Thursday 6th October 2011
It was just a training day today but we weren’t about to take it lightly as it gave us a great opportunity to develop with Mia’s next match 4 days away.
Early start as normal this morning and we got the first bus at 7.30am to give us the best chance to get a full court to play a set with one of the Swedish girls. Mia completed her full physical warm up before hitting with me for 25 mins so that at 9am she was ready to go straight into a set. As I said yesterday it’s great that there are so many girls to train with at these events, the only probably is working it so that you can get a full court and not have to share with players that are just going through 30 minute pre-match warm ups.
Mia played a good set with Sofia Segerfors and continued to develop the areas that we highlighted from her singles match. She found a much more consistent level today and was developing more points without trying to finish it too early. As they played I made notes on her performance goals and I was also able to film the set so that Mia could watch herself play and hopefully see what I see! The set lasted just over an hour with Mia narrowly going down 6-3, I would have liked them to play one more but Sofia had doubles later so they both stopped just after 10.30am.
We then had lunch and at 12.15pm were back onto the basketball court to warm up before completing Mia’s strength and conditioning programme. It started with some speed and movement work with the bungee rope and then moved onto a tough strength programme which lasted just over an hour. It was very hot during the session but Mia worked hard and proved that she’s not just one of these players that think all the important work is done on the court hitting balls.
Mia working out in our makeshift gym on the basketball court
After the session Mia stretched out and showered before we got the bus back to the hotel. We then had a couple of hours before dinner so Mia emailed her training team with her feedback from the first week while I went in search of a bank to get a good exchange rate for some Dollars. I thought the exchange rate at the hotel wouldn’t be great so I went for a walk and after 20 minute found a bank that would change some money. When they told me the rate it was only 30 dong (about 1 penny) better per Dollar than the hotel – well worth the 40 minute round trip then!!!!!
After dinner with the French guys we all went to play table tennis but got severely outclassed by the Thai team who dominated everyone they played – I did manage to scrape a win against Pierre though!
We ended the day by going through the video of Mia’s set against Sofia. She found it very useful and made a lot of notes on the positive areas as well as the things that she wants to improve on. She’ll now select 3 of those areas and set them as goals for her practise set against Anais tomorrow morning. We were going to travel to Bac Lieu tomorrow but now we’re going to train in the morning and then hit the Cu Chi Tunnels in the afternoon.
