Harvesting Pumpkins, Water Trough and Exercise

Today we went through the vine patch on our hill and harvested any pumpkins that were ready. About a dozen had either animal damage or sun damage. These we chopped up for the cattle who were very appreciative.

We now have good Winter supply of Muscat de Provence and an exceptional supply of local Dry Pumpkin.

We moved our three cattle into a new paddock this morning after their feed of sprouted oats and a biscuit of Lucerne. It didn't take long for them to demolish what little green feed was about. There is still quite a bit of rough feed in that paddock to keep them occupied for a couple of weeks. The supplementary feeding is keeping them in good shape.

The 28 day rain forecast is not promising. The only rain expected is in the next 2-3 days. After that it is a dry March. We are in a good position with feed for our three. The oats we are sprouting are in plentiful supply and we have enough Lucerne for about 180 days.

The new paddock they entered is serviced by a small dam. Well it isn't really a dam just a depression in the ground where some road base was harvested. It has about 50 mm of muddy water covering the base. Rather than force them to drink that we installed a small trough connected to our extensive network of piping.

The trough was on hand left over from another project and there were plenty of spare connectors and pipework. It wasn't long before the trough was working nicely in a shady spot.

This morning we popped down to the pool for aerobic, anaerobic and some muscle strengthening exercises.

Because we were late the Learn to Swim classes had started tying up one end of the pool. Skipping the laps we did the Aquarobic exercises for lower and upper back, legs and finally arms. Some of these we increased the times from 30 seconds to 60 seconds to make up for laps.

Finally we performed our HIT. The High Intensity Training we follow is normal 20 seconds  of jogging on the spot while punching under water. Jean does her punching with a closed fist while I increase resistance with open palms. We rest for a couple of minutes just jogging slowly then repeat the sequence three more times. There is a lot of material on the web about HIT and there are numerous forms of it.

Anyway the point of this mention was we decided to both increase the time from 20 seconds to 30 seconds as well as add a fourth repetition. All well so far.

Later that morning after watering our newly planted seedlings and feeding the cattle across the river we both felt knackered. A repose on the bed was the outcome and it was mid afternoon before we had enough stamina to carry on.

So was it the Aquarobics or the HIT. It certainly wasn't the laps. We have felt a little this way in the  past after particularly big sessions at the pool and just assumed it was the combination of all three and the build up over several days. A rest day tomorrow and then the plan is to drop the HIT and only perform Aquarobics and laps on that day and monitor the outcome.

One thing we did notice was our bodies felt hot all day as if the metabolic rate was working over time.