Saturday 1st March 2014
It was another good training day today despite the heavens opening at lunchtime and qualifying having to be suspended for the rest of the day.
As qualifying started today we had to be up early to make sure we were guaranteed a full court to practice on this morning. That meant a 7.15am meet in reception and then breakfast at 7.30am at ‘Fine Things’ restaurant. Some of the other players had told us that on previous mornings the breakfast had taken ages but I think now that the tournament has started the people at both the restaurants know what’s expected! Ours was pretty quick and after some scrambled egg on toast and some strange Rice Krispies we were feeling reasonable satisfied!
By 8.30am we were at the tennis centre warming up and preparing for our 9-10am practice session with Dylan Foo-Kune from Mauritius. Ben once again hit the ball well throughout the session and it gave him another chance to get used to the altitude both in terms of the bounce of the ball and also in terms of dealing with a higher intensity training session. Ben and Dylan warmed up for 30 minutes before going into some point play to get some match practice. They each played a couple of service games and after some strong serving and solid returning Ben took a 4-0 lead before the players for the 10am session arrived and took the court.
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Ben taking on a forehand during the points
After cooling down and stretching out we had planned to get over to lunch for 11.30am but all of a sudden the rain came pouring down! While we waited for it to pass I decided to check out the North-West University gym which is just by the running track behind the courts. The gym was very impressive and, once we can register to use the facility on Monday, we’ll be making the most of it both for Ben’s maintenance programme and also for his recovery between matches – I’m not sure Ben’s going to be keen on ice bath though!
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The gym at North-West University here in Potchefstroom – very impressive (and this is about 1/4 of it!)
Lunch wasn’t the best today; Ben had pork chops which were more bone than Pork and I had a very creamy chicken tagliatelle! Once we were done it was back to the court to prepare for our afternoon session with Jay Clarke but just after the boys had finished warming up the wind suddenly picked up and once again the courts got flooded by the rain.
We stayed at the club for a while to see if the rain would ease up but at around 3pm the tournament director cancelled play for the rest of the day and arranged for the mini-buses to take the players back to the hotel. While Ben got the bus back to catch up on a little sleep I decided to go for a little run to keep up with my marathon training. Do you remember those sports fields I told you about yesterday? Well one lap of the fields is 1.15 miles so after 5 of those and the distance from the club to the hotel I ended up doing just over 7.5 miles in 55 minutes – not the quickest average minute / mile but after training in England in the cold I was quite pleased to get through it at this altitude!
The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing at the hotel and getting more supplies at the supermarket before going off to dinner at ‘Beef boys’ at 7pm. Dinner was much better than lunch and by the time we’d both finished both we felt rather full!
When we got back to the hotel Ben got stuck into some A-Level PE coursework while I replied to some emails and updated the website.
Final day of preparation tomorrow and hopefully the weather will be kinder to us – the week ahead isn’t looking good though!
