Club la Santa, Lanzarote
We were busy on Saturday but not in a particularly blogworthy way. We did my long run for my marathon training, and Claire went to an Aerial Yoga session, which I decided to skip as I haven't really done yoga before, so I didn't think doing my first session suspended in the air would be a very good idea. So I did the laundry instead, as things were getting critical on the clothing front. Then later on we played two rounds of crazy golf, both of which were won smugly by Claire.
Today (Sunday) we were up earlier than usual as we'd booked mountain bikes from 8am-12noon. I was relieved that the bikes had a quick release saddle clamp, which would allow me unlimited saddle height adjustments without an allen key. After our last ride this was very important to me.
The bikes looked a bit sorry for themselves, and could have done with a wash and some TLC. I spent a while oiling their chains and derailleurs and clip in pedals, after which we all felt a lot better. Except Claire, who was moaning that I'd spent enough time tinkering with bikes and it was about time we started riding them.
The original plan was to go looking for some strange birds called Houbara Bustards on some trails a little inland. These birds are not particularly exciting to look at but they are rare, plus they sound like they should be in a Tarantino film. However, almost as soon as we left, I spotted a trail heading north along the coast which looked much nicer, so we followed that instead. We made quite slow progress to start with as we are both used to cycling on roads rather than trails covered in sand and lumps of dried up lava and were a bit cautious. In fact, we were so cautious that it took us a couple of miles to overtake the runner who had joined the trail at the same time as us!!
We cycled about 7 miles to a village called Famara, where we stopped and spent some time watching an egret and a curlew.
Then we headed back the same way we'd come as we had received some secret intelligence that there were some spoonbills hanging around near the Club la Santa lagoon.
We spotted a hoopoe perched on a telegraph wire just as we were leaving the village.
We made quicker progress on the way back as we were both a lot more confident on the trail and were whizzing over all the chunks of dried up lava, although still treating deep sand with caution after a few near misses. On the way back we passed Michelle Vesterby and Camilla Pedersen who are professional triathletes and were heading out for a run together on the same trail.
We made our way down to the other side of the lagoon where the sea comes in and spent an hour looking for birds there. We eventually spotted the spoonbills, who were hiding round the other side of a little island, and seemed to be rather sleepy and were hiding their bills in their wings most of the time.
We also saw a snipe (long billed bird below) and some other cute smaller birds.
We returned the bikes at about 11:30am as we were ravenous, and went for lunch.
After lunch it was time for Claire to regret her victory at crazy golf by being resoundingly beaten 5-0 at Badminton.
We went to a running technique session in the late afternoon, which told us some stuff that we knew already, but a few new things too, and we also learnt some running exercises to do while we're cleaning our teeth. After that, Claire stayed on for the intervals session, which I decided to give a miss as my back was a bit achey, so I went to the stretching area in the gym instead, where Michelle and Camilla were working out in the weights room!
Tomorrow we are going to go to the "morning gymnastics" session at 8am (not as difficult as it sounds), I am booked onto my first yoga class (on the floor), and we are going to do the swimming videos so we can see for ourselves how bad we are.
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