Train, sleep, train.

3^rd December

The last week has been all about training and sleeping. Every day I have woken up at 6.50am for a 5km run followed by stretching and almost two hour training. After training a jump in the pool, shower, hanging around few hours, eating and sleeping for 3 hours or so. And then the same all over again except the run is half the distance.

Actually I should be running 8km in the mornings and 5kms in the afternoon. I still haven’t mastered the skill of breathing properly in the heat so I stick to my shorter runs. The 8km run is also full with hills and it ends in a steep long hill one has to sprint up, run down, turn around and sprint up again. Definitely something I won’t be able to do for a long time. All respect to Chris and Jame who run it every single morning.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it feels to run every morning after hard training; just lifting my legs up feels almost impossible. The locals on the way make it a bit easier; children are always waving to me on their way to school, sometimes they even run with me for a while, and others passing my bike are giving me the thumbs up.

The training has been great too. After my slight injury in my right hip muscles, I haven’t been able to do proper kicks with my right leg. So now I have developed quite strong left abdominal muscles only kicking with the left. Both of my hips are fine now but now I’m trying to strengthen the right side as the left one is all muscle and the right leg has no power to kick the pads.

All the sleeping really helps with the training; I guess it works well as a short recovery between the training sessions. One night I didn’t sleep much though thanks to a big fat ass mouse in my room.  I woke up at 3am to find a mouse going through my food and running behind the fridge to hide. I hid all the food in to the fridge but the bugger just didn’t want to leave. I even went outside to look for a cat, there’s always plenty around, but couldn’t find any. So I had to sleep with the lights on.

There’s also more people here now for the training; almost ten people are training now simultaneously, gets a bit crowded in the ring. Feels nice to be a bit advanced in the training compared to the newbie’s; I felt quite strong holding down a girl much bigger than be during grabbling. I definitely need to learn more technique in boxing, my weakest point. One day as everyone’s punching bag was not fun at all.

One more day to go before the “holy Sunday”, the day off. Can’t wait to do nothing at all.

‘That’s it for now. I’m off for my afternoon run.      

A recap

29th November

So what I’ve been up to here lately? Training of course, oh and being sick..

Had few vey good days of training even went for runs, but one afternoon while relaxing in my bed I started to feel cold. I turned of the air-con and still I was shivering. Yep I had a fever. One of fellow students here had brought some sort of virus from somewhere, which enable at least 3 people from training. Ah the stomach aches.

I feel better now still some stomachaches once in a while but I’m back to training. Seems though I don’t have enough energy to train, like dealing with all the pain is eating all my strength. I also have a slight injury in my right hip. It hurts every time I kick with my right. I can also feel the pain when I cough; it’s somewhere deep in my ab/hip muscles. So far I’ve been treating it with a hot water bottle and today I got some cream to rub in on it. Hopefully it will work.

I have definitely learned a lot during the 5 days of training. One of the trainers even said I’m good, which felt really nice :). One day I was sparring with a muscular French guy we call “Leon” and I managed to floor him and punch him several times in the face. It felt good to “beat up” a big man. Even the trainers were laughing.

Yesterday, Sunday, we had a day off. The whole day was basically dedicated to eating. We did manage to do some shopping and a tiny tour around the island on a motorbike. And of course we couldn’t leave out muay thai, so we watch fights on TV for few hours.

The restaurant people here have been very nice to us too. One day we bought a fish at the market and they cooked it for us, it was so yummy. And yesterday we also got fish from them. They are very nice and funny.

Today we are expecting more people to arrive to the camp. There are not many of us left now: only five, of which 2 are in Phuket and one is sick.