Week 4, Day 1. Every day, in every way...

What a fantastic run.  We decided to do our usual Bay run but this time add a jaunt out along the Cardiff Bay Barrage.  I've only ever run along it during a race and they've not long opened it up to the public so that you can now get from Penarth to Cardiff Bay - fabulous.

It was a beautiful morning.  The sky would have been clear if about 10 million planes hadn't scribbled all over it but even this didn't detract too much from the wonderful vista afforded by such a great vantage point on the barrage.  There is such a wonderfully eclectic mix of buildings along the seafront, in the Bay.

This was our mid piont for the run and so we took a couple of minutes to stretch and have some water before heading back along the Taff Trail, home.  I've noticed that we always seem to do a negative split on these runs, which means that the second half of the run is quicker than the first, and checking back through my records I see that our pace is getting a little quicker each time.  It's only a few seconds, on average, but at least it's heading in the right direction.

My training schedule suggests a run of 75 minutes but we were so close to our usual stopping point, that it made more sense to go over that.  In the end we covered 8.31 miles in 1:18:46 and although I was getting tired towards the end, I still felt good.

I wasn't able to meet up with Bryan to go through the new exercises, so I had to do a bit of hunting on the internet to find out what 'hamstring curls on the Swiss ball' and 'reverse crunches' entailed.

Below are a couple of the clips I found on YouTube for reverse crunches:





I followed the second of these but didn't tuck my chin into my chest as 'Gina' does here.

The following clip illustrates how to do hamstring curls on the ball.  I can only dream about the physique and control of this guy - respec':






...saying that, however, I'm not too sure about the dodgy disco music in the background.

One of the other exercises included in this weeks programme is tricep arm extensions with dumbbell, which I did sitting on the ball.  Learning from my previous mistakes I thought I'd use my 5kg weights.  The first set wasn't too much of a problem, so I decided to try my 9kg dbs for the second.  Needless to say that the 3rd set was with the 5kg dbs.  Doh!

More soon...