This weekend I have been mostly adventuring in Wales…with a lot of Landrovers…

Look, there they are, hundreds of them!

Well maybe not hundreds…

but lots…

by the way, the white one, in the centre of the top picture…that one is ours…that is the one I spent an excellent and occasionally terrifying weekend in (mostly in..well sometimes in) the passenger seat of. While we drove around the lesser used, more out of the way byways of Mid Wales.

By lesser used…I mean roads that could, but for a technicality, be confused with not roads at all!

Seeee…they don’t look like roads in the way we traditionally think of roads…

They are roads however… It is important to note that everything we drive on, despite them looking like tracks / fields / big piles of rocks are all marked on the maps as Byways open to all vehicles…and therefor we have a legal right to drive on them!

That was the serious bit…but it is important to not because we occasionally get harangued by people who think we are hooning around breaking the country…

there is definitely no hooning… and no speeds above walking pace really 🙂

So there was driving, and no hooning and pretty Welsh countryside, which was mostly hidden behind cloud, rain and mud! But it still remains an interesting way to spend a weekend 🙂

See…lots and lots of mud…and my feet, in the mud..a lot more than I anticipated and a lot more than if, for example, I had been driving! Oddly they look pretty clean in that pic compared to how they looked at the end of the day!!

There is a reason for this, and the reason is gates.

yup…gates, hundreds of gates…

it is the passengers job to open (if in the lead car) or close (if in the last car) any gate we encounter. We were the lead car or the last car for the majority of the 3 days… I suppose this made up for the green laning trip we went on when I had a broken leg and therefore couldn’t fulfill this gate duty… 😀
But never mind 🙂 there is a lot more activity than you might think involved in holding yourself steady in a landrover that is bouncing around a lot…there is a lot of core bracing and bracing of your arms against the sides to keep yourself from being flung around like a ragdoll! Not to mention all the climbing in and out .

This, however is not enough activity to count as an actual daily workout!

So I had to invent some things to do in my hotel room in the evenings…

Friday (day 224) 

This is the day I discovered that one of the apps on my phone has a tabata timer…

Of course I decided to try it out…what else would you do if you discover a thing like that? 😀

No…hiding it away pretending you didn’t see it and surreptitiously deleting the app is not an option…

the timer was set to: 20s work 10s rest x 8 which seemed reasonable so I used it set like that and did:

20s work, 10s rest x 8 of:
Jumping Jacks,
Squats
lunges
Press ups
Planks (4 x 2 handed and 2 each hand one handed)
Pilates advanced clam thingie…

all with no more than 30s  – 1 min rest in between rounds…

I then attempted to do the Pilates open legged rocker..but managed to make myself very dizzy…so I stopped that and did some sit ups…which didn’t help at all.. so I laid on the floor until the room stopped spinning…

Things I learned… I can hold 1 handed planks for 20s more than once in a row (woohoo)
I shouldn’t do things that involve rocking when I have the remnants of a cold…

Saturday (Day 225)

This was the day that I discovered that bracing yourself in a landrover, jumping in and out about 30 times and the previous day’s tabata training all conspired to make me ache!

This meant that this was also the day that I decided to make up my own Pilates work out that includes as many exercises as I can remember from my normal Sunday class 🙂

So I did (after the warm up we use in class):
5 x roll downs
plank x 8 breaths
10 x swandive
10 (per side) x superman swimming thingy
10 (per side) x Side lift thingy
10 (per leg) x leg swingy forward and back thingy
10 (per leg) x advanced clam
10 (per leg) x leg extensions from table top
1 x Pilates hundred
leg circles 4 per direction per side
leg kicks
10 x roll ups
10 x V-sit with bending and straightening legs
Some stretching.

Sunday (Day 226)

This was the day of more green lane driving followed by a long trip back home and slightly broken (and fixed again) truck.  this all conspired to us getting back slightly later than anticipated and meant that I did not want to go to a gym at that time of night!

So as I was at home, and had access to a DVD player, I feel back on a level 2 work out from the 30 day shred!

It was good, it is a hard workout despite being fairly short! the no rest policy seems to be a good one!

It was during this that I remembered about another awesome exercise that I will have to do my best to use on my own in future…
the walk out press up. In this you start standing, bend down, touch your toes then with straight legs walk your hands out into press up position, do a press up then walk you hands back to your toes and stand up, then repeat 😀

It is a good one, I like it…in a crazy sort of way 😀

 

So with all that, I can say days 224, 225 and 226 complete 😀

also…did I mention there was a lot of water…