Exercise routines

The final instalment of our Olympic travels.  Below is Monday afternoon in the Riverbank Arena for the hockey.  We saw group matches between China and Japan and South Korea and Belgium.  The former was a thrilling contest.  Japan, bottom of the table, snatched a deserved victory against their bitter rivals China (3rd in the table) to ensure that China couldn't go through to the semis and Team GB then didn't need to beat the Netherlands to go through (which is a good thing as they lost later that night).  It was slightly surreal to hear a crowd of mostly Brits chanting "Nippon, Nippon, Nippon"!

It is a really fast and physical game.  My photos are rubbish though as we were sitting behind the screen (and I'm pleased we were given the speed of the ball).

The Olympic Park was pretty stunning. 

And we had a great time.

After the hockey we headed of to ExCel for the second round of boxing.  I was very impressed by the regeneration of East London.  Nothing like the development below existed when I lived in London in the early 1990's and now it looks as though it has always been there.

The atmosphere in the boxing was excellent.  It was not a huge arena so you had great views from all over and the crowds were very boisterous.  We saw 5 lots of quarter finals and were lucky enough to see 3 of Team GB's eventual boxing medal winners - Luke Campbell from Hull, Anthony Joshua from East London (both of whom got golds) and Anthony Ogogo who won a bronze. Of those, Anthony Joshua stood out as a star - I tipped him for the gold as soon as we saw him fight.  (He's the big chap in the bottom 2 pics.)

 

In other news, I'm taking baby steps to get back to my pre-summer exercise routine and am having some success. To date, 2 runs have been achieved and one thwarted by unavoidable late night working and torrential rain. I am thinking about running more, though and starting to plan when I can fit one in. Running is now back on my radar.

I realised how much I'm /my chimp is motivated by competition when I found it much easier to go out for a run after reading a facebook entry from a friend about her last run. She is getting back to fitness now that her twins are toddlers and her husband is working locally so more available for babysitting duties. To help her, she has a MapMyRun app which records her run, the route and time etc and then posts it to FB. It is a run I used to do all the time and her time was pretty good. I found myself thinking - I can do that and then, on Tuesday morning, I headed off to Bamford and did (most of) it! Actually, she is clearly fitter than me at the moment so I'm setting myself a medium-term target of getting back to those sort of times. I might even sign up to the app if it works! I'm probably never going to be as fast though as I have all the dog-based palaver to cope with; the leads on and off again, the chasing after them while they run round fields chasing low-flying swallows etc.

 

 

 

So, to keep up the momentum, today I'm going to go out for a short run at lunchtime with the dogs and then play golf this evening.  We're playing my final knockout competition.  It's the mixed and me and my partner Nigel are playing against my usual pairs partner Fran and her mixed partner, Lee.  A crunch match if ever I saw one!