Another day another morning run. We meet up at 6:55 and start the run at 7. We don’t run that far along the beach before we start doing stick work.
We play with basic moves, but focus on proper striking and not just copying the move of the instructor.
Then we did a session of Joe’s Gym afterwards. Short of fifteen minutes of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). That was hard. Use of the rubber band with one person holding the other back, while running along the beach. Different exercises, all equally heavy.
Then we returned to more striking and worked with double stick. Closing off we did another grounding meditation session in the water. We use a mantra for the meditation that goes like this:
I am earthI am waterI am fireI am wind
This is the four elements and focusing on them while breathing is a good thing. I added another sentence today at the end. Johan said “keep centered” and Katja commented on the way out into the water:”Hmm, you think centered springs from the word Zen?” A cool thought and I figure that “centered” is a good word to put into my mantra. Mine therefore now goes like this:
I am earthI am waterI am fireI am windI am centered
Back at the hotel we had heaps of time today, since we didn’t have to go to the clinic. Katja had an appointment with Cassy, the physiotherapist at camp to look at her foot. I picked up laundry and bought more water.
We also recorded a video for a special someone and made ready to do Muay Thai.
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- Henrik before departure
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- Before leaving to Muay Thai. I’ve borrowed Piglet to do a little blogging
We arrive at Emerald gym and started with warm up. After that we did pad work and clinching. I got to go with Will, the French owner of the place. He’s won a lot of fights and carried belts to prove it. He moved very differently than the trainers at Tiger and it was cool to get another perspective. He could feint me out in a heart beat, which he did repeatedly, but gave me ample opportunity to work out.
I also got to do clinch work with Heikki and Matthew today. Both are very good and with a size that matches me.
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- Arriving at the Muay Thai gym out in the jungle
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- Katja and Karen
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- Ready to fight
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- Jojo in his new famous posture
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- Dan, Nev, Karen and Josh
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- Mika
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- Nina (from Molde) and Buddy
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- Hyped? Me? Nooooo
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- Will, The Emerald Manager
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- Us and Will
We got back in the buses and drove to the hotel where we went straight to the pool. Here we did water confidence training. Basically we stayed under water for as long as we could. Then we swam like crazy for a while and tried it again. Not a very good development in time under the surface. We will work more on breathing and centering during the week and hopefully extend the time under water.
Lunch, then drop off more laundry, get more water and get caught in heavy rain. It’s not far to drive to the water shop, but it hammered down all of a sudden. Oh well, it’s not like autumn rain in Norway so we got wet, but not cold.
We managed to put in a little stretch on the bed before meeting our team for a walk through of the homework from yesterday. A nice thirty minutes with the team where there were lots of sharing.
Johan continued on his Personal leadership training and we went outside to do knife fighting with Heikki. The Johan did a long class on stick sparring before we called it a night.
We got cleaned up before going to the clinic again. Here we waited for a little while before it was our turn to use the treatment room.
When we got in it went quite fast and we were told the wound grows and heals well. Only a few more days left with the bandage inside the wound. We also learned that there is another man walking around in Ao Nang with almost the exact same problem. There is might in numbers, but also comfort in the same diagnose.
We had dinner with a few of the other camp participants. Moa from Sweden and Buddy from Australia as the closest on the table. A great talk, good food, best company.
We did homework in bed before lights out, and then it was ta-da, exactly, lights out.
kogatravel 