We were fantastically lucky with the weather: last year they couldn't do some of the activities because it rained the whole week, this time the sun was out and I even got a little sunburnt....

To prove that I climbed it, here is the view from Twmpa,
near the peak.

The other exercise I have done is varied but Martin (yes the same Martin, he made me run up some of the hills!), let me try out his Slendertone which felt like it was working. Enough, at least, for me to invest in one myself; also, if a super-fit PT thinks they work, who am I to disagree? Oh, and I had a lovely run yesterday, got very lost in the woods and met some cows.
They were super cute but really not that pleased to see me. I think they must have been fairly young as the calves were very shaky on their feet when they got up!

Thanks for reading this post, it won't be nearly as long till the next one, especially as there are only 34 days to go.

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