Home comforts

Just like most other students, I love coming home, seeing my family, friends and my dog. Being home also means being surrounded by home comforts and by home comforts I mean being surrounded by chocolate and other kinds of delicious temptation. When I am home I find it a lot harder to be strict with myself with both healthy eating and exercise. Over the past two weeks I have particularly been craving chocolate – be it milk, dark, hot chocolate or chocolate cake. In fact today I discovered that I am not as hopeless at baking as I thought I was – I made brownies and they actually worked! I believe that what’s on the inside manifests itself on the outside, meaning that all this deliciousness is now manifesting itself in the form of spots on my face – the bottom half of my face is basically one big spot/blackhead. I think some home-made facemasks may be on the cards for this weekend.

In terms of exercise, things have been better than they usually are when I’m home - so far I managed to stick to my daily yoga challenge. The fireplace light, my mum’s new salt lamp and a couple of candles really help to set the mood ready for practice. At the moment I am mostly practising what I have learnt in class – mainly some warriors and sun salutations in preparations for the Yogathon Challenge taking place in April (108 sun salutations!), but this week I have also come to the conclusion that I won’t get very far with certain postures if I don’t work on my hamstrings first. I remember that before my growth spurt (for a year or two I grew really quickly, I even have some stretch marks on my back to prove it) I was really flexible, I wasn’t far off being able to do the splits. At this point however I also stopped dancing and so, since stretching was a big part of it, my flexibility diminished. With that in mind I went online to look for some poses specifically for hamstrings. I found a 20 minute sequence that seemed perfect for me on Sarah Beth’s YouTube Channel. Hopefully I will see some results in a few weeks’ time.

Running on the other hand is not going great. One run in two weeks is definitely not enough preparation for the 10k I will be running in April. This is definitely something I need to work on this week. During the one run I did go on this week though I was accompanied by my dog and I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t my biggest fan for the rest of the day. Sleeping, curled up next to a radiator, is more his kind of thing.