Tuesday 4th March 2014
It was a long day of watching the rain come down and fitting in some training between the rain showers before once again the doubles got cancelled.
Whilst Ben had a lie in this morning I was up at 6am to get the first shuttle bus over to the university so that I could run before breakfast. Despite the running machine switching off after only 30 minutes I eventually managed to complete a full hour and cover just over 7.5 miles with the help of watching the Karate Kid on my phone!
Once I had stretched, showered and changed I walked over to meet Ben at the restaurant for a well-deserved breakfast at 8.45am. As the rain was still pouring down we took our time over breakfast and then headed back to the club to find that it wasn’t raining there and the courts were starting to dry out!
By 11am the matches were on and, after watching some of Ben’s first round opponent play his next match, we got on court at 11.30am to warm up for our 12pm practice session. We only had the court booked for half an hour but in the end we trained for just over an hour and a half and managed to work on all of the specific areas that we had talked about from Ben’s match yesterday. We worked specifically on developing more controlled aggression on Ben’s groundstrokes before moving on to focus on him moving forwards and then ended the session by working on his 2nd serve. It was a really good training session and hopefully gave Ben a lot more confidence playing aggressively at this altitude.
When we left the court the rain started again and so we decided to head to Beef boys to get some lunch. The lunch, like the dinner, changes every day and today it was fish and chips but because neither Ben nor I are a fan of fish we arranged at breakfast this morning to get chicken instead!
The rest of the afternoon was spent wondering if the courts would dry out before the next rain shower came along, but at 3.45pm it poured down again so play was cancelled for the day.
Click here to see the video of what we get up to during the rain breaks!
That gave us a chance to get into the gym at the university and have a good workout for an hour before the last shuttle back to the hotel at 5pm. Ben went through some band work before joining me (and the Loughborough university cricket squad who are touring in South Africa) on the lifting platform to complete some lower body work. We both then had a good stretch out before going back to the hotel.
It was a fairly quick turnaround before we were back out for dinner which tonight was chicken pie, spaghetti and another mountain of salad! We then returned to the hotel and Ben got stuck into some of his college work while I sat down to update the website and reply to some emails.
Schedule for tomorrow:
Ben Stride (GBR) & David Volfson (CAN) vs (4) Courtney Lock (ZIM) & David Pichler (AUT) – 4th match, not before 1.30pm
