Week 42 (18 October - 24 October)

We had a good break whilst away and because we had extra energy we knew the week would be hard and that it was. There were also a few changes at the academy, they had painted the training and hallways and the fumes were really trenchant.

Monday morning we had to do continuous sprints and in-between the 10 sets we had no breaks but instead had to push ups or other exercises. Because of the cold my already troublesome was agonizing but I just kept going. After wards we had to hold ourselves up with a single arm for 30 seconds which we had to repeat for both sides 6 times in total.



The rest of the day was also very hard and in the evening there was no water which meant no showers, luckily we had showered on sunday so it wasn't too bad considering the kids only get a single shower during the week and they train about 4 hours everyday.

Tuesday morning the temperature had dropped below 0 in the morning and the run at 5:30 in complete darkness was extremely straining. At 8:00 we did did upper body strength training to give our legs some extra time to recover. During the afternoon session we first had a warm up run and on the way back there were four girls that had come to look at the "ancient castle", they were really excited to see a foreigner and after taking many photos of me with each of them (I didn't mind the attention) I headed to the training hall.

 

Chinese Spice Girls ? Fringes, Make up, fake eyelashes, very "unique"

During the training focused some more on the upper body doing 10 sets of 1 minute punching intervals on the bag, during this time it had also started to snow lightly which was the first snow however it did not settle and just melted away. At night the horizon looked like an apocalypse as orange flames could be seen everywhere has farmers set alight the harvested corn plants. Dan and I also decided to shave our heads, perhaps not the wisest thing considering the cold but at least we will sweat less wearing beanies. And when it came to shower time there was no electricity.

By Wednesday my knee was feeling better and we did the same exercises as monday just pushing hard even though it was really cold and we spent most of the time outside because of the fumes inside the training hall.

 

Ancient castle at night

 The rest of the week was pretty depressing, there was no internet from wednesday, no showers from thursday till sunday evening, occasional power outages and of course the grey overcast weather. We were tempted to go to Siping but decided to just stay at the academy which we did.

A look at the weather, I felt pretty much like that horse/donkey

I didn't take many pictures this week but maybe next week will be a little more exciting. It's never easy to adapt to huge changes quickly and after relaxing in paradise for a week and then coming back to corn fields, bad weather and hard training isn't easy but my motivation level will increase.