Thursday 26th January 2012
It was a long day today as we had two training sessions at the National Tennis Centre in London on clay before leaving Heathrow on a 9.20pm flight.
The team for this week is Mia Smith, Jack Large (who came out to Burundi in November) and Tom Hulme (who is back from Sanchez Casal’s and training at the Bath International High Performance Centre).
We had two sessions booked on the clay at the LTA Headquarters in Roehampton, London but Jack was unable to attend either as he had to be at school in Bath and Tom was travelling down from Manchester so he could only make the afternoon session. Mia and I got the train across London and were at the NTC by 10am which gave us a chance to watch some of the other full time players who are based there go through their normal training before we warmed up at 10.30am. We then had a good hour and a half outside on the covered red clay to get used to the different bounce compared to the faster indoor courts where we train and also get used to sliding again. Just as we were finishing Tom and his dad arrived so, after cooling down and showering, we had lunch with them and got to know each other.
Mia completing her forfeit at the NTC!
We were then back on court from 2.30 – 4pm for our afternoon session where I spent almost the whole time with Tom getting to know his game and how he likes to play while Mia played a set with one of the other girls who was training there. Both players had a good session and, despite the rain coming in horizontally throughout the afternoon, they were both feeling good back on the clay. After cooling down, stretching and showering we left the centre at 5.30pm and made the tricky journey across London in the middle of rush hour with all of our bags.
Tight squeeze on the Underground but we eventually made it to Heathrow!
We finally got to Heathrow just after 7pm and met up with Dawn (Mia’s mum) and Jack before we checked in for the flight. Originally we weren’t all sitting together but, after smiling nicely at the check in staff(!), I managed to get us closer together and even got us upgraded to seats with extra leg room without having to pay! As it turned out the flight was quite empty so Mia was able to get 4 seats to herself, Tom had 2 and Jack, Dawn and I were all on the emergency exit row.
We then went through security where all of us managed to set the alarms off but I think Jack gets “unforced error of the day” by leaving a Swiss Army knife in his hand luggage – fortunately the blade was just under 6cms so he was able to take it with him. We then got some dinner before settling down for the 8 and a half hour flight to Nairobi.
