You can’t fire a canon from a canoe

After a hectic and tiring few days we decided to take it easy today and potter around rather than do the white water rafting or hot pools options. We wanted rest up before race day tomorrow and also catch up on some jobs such as washing, internet and blogs.

The highlight of the day (probably beating even the competitive team game of mini golf we played in the evening and for which white van team were severely handicapped by having me on their team) was getting an assessment done by Craig, the tour physical therapist. Craig ran through a number of musculoskeletal tests to see where we are tight, unbalanced or weak and then gave us specific individual exercises to work on the findings.

Not surprisingly I scored ‘tight’ on most of the tests, (even managed a v.v tight on the forward bend test) and weak on the core. Chris scored slightly better with ‘fair’ on the core and with a few less ‘tights’ than me. It was especially interesting to score so poorly on the core considering we have now been working on it a couple of years. Turns out we have been getting the core exercises a little bit wrong, however we now have a better idea of how to do them properly. Aided by Chris’s pages and pages of stick men diagrams from the session we can have a better attempt at developing strong core in the future.

One of my favourite quotes of the trip (and there has been many so far) was the above title of the blog. Craig, in trying to describe the importance of core, related it to firing a canon from a canoe and this tickled me no end. I’ll remember it though!