Monday 3rd October 2011
The rain came down for the whole day today which meant that all of the girl’s 1st round matches were cancelled. For almost all of the girls that meant the day was a complete washout but we had other ideas!
As Mia was scheduled for 4th round on today we decided to have a later breakfast at 8.30am and get the 9.30am bus to the centre. Almost as soon as we arrived the rain came down so we delayed our physical and pre-match warm up until the referee had decided what he was going to do. The club we’re at looks brand new and they’ve had the foresight to build 4 out of the 9 courts under cover so it meant that half of the boy’s 1st round matches could continue. When the new schedule came out Mia was still scheduled for not before 1pm on one of the open courts but the rain was still coming down and it didn’t look like it would ever let up.
With all of the covered courts being used for matches we decided to use an indoor badminton centre next door to do some fitness but just as we decided to do that we noticed that play had stopped on one of the covered courts. Water was rolling on to it from the open court next to it; it was bad enough not to have matches on it but the water wasn’t actually on the playing surface so we grabbed Claudia and jumped on to train. While all of the other girls either went back to the hotel or sat in the clubhouse doing nothing we had a great 2 hour training session going through everything we needed to prepare ourselves for tomorrow. At 3pm it was back on the bus to the hotel and then straight into the ‘gym’ to do some physical work. The gym is very basic but has a bike, running machine, free weights and area to do core / stretching. Mia completed a great 35 minute session and then had a thorough stretch out to finish off our training day.
We then played a bit of table tennis before relaxing before dinner. We had our standard BBQ chicken and rice with Anais and her coach Pierre and once we’d let it go down we were back on the table tennis table again battling it out against each other!! It ended up being a very productive day and I’m so glad Mia is not one of those girls that would have taken the easy option of using the weather as an excuse to sit around all day doing nothing.
Schedule for tomorrow:
Yuna Usui (JPN) (UNR) vs Mia Smith (GBR) (UNR) – 1st round on at 9.30am
Yun-Chieh Chang (TPE) & Lo Shao-Chi (TPE) vs Anais Nussaume (FRA) & Mia Smith (GBR) – 4th round on, not before 1.30pm
