When I was in America I got my coach a shirt from Boston Badminton. I got one for myself too and the other day we both happened to wear the same shirt and shoes at the same time. Twins!
Can you see our feet? Same shoes. Same shirts. Twinsies! Yes, I know I should have taken this pictures before I was totally sweaty and nasty but whatever.
Our matching shoe and shirt club isn’t an exclusive one anymore. That’s because I have a new club and we are getting serious. We all got matching shoes, and we’ll be getting matching shirts as well. So now it’s not just twinsies, but vigintuplets! (It’s a real word, look it up).
Boxes of new shoes, all look the same as this.
They are Wish Brand, 伟士, a local badminton company that sponsors my coaches court, and they are bright orange and yellow. Not at all my color scheme. I’m a black, blue or anything dark kinda person.
I tend to bristle at conformity, and my coach said it wasn’t mandatory to have them. But I figure that I’m odd enough in our group as it is, so I wanted to do “what the cool kids were doing.”
Of course with 20+ people all wearing the same kind of shoe, it can get tricky keeping track of them. Since I have other shoes I decided to keep these shoes at my coaches courts so I don’t have to drag them home everyday.
But they are identical to everyone else, and I accidentally stole someones else’s shoes on the second day as we wear the same size and he puts his next to mine. So I decided to write my name clearly on it. Azhi, my doubles partner, asked me to draw a picture on his. Sorry for him, I am not good at drawing, hahah. But it will surely prevent anyone from stealing them!
The top one’s are mine. They say 小冰的, which means Xiao Bing’s. The bottom one’s are Azhi’s, my regular partner, and the picture is a dragon, not a cat, not a snake as my dumb friends guessed but a DRAGON! And the other shoe says dragon in traditional Chinese.
So aside from all that training is going as well as can be expected in 100 degree heat. Everything has leveled up in training and now my coach is focusing on gao ji (high level) training. But either because it is so much faster paced, or the weather, training is really killing me. I normally hate taking a break past a few seconds to get my breath back and towel off my face, but this week we trained front of the net stuff and I was just destroyed.
We trained cross net shots. Not hitting them, but returning them. As a woman that trains mixed doubles I have to be master of the net and cross net shots get me every time. I’m getting slightly better at returning two cross net shots, but to get the second I basically need to run at full tilt and I end up running off the side of the court (I can’t stop myself). I wanna be able to return three with “ease” which requires a hell of a lot of footwork training and controlled speed.
I keep track of my heart rate during footwork training and find my heart rate is in the 135-150 area which is perfect for my anaerobic (hardcore) zone. But this week after going through maybe 20 birdies on opposite sides of the net I checked and it was at 170 (in the V02 Max zone) almost my maximum heart rate! A combination of speed, lunging (while keeping my center of gravity) and the heat really pushed me past my comfort zone and while my coach let me take little breather he didn’t let me sit down because he guessed my heart rate was high. But it’s all for the love of the game, right?
The next day I had sore glutes which is good as it means my muscles are growing but seriously?! After all my training I still get so sore? I even foam rolled the bejesus out of my thighs afterwards but obviously to no avail. It’s like getting zits at 40, I’m not done with them yet?!
Unfortunately this is my last free week as the semester will finally begin and I have to go back and do that thing people call “work.” Shouldn’t affect my badminton playing too much except I now need to take two nights a week off instead of one. (I have to work on Monday nights). I still don’t have my schedule but I should have a free day for morning training. Hopefully my coach will be free the same day as I am. (I’m a real snob about evening training. I just don’t like it. I want to be undisturbed.)
Time to come up with a new fall schedule.
