New strengths

A little bit of something new today. Pilates.

As I mentioned yesterday, Pilates is something that I have been meaning to do for a while. Probably going on a couple of years now. It is something that I have known would be good for me, but I just haven't quite got around to sorting out. The last few weeks though I figured enough was enough and I just needed to get on with it. Particularly now that I have Friday's off work and have the time to fit it in. So last week I found a Pilates instructor near me who seemed to know what they were doing and made a booking for today.

The session was actually for myself and my wife. The instructor recommended a personalised session to begin with and so I thought it would be something we could do together. The session went quite well. I was a bit worried about doing a new exercise less than three weeks before a race, but I was also fairly confident that the session would be low key, which it was. In fact, probably around half of the exercises I have done before. I have injured myself enough that I have been given lots of strengthening exercises by various Physios. Lots of these exercises are also used by Pilates. So it wasn't a total body shock. At the same time, it certainly wasn't a waste. A lot of my injuries have stemmed from a lack of core strength and stability. Today showed me enough new core and stability exercises to show me that this is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing, and today we barely even scratched the surface. I look forward to learning more.

Long, long bike session tomorrow morning. Could be an interesting session. Currently the forecast for the morning is a 90% chance of rain between 5am and 2pm, or about exactly when I am planning on riding. I am not sure what that will mean for me. The forecast makes it sound like it could be anything from sporadic showers to a full blown thunderstorm. If the rain is really heavy and persistent then it could mean a fairly long morning on the trainer, or possibly a mixture of trainer and the road. I am not sure if my sanity will cope with four hours plus on the trainer, although I know some people do that. My current plan is to set up the TT bike and then see what weather turns up. Fingers crossed friendly weather turns up.