Month: June 2014

Juneathon day two: Swim-a-Song and sun salulations

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Monday is Mini-Ginge’s swimming day. I say his swimming, he just lies there splashing his arms while I do all of the hard work. Anyway, even though lifting him up and down is good for my bingo wings, I felt a bit guilty using this as my Juneathon exercise as it’s not what I planned to do.

What I plan to do is daily yoga. Oh yes.

I am rubbish at doing exercises at home. I lack the motivation and then when I do actually do them, I feel as if I’m rushing and not doing them properly. It’s daft, Dan and Angela both posted their first ever Juneathon blog on twitter, which set me off looking through my old posts from 2009. On the one hand I can see how far I’ve come since then, on the other hand one bit stood out a mile. Back in 2009 I had enjoyed an epiphany about my yoga, I had bought books about it (my favourite way of doing anything) and was going to embark on my posture practise at home.

Needless to say I have never done this. I have however, waited five years for another yoga epiphany. This time I have bought an app, not a book. Well several apps, but I only like one of them. The others are a bit too shouty, require a subscription, or have adverts that are a bit incongruous to the whole meditative yoga lark.

So tonight I have warmed up, done some stretches for my sacroiliac joint (Mini-Ginge has had a bit of a growth spurt and is challenging my back a bit), a sequence of swan to cat to dog to cat to swan to get things going and then to the app for some sun salutations. I am rubbish at sun salutations. It comes down to the fact that I’m terrible at any kind of organised dancing, you will never see me doing the Macarena and I even spell things wrong doing the YMCA (my C comes out backwards). With sun salutations, I struggle to hold the sequence in my head and always seem to be one step behind. I am determined to crack this by the end of June.

Today I learned that:

  • I still hate the transition from plank to the knees-chest-chin pose.
  • I’m still more hopeless at plank.
  • I’m leaping ahead. What I need to do is go through the individual postures and get the basics sorted.

If anyone has any tips for doing yoga at home, or knows of any good, non-shouty videos that might help me, all suggestions would be gratefully received.

Importing the Juneathon blog roll into Feedly

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Visit I can. I will who has put together the blog roll.

Right click on the the link to the OPML file and Save As or Save Link As

opml
Log in to your Feedly account (if you’re anything like me, this will take longer than any of the rest of the process).

*UPDATED* Feedly has made this bit easier, just click on Organize on the left of the screen

organize
This should take you to a page with the title Organize – next to the heading is a button that says Import OPML – click on this.

Click on Browse and find where you saved the OPML file back at the start, select the file and click Open. This will take you back to the import page – click the big blue Import button and wahey! The list should have imported into your Feedly account.

Juneathon day one – couch to 5k week 5 day 2

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Even though I started this year’s Janathon, it was only a couple of months after having Mini-Ginge, I was still banned from doing any high impact exercise and I felt I had a decent excuse for taking it easy. He is now nearly eight months old and I’m slowly but surely getting back to running. I feel that I should make a proper go of Juneathon. I thought that I’d considered all the issues that would make this year more challenging; the tiredness, the wonky pelvic floor, the difficulty getting out for early morning runs, the dodgy hip and back, the potentially still lax ligaments, the tiredness… What I didn’t account for was that even leaving the house would take so flipping long.

With hindsight, it might have been my own fault, but before I left I decided to peek in on Mini-Ginge just to make sure that he was settled in his cot. As I looked in the room, a head popped up and a pair eyes stared out at me in the gloom. His gaze met mine. I tried to back away, but it was too late. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

A few cuddles and a couple of verses of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star later and I thought it was safe to leave. I stood up. His face crumpled. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

At this point I handed over to Ginge but the WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHs continued, punctuated with a few of his hungry cries. This was a situation that I was hoping to avoid because once my sports bra is on, the door to the buffet is firmly locked. If wearing a nursing bra is like nipping to the cash machine when you need a tenner, wearing a sports bra is like getting your tenner from deep in the vaults of the Bank of England*.

I left the boy blowing raspberries in his cot and legged it.

Today’s legging it consisted of 8 minutes running, 5 minutes running, 8 minutes running. This was the first time that the return leg would see me running all the way home and it was both liberating and frustrating not looking at my watch to see how many minutes I had left. Instead I kept on picking out landmarks in the distance to split up the distance until I was home.

My next session sees me leap up from 8 minutes to 20 minutes of running. I have no idea who was doing the maths for this one, but clearly they forgot about all of the possible numbers between 8 and 20. I am a little terrified.

*I originally wrote Fort Knox, which does read better but then the pedant in me realised that you’d really struggle to get a tenner from there.