Good afternoon 🙂

It rained on Saturday and it was definitely glom of nit this morning when I got up to go to PT and it was still dark, we will just have to see what effect snow has on my dedication! (I can’t believe I got to day 102 without a Terry Pratchett reference!)

Anyway, back in the dim and distant past (this morning at 5:45 am) I dragged myself out of bed despite the dark, only to discover that I was actually much more awake than I expected 😀 I made my way to the gym for my PT appointment with time to spare (just) met Matt the trainer and we were away!

We started with a cross trainer warm up, followed closely by some joints and mobility warm ups. The first part of the session was some weight training, where I discovered that my shoulder hurt more than I thought in only one plane of motion, it is most odd and I will get round to seeing someone about it soon… after this we adjourned to the dance studio where Matt donned the body armour which means that for body punches I actually get to hit him rather than the pads and we started out Thai boxing training. Which then became much more MMA-y with the addition of spinning backfists 😀 in which I spin round and hit out with the back of my right hand, then on the way back do the same with my left hand. It is awesome and I remembered today why it used to be my favourite punch in the olden days when I did kickboxing training 😀 to finish this off as a combo we added a kick on the end…it was awesome! We did this along with the normal punch / kick / defence combos and the “make Sam more aggressive” drill that we introduced last week! Hehehe…this was lots and lots of fun 😀 😀 I might well have to find a supplementary Thai boxing / kickboxing class to go to soon to augment this 😀

we finished off with some core work on the pulley machine in the form of wood chop thingies (which were hard work…but in a good way!) and some stretching, where we discovered that my flexibility has improved and that my socks didn’t match. Technically I already knew about the socks but shhh!

The thing about getting out of bed and managing to get to the gym is that by lunchtime you feel like the exercise was so long ago…that you do some more!

So I went for a run…

The run felt ok, i ran most of my runs intervals (all of the first, 99% of the second and about 75% of the third) which leads me to believe that my stamina and general running ability is improving. The pace was exactly the same as the saturday run, but the thing that intrigues me most is the breakdown of the pace graph. it would seem from the graph that my pace is relatively consistent, not much variation even though that includes both my run and walk intervals! Even though I can identify the bits where I am going slower, and walking, it would seem that my brisk walking pace in the rest intervals is getting quicker. this has to be a good thing, but I am sure there should be more variation between the running and the walking…

I am a little confused as to what to do next, I want to improve, but I am not sure how. I am going to keep on doing what I am doing until I figure out the next logical thing to do. At the moment, I am working on the principle that getting out and running as much as I can is improving my fitness, it is far better than not doing it. I will read up what I can about running training and see if I can formulate a plan… If anyone has any ideas, please let me know…

All in all I am pleased with day 102, and I can now declare it complete 😀