Good evening

Today started early, far earlier than a Saturday morning should, but with a busy day ahead I needed to start early to get everything prepared!
Exercise wise my first challenge of the day (after getting up at 6:30 on a Saturday of course!) was a 9am personal training session. It was an excellent session, every one of these is fun and involves a mixture of Thai pad work and seemingly weird and wonderful ways to use gym equipment that I have never heard of before, mind you that is why i have a personal trainer..I can do all the stuff I have heard of on my own…although with less motivation. Anyway, today’s confusing new exercises were things called spiderman crawls, they are pretty much what they sound like…you crawl along the floor on hands and feet using the opposite arms and legs at a time, you basically progress along the floor in a similar way to spiderman ascending a wall, although in my case with considerably less finesse. To make this even less finesse-full and considerably trickier I was attached at the waist to a big pulley machine. We also did some other work on this machine only with a bar attached to one of the pulleys which i had to wave around like it was a weapon, this is more sensible and harder work than I have made it sound! there was a brief kettlebell interlude because there are always kettlebells which is a good thing. we also spent half an hour doing Thai boxing pad work, punches, combinations and defense as normal, adding in kicks between each combination because it is fun…and harder that way! The other significant development today was i got to kick with both legs, this indicates that my previous hip / thigh injury is very well on the way to recovery 🙂 This all happily occupied 1 hour of my PT session!

On leaving the gym, I (after showering and changing of course) went to today’s Mythago dance out at the rather lovely location of Amberley working museum for their arts and music festival. It was a generally lovely day, a really nice location beautiful sunshine to dance at and as always lovely people to talk to! we did 2 stands (chunks of dancing) and a procession…although this actually turned int to 3 stands and a procession but that was something of an accident. As the above mentioned hip / thigh injury is well on the way to recovery and i don’t want to exchange that for a re-injury, I didn’t do quite as much dancing as i normally would. However, with the dances, and the walking around in between I managed to clock up 2.6 miles of moving around…all in very heavy (but awesome) boots and some in a rapid, high impact-y border bedlam morris style of dance. This dances I did were:
Maiden Castle, Our Henry, Triskelle, Avebury Ring, Fanny Frail and Thor’s Hammer. This was not quite as many as I really would have liked, and I felt somewhat guilty at the beginning of the day for dancing less than other people, however I went with the majority and rested in between dances. It was probably the right thing to do…but it is very frustrating! Did I mention it was lovely and sunny…and hot and we were all dressed in black tatter covered jackets…it was a very warm day.

So I would say, Day 8, well and truly complete 😀