Through the last twelve months, my most constant advise to friends and family, whether they wanted it or not was to keep as busy as you could in what ever way suited you best.
If you were a sports person, then I have frequently suggested that you not only do the obvious training for your sport but that you found ways of keeping supple and stretched.
To my mind that it very good advice since keeping your body soft a supple is enormously useful to us all and not just to sports people.
At the start of the challenging period in our lives I tried a number of different YouTube classes that would bring a wider range of movement to my body that would be beneficial to me.
You must find your own way through that advice and find something that extends your range of movement without causing any harm.
I sampled loads of dance classes as well as yoga and kept on trying sample classes, all of which I gave a few try’s at before moving on if they did not seem useful to me within my sport of Triathlon.
Hula classes were fun and I enjoyed them for a while but found it limited for my purposes. In the end I went back to my roots and tried a number of ballet classes until I settled on the most useful one that included a gentle warm up, a set of floor exercises that were pretty general actually and good grounding for any sport. Then the class went on to a little simple ballet, nothing too difficult.
This was the New York City Ballet Workout and this became a regular class for us both. We both also fell instantly in love with Qigong, and again there are dozens of classes that all have a different aim per class. Steve and I still do a few of those, every week. They are helpful for the body but also the mind, which has been a great help whilst trying to stay mentally wide awake during these times.
Other than classes for the body and to compliment your chosen sport, I also need to set myself other slightly testing pastimes to give me plenty of variety. I already had my interest in poetry both reading and writing. The last meeting of my poetry group that took place once a month in our home, was March 8th 2020 when it became an impossibility to invite friends into one’s home. I also had a diary blog page that I only posted on every now and again but feeling so sad at the loss of my group of writers, I set about writing a page for that, every day instead of once or twice a week. I have slowed that down a little and now write that page at weekends mostly which gives me a little more time for other things.
One area where I have seriously over done things, is sitting at my sewing machine and using up every piece of material that has been bought in a sale and never made up into a garment. My mother- in-law suffered from that weakness most of her life too, right up until her death over six years ago. So, with my pile of remnants and Caroline’s pile of totally difference types of material, I had a small branch of a secret haberdashery store tucked away.
I have beavered away at garment construction and have made during the last year, five nice shirts for myself, a number of other little tops, a house coat, about eight pairs of silky summer trousers and used a pile of scrap pieces to make dozens of masks and hair scrunchies, many of which I have given away. I have also made umpteen little felt/embroidery pieces to the point of madness. This morning I put the final stitches in my latest piece of dressmaking, a very nice classic shirt. I have included a couple of photos in the diary page today. This is a length of material that I bought during my one day out shopping in Chichester in October, when I did a clean sweep through my Christmas shopping list. I finished that trip by walking into my favourite haberdashery store in North Street,
Closs and Hamblin where I have spent many a happy moment turning pages in the pattern books over the years and feeling rolls of cloth. On this once in a year visit, I bought a few yards of what I thought was a kind of camouflage printed fabric that I liked to look of. It was not until I came to cut the pieces for my latest shirt out, that I realised that it was not camouflage but rather a kind of Halloween pattern, since it seems to have skulls all over it! None the less I have made it up and in fact I rather like it. My button hole attachment seems to have run away from home so that gave me yet another time-consuming task of making the button holes by hand that has been a nice peaceful thing to do on all the shirts.
Steve though the new shirt nice enough for a photo and moved me to a couple of spots on our landing where I would be standing in front of some of our many posters from some of the wonderful race holidays we have taken together over the last thirty years. Great races, great holidays, great memories, great achievements.
Background posters are;
Ironman California at Camp Pendleton US Marine base 2003
Lanzarote, Ironman 1996
-Fredericia, Denmark World long-distance championship 2001
Ironman Austria, Klagenfurt 2012
Almere, Holland European long-distance championships 2006
Gulf Coast, Florida Ironman 70.3 2004
Muncie, Indiana USA Long distance World championships 1996
Lanzarote, Ironman 1993
Roth Germany Ironman 1998
Lake Placid, USA Ironman 1999
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