Busy week so far, Monday was a cutting back trees and bushes ready for fence panel replacement on Tuesday when our eldest son came over to give me a hand to replace ten six foot fence panels! and a concrete post. After removing lower branches off next doors ley landii [grrrrrrr! horrid things!!!!!!] so we could lift the panels high enough to get them in the concrete slots, very hard, lessons learnt on the first one, good job it wasn't too windy either. We did well on the first couple but!! by the fifth they were getting heavy. Next job was to dig out a lump of concrete and a elderberry root, Son had an ingenious method using a farmers jack to pull out the stump, which worked really well. He then used the hole, but a bit deeper to bury the concrete we removed. Working for the National Trust has the benefits of tricks of the trade when it comes to trees. One of the hardest jobs was removing an old fence panel covered in ivy, which was covering one side of the fence, and was at least 20 - 25 mm diameter in places!! - so a good job done, especially between showers. I also forgot to mention that Bramble the brown lab was there with his ball, insisting it was thrown between hammer blows or spade fulls of dirt!!!
Wednesday morning saw me working with year 2 at the school hearing them read and talking through the plots of Biff, Kipper and Wilf :-) After lunch the sun still shone so as I hadn't run for a week and not run off road for several weeks I headed up to Neroche castle for a run and took my camera this time hoping to get some Autumn shots, I was surprised to see many of the leaves had now gone!! I had a good 6 mile run from the Castle over to Staple hill and back, not too muddy, and the weather perfect, lots of dog walkers out today and the views stunning as always. I was also pleasantly surprised with my time of 1 hr 11 mins which to say I stopped several times for photos was good [hopefully the results are below]
Its amazing again, how last weeks run was hard work, but today much better, funny thing the body!!!
Thursday was my first Spinning session, I apprehensively went down to the local leisure centre, towel, and water. As I got there one man was setting up his machine, so I followed getting the seat the correct height. Another 8 people appeared a good mix of male and female, young and older!!
the Instructor started us of with a warm up spin to a good music beat, I was soon very hot and sweating. The session continued with more resistance applied to make it harder to pedal, and I found holding the speeds for the what seemed lengthy 30 secs, hard!! and we had to increase resistance each time, sometimes standing. It was a good session , but very hard, I was not used to the bike, or the resistance, totally unlike a real bike, it did seem to me much harder than 'real cycling' or even running up hill, so I hope it will make a difference. We finished the session with some stretching. I did enjoy it, got very hot, legs did ache, I now look forward to next week as I have already booked !! I need to keep it up at least once a week.
It was nice to sit down at home with a nice mug of real coffee and a couple of Brioche rolls with homemade jam. AND! of course sitting writing this blog
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