Category: Post-Pregnancy

Juneathon day nine: hippy hippy shake

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Today has been a very busy day. I’m not quite sure what possessed me this morning, but we were both up, fed, dressed and on our way to the supermarket by half nine. Shopping was amazingly brief so we braved the rain showers to walk down to the library for bounce and rhyme. As the name suggests, this involves bouncing and rhyming – lots of nursery rhymes, songs and actions – and today I learned that there is more than one verse to Hickory Dickory Dock, I never knew this! Anyway, this was all good upper body exercise for me – well, have you tried doing the actions to the Grand Old Duke of York with a 7kg wriggling kettlebell?

After we had bounced and rhymed, we had a stroll down to the doctors and back home for lunch. Lunch has to be relatively early on a Monday to avoid any unfortunate being sick in the pool incidents at swim-a-song (him, not me).

Tonight’s yoga involved some lovely hip opening, the added benefit being that as I lay on the floor I could see through the underside of our glass coffee table and found a bit of paper that I had been looking for (and was hidden from above).

Juneathon day eight: Fun in the sun

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I’ve always liked a morning run. The reasons are multiple: it gets it out of the way, mornings are lovely and full of promise, it’s quiet and if it’s sunny, then it’s not too warm. I was woken up unfeasibly early and by 6.00 I was sitting with a cup of tea and a backlog of Juneathon blogs, supervising a small boy intent on crawling his way to every possible danger in the front room.

When I was able to hand over the supervisory reins to Ginge, I bounded out of the door like an excited labrador. Now, technically the C2K plan had me back doing a sequence of run 5, walk 3, run 8, walk 3, run 5, but what is the point of a plan if you can’t ignore it? I decided just to run and see how I got on.

How I got on was twenty minutes running, interrupted at 12min30 for an utterly pointless thirty seconds walk. It was the sun wot done it. I was plodding along into the sun when I made the mistake of remembering how I hard I find it to run in the warmer weather. Before I knew it, I had convinced myself that I needed to have a little break. Hmmmm. After that, I carried on plodding home and when I got there, realised that it felt harder than last time because I was going faster than the last time.

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.

Adventuring to the OM Yoga Show

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I’ve been doing yoga since 2009 and it’s one of the few hobbies/exercises that I’ve stuck with. I only do one class a week and I have only ever done classes with the same teacher (mainly because I think she’s ace but partly because I’m too much of a wuss to try another class), so I don’t consider myself to be a proper yoga practitioner. I am much more Boo Boo than Yogi.

However, I was lucky enough to win tickets to the Om Yoga Show (incorporating the Mind Body Soul Experience) courtesy of Helen at HelsBels.org.uk and last Sunday, my tiny yoga partner enjoyed one of my magical mystery tours around Manchester (he’s rubbish at navigating) so that we could visit the exhibition.

After parking in the extortionately priced but convenient car park, the show was very easy to find – it was just a question of following the steady stream of limber looking women wearing interesting leggings.

We kicked off with the Mind Body Soul half of the show, which I have to admit isn’t quite my cup of tea (or indeed my cup of purifying herbal infusion). At this point, I feel that I should issue a disclaimer: I will happily respect anyone’s belief in whatever mystic quackery they gain benefit from, however I also reserve the right to refer to such things as mystic quackery. This is probably why I found myself chatting to the man from the RSPB rather than discovering the benefits of hydrogen-rich water. Now I fear that I will never know how I have been coping with the water that comes with hydrogen and oxygen in the old-fashioned 2:1 ratio.

The yoga half of the show was (to me) far more interesting. I was very restrained when it came to shopping (like running, yoga is an activity that doesn’t require a lot of kit, but by heck there’s a lot of gorgeous kit to lust after) and only treated myself to a new mat and a spiky massage ball (which Mini-Ginge has taken a liking to, probably because it does look like it belongs in his toy box). There were plenty of demonstrations and open classes to gawp at (in an admiring way), I picked up a copy of Om Yoga and Lifestyle magazine for a quid and we bumped into both my yoga teacher (who was leading a demonstration later in the day) and Mini-Ginge’s yoga teacher (who was taking full advantage of the retail opportunities) which was also rather nice.

Would I go again? Yes, I think I would. Will I be brave enough to join in with the open classes? Maybe… Going to the show has made me think a little bit beyond my normal weekly yoga class and just setting off on the adventure to Manchester gave me a much needed boost, so all in all, it was a morning well spent.

(I went to the show because I won the tickets, there was no expectation or requirement from either Hels or the Om Yoga Show that I blog about it).

Things I have learned (or remembered) since returning to the gym

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1. I still get very very red faced, very very sweaty and quite a lot stinky.
I look dreadful after I’ve been running, it’s as if someone swaps my head for a big, red, shiny grinning tomato. I really don’t care about this, although the other day Mini-Ginge was very reluctant to have hugs with me because I smelled so hideous. I have probably scarred him for life.

2. I’m still not down with the music videos
Yup, it’s still lots of ladies writhing around in their bra and pants. To be honest, if I wanted to have a close up view of that many gussets, I’d work for M&S quality control. Having said that, today’s telly was “Coldplay: The Collection” and seemed to involve Chris Martin learning puppetry with a spoon.

3. I’m rubbish at following plans
I’m (loosely) following the NHS Couch to 5K plan. I did week one twice, week two once and today decided to wing it with week three. I suspect that this is not the way that the creators intended it to be done.

4. I don’t get the concept of Weetabix as a drink, it does not sit comfortably with me
I wasn’t actually at the gym when this occurred to me (I was in Tesco) and found myself doing a “bleurgh” face every time they invaded my consciousness. I just needed to get this off my chest.

5. I am still rubbish at holding numbers in my head
I look at the plan, I forget what I’m supposed to run, I look at the plan again, I set off running, I look at the clock, I run, I look at the clock – it says 6 minutes 39 seconds, I try to remember whether I should be running to 8 minutes or 8 minutes 30 seconds, I tell myself that I have only been running 30 seconds, it seems longer, I forget how long I’m supposed to be running for. Repeat for twenty minutes.

6. I want to be good at this again
One of my many books about avoiding procrastination (I know, I know…) discusses goal setting and points out that it’s one thing to want to be able to do something, it’s quite another to want to go through the process to get there. The example it gives is learning Italian; the author realised that while she loves the idea of being able to speak Italian, ordering rustic pasta, flirting with waiters and zipping round on a Vespa, she is less keen on the actual sitting down and learning verbs, nouns and adjectives. Similarly, I want to be bounding effortlessly down the road, not doing the boring hard work of increasing a minute at a time.

7. I am never going to be one of those people who chat to instructors
I gibber. And then run away. I just can’t do it.

8. The lightest kettlebells are pink
Why is this? It does not affect my life as I steer well clear of them, but they are are on shelf next to me and it grates a little.

9. I could do with throwing in some abdominal work
Core stability, blah blah blah…

10. I enjoy myself when I get there
I just have to get my lazy arse out of the door.