Good evening 🙂

Today has been a day of contrast! I have indulged in activities which firstly helped my achy muscles  then added bruises and scrapes to them. Ok…these were two separate activities, this is not a tale of massage gone bad or anything like that!

The first of today’s activities was my Sunday morning exercise class of choice. In which I indulge every time I a) don’t forget and 2) am not away or otherwise occupied. It is of course Pilates, the class I never expected to like but the one I find incredibly helpful when it comes to balancing out the other more aggressive activities I engage in. Today’s class was no exception. It was a different instructor to the last two classes I went to, but I think it was the same one as the first class I did. We did a lot of focusing on posture and core engagement and all those good things. We also did a lot of things that seemed simple for the first repetition, but when you got to the 10th / 15th / 100th (yes really) they were really not that easy at all! I walked out of the class feeling stretched and with fewer annoying achy muscles that I went in with but feeling like I had worked my core somewhat, all prepared for the day’s next challenge.

 The next challenge of the day was Ice Skating! I found a voucher online the other day for cheap ice skating so I press ganged some friends into coming with me and we set off for a magical ice filled adventure full of graceful skating and fun. 

OK…I hadn’t actually skated for 15 years, but how hard could it be, surely it would all come back to me…

No…not really, I seemingly hadn’t learned my lesson from hula hooping, everything you think is easy as a child is really hard as an adult! Firstly the skates were not a lot like that picture, they were blue moulded plastic and were somewhat tricky to move in. whats more they had a thin piece of metal attached to the bottom which made it really hard to balance (ok…that bit was supposed to be like that…I know really). So after some confusion where I was given 2 right skates and not allowed to wear my hat on the rink, I finally made it onto the ice. 

It was a lot more terrifying than I remembered…

But with a little practice, it started to come back to me, the weird pain in my feet caused by the crazy boots was subsiding and I was capable of going around the rink without clinging on to the side, I could even go round more than once without stopping to regain my bravery. Things were going pretty well, I was considering the whole thing to be quite a good leg work out and good for balance when this happened…

Ok…I didn’t turn into a small deer… I didn’t slip and slide endearingly and look all disney (:-S)

What I did do was trip over the ice, or get my toe pick thing caught in the ice or something and fall completely forward on my face, putting my hands down in front of me, which then slid out and I slid headlong in a bambi / superman pose across the ice! It was not graceful at all! I somehow managed to fall in a slightly lopsided manner, all my weight landed on my right knee, closely followed by my elbows / forearms then completely facedown! I made this whole thing slightly worse by having to crawl to the edge before I could get up… 

This curtailed my ice skating activities for the day, leaving my with a scraped elbow and a huge bruise on my knee…I was quite pleased to have lasted 45 mins before this happened mind you 🙂 And it was good fun, even though it may be the sort of good fun that we don’t repeat again in a hurry :-S

So in a slightly bruised manner…Day 72, complete 😀