These long weekends are getting to be a habit… I could quite get used to a four day working week and a three day weekend.

For those of you who live anywhere other that the UK we have just had May Day / Spring Bank Holiday, we get the day off to celebrate it being may 😀 or it being spring, or something…there is more about it here, if you want to know the origins..

Whatever the origins it meant I had 3 days off work and now have trouble remembering what day it is…

Day 315: Friday

Friday started very early! I would love to tell you I spontaneously got up early to do exercise, leaping out of bed voluntarily at the crack of dawn filled with enthusiasm and vigor!

This is not what happened.

What happened is my husband needed delivering to the railway station at an unnaturally early hour in the morning (7am) and I offered to drop him off.

I intended to run after that, but I was not entirely awake enough for that. However, I resisted the temptation to sit in my car and sleep for an hour…I call this a huge plus!

I ended up going for a 50 min walk in my new (to me) dancing shoes in an attempt to break them in 🙂

I walked for 50 mins and went 3.1 km, not as fast as sometime, but these shoes are going to take a little breaking in…

It was, in theory, a nice way to wake up the morning, but I am really not very good in the morning so I was still half asleep after my plod…

during the day at work, I managed not to go for another walk due to rain, but I did manage to study for some of my nutrition course 🙂 yeay!
Friday evening looked very much like Thursday evening, there was some tabata and a lot of squats!

Warm up jogging on the spot 5 mins or so

1 round of tabata (2o work 10s rest x8), alternating between skaters and side to side shuffle things (as Thursday)

Day 2 of the squat challenge:
55 x Standard Squats (25 + 30)
55 x Plie Squats  (25 + 30)

then I added on 2 x 10 squat jumps and 2 x 10 split squats, because I didn’t feel that I had squatted enough 😀

Day 316: Saturday

Saturday was the awesome day…it was Rochester Sweeps festival which *may* have originally been an annual holiday / celebration for chimney sweeps, but now seeps to be a giant excuse for music and dancing…

who needs an excuse for dancing!!

Not Mythago…although we did have one as we were invited to dance in Rochester 😀

Here we are…dancing…sadly (or perhaps happily) I am not in this video…

We danced 5 stands, each was to last approximately 1 – 1.5hrs each, but was shared with 2 or 3 other morris sides…we alternate dances so we don’t have to dance solidly for an hour…

this mostly worked…although there were 2 stands where we were the only side there so had to do somewhat more than expected…

It was a great fun day, and we got to do some fun things and see a lot of morris sides we don’t see very often. We also got to dance Thor’s Hammer with The Wild Hunt, a Morris side started by the same chap who started Mythago. This
always makes a pretty impressive show as we end up with four or five sets dancing 🙂

The dances were interspersed with a lot of walking, as the stands are spread throughout the town. I ended up dancing:

Maiden Castle
Triskele
Hunting Dance
Star of the County Down (x2)
Summerland
Spank The Monkey
Avebury Ring (x2)
Standing Stones
Thor’s Hammer
Fanny Frail

It was all in all a good day all around, with my arm holding up considerably better than I thought it would on Tuesday!

and…

with all that dancing, it made it very hard to want to do any squats when I got home!!

But it was squat challenge, day 3… so squat I did!
60 x Standard Squats (20 + 20 + 20)
60 x Plie Squats (20 + 20 + 20)
10 x Low Pulse Squats

 

Day 317 Sunday

Sunday was the day that my cold (which I had been killing with lemsip and ignoring) and my arm healing and the dancing all caught up with me…and caused me to sleep for the best part of a day!

I managed my pilates class, it was hard work mind you…

Mind you…it was meant to be hard! Sarah has done quite a lot of research recently and found a plethora of new and extended exercises designed to challenge those of us who have been attending the class for a while!

This lead me to discover such exciting things as the one kneed press up:

The side plank + thread the needle:

and various core strengthening things that I have no idea of the name…

such as the one where you lean back on your arms and lift up your legs then twist them to the side and rotate them out and in a circle and back in, and the one where you lay on your back, with knees up in table top, then drop your knees over as far as possible to one side, straighten your legs, then use your core to bring the legs back to the start position…

It was all good fun, and tiring fun, and it made my core ache the next day..which is rare and awesome!

Sunday was also my Squat challenge day 4…which was a rest day woo!

Day 318 Monday

Monday did not involve Body Pump…

This makes it quite an unusual Monday!

It is because if the aforementioned bank holiday and the gym that run s the Body Pump class I go to  closes on bank holidays, others don’t but this one does. Some sort of local authority rubbish I believe!

Anyway, without Body Pump to look forward to, I had to find something else to do. So I decided that 1 week was about long enough to get over my cold, and I was going to run again for the first time since my 10k.

I decided to go along the downs link towards Christs Hospital, the same way I was going on my training runs before my 10k. It is a good route 🙂

I set myself an interval schedule which was slightly different from the 10k trainer one, just to see what happened.

What happened was a better run than I expected! I hadn’t run all week, and thought I was recovering from a cold, so I was expecting a slow time. But, actually did the same distance in about 4 mins less than last time 😀 I was very pleased!

It felt hard at the very start and in the middle with periods of okay-ness in the first half and towards the end…I have no idea why! The main thing I am learning from these runs is, just because you feel rubbish at the start of a run, doesn’t mean it will feel bad the whole way through…This is actually pretty reassuring to know 😀

woohoo 10% of the way to my May running goal!! only another 54 km to go :-S

Monday was also squat challenge day 5:
70 x Standard Squats (25 + 25 + 20)
70 x Plie Squats (25 + 25+ 20)
15 x low pulse squats

Days 315 – 318 Complete 😀