A few more weeks till the start of the season. Winter nets has just finished and I'm on my Easter break from teaching and so despite the horrible weather I've made a start on general fitness and agility. Hopefully I'm going to get out and do some running and interval training but I'm only too aware of all the people in the papers croaking or having heart attacks around my age and younger!
What with having a bit of a scare a few years ago... panic attack that I thought was a heart attack I ended up having my blood pressure read at the hospital and found out that it was high. High enough to require medication for the rest of my life and for me to sit up and say 'Yikes'! I then bought a blood pressure monitor and changed my diet a bit. My readings these days are pretty good and when I'm exercising consistently they're very good. But I will ease into having read John Crace's account of having a heart attack recently in the Guardian.
The weather though at the moment and over the next few days is wet and windy, so much of the exercise is going to be indoors I reckon. With some luck I might get down the nets with a new bloke at the club for a bit of a bowl and a work out. I want to do some work on throwing from the outfield as that's always an issue and just needs a bit of work and training and it should be good by 3 or 4 weeks time?
The last 6 weeks in the nets I've bowled Flippers and Top-spinners and they're coming out OK. I want to get more variation with the flipper in terms of the speed and length - combining it with better accuracy. I reckon with bowling more top-spinners with their added bounce, I'll have more batters looking to step back into their crease looking to cut me through the point region. This was evident in the nets to some extent and I'd have hit the stumps more if I was a little more accurate with the Flippers, but I also reckon a slower flipper will bring LBW's as the amount of back-spin I get stops the ball and batters play all over the top of it, just the accuracy missing at the moment, so that's what I need to work on. Leg-Breaks I'll reserve for games where I'm playing with better players who can run and catch in the outfield and where the batters are slightly more respectful.
