1 . During the Covid-19 pandemic( 新冠疫情),things like eating in a restaurant or air travel are impossible. What about going to the gym?

When everybody was discussing how to make the best banana bread, during those very early quarantine( 隔离) stages, I worked out and took some online fitness classes at home, including yoga. Honestly, I just wanted to do a cool headstand by the end of quarantine.

In high school,I liked running on the track. In college and beyond, I loved the weight room. When I finally accepted that home workouts would be the best for a while, I prepared some basic gym equipment.

In some ways, I feel it stupid to admit that I missed the gym. I’m fortunate in so many ways since the start of the pandemic, but my living room is just not the same as my gym.

There’s a wider choice of equipment,and I’ve missed my gym friends. After looking into my recently-opened local gym’s safety steps in New York, I finally decided to go back.

With a spare face mask and water bottle, I made my 10-minute journey to the gym at 7 :30 am. I filled out a detailed Covid-19 survey on my gym’s app before stepping foot inside. I always feel like I get a better workout at the gym, and for me, that includes lots of extra sweat.

Please keep your mask covering your nose and your mouth. I only saw two people wrongly wearing their masks, and an employee had to call them out. The best ways to avoid Covid-19 at the gym are to wash your hands, wear your mask, wipe down equipment, and avoid standing on top of other gym-goers. If you’re used to basic, good gym rules, it shouldn’t be too challenging.

2 . Latest Competitions

Win a copy of Fergie Frog’s First Aid Adventures

Closing Date: 30th January 2021

Fergie Frog’s First Aid Adventures introduces first aid knowledge to children, just to meet their curiosity and help them feel confident in an emergency situation.

By gently introducing different characters, we can gradually improve their understanding and abilities as they learn and grow. Fergie Frog’s First Aid Adventures can be bought from Amazon for £8. 99. To enter this competition you must register.

Win a copy of Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright!

Closing Date: 14th January 2021

This gift book collects 365 animal poems, including poetry in translation. The illustrations (插图) bring together all the richness and wonder of the animal kingdom, making this poetry a perfect gift that will be liked by generations.

Win The Fireman Sam Bundle

Closing Date: 30th January 2021

To celebrate the new TV series of Fireman Sam，Mattel is giving you the chance to win a special prize including: Fireman Sam Five Figure Pack, Fireman Sam Helmet with Sound and Sam Fire Rescue Centre.

Make sure you watch the new and exciting series of Fireman Sam on Cartoonito from Monday 26th December 2020 at 7 am & 4 pm. Expect lots of Fireman Sam fun, excitement and laughter for pre-school children combined with those important safety lessons.

Win prizes in Toyota’s Dream Car Art Contest

Closing Date: 4th February 2021

Toyota is giving children a chance to use their imagination and drawing skills to explore what future cars might look like. There are prizes in three age groups: under-eight, eight to 11 and 12 to 15 years old. The three winners in each group will each receive an iPad or a Samsung tablet, plus a Toyota food bag.

When I was 13, my only purpose was to become the star on our football team. That meant beating out Miller King, who was the best player at our school.

Football season started in September and I’ve been working out hard all summer. I carried my football everywhere for practice.

Just before September, Miller was hit by a car and lost his right arm, I went to see him after he came back from hospital. He looked very weak, but he didn’t cry.

That season, I broke all of Miller’s records while he watched the home games from the bench. We went 10-1 and I was named most valuable player, but I often had crazy dreams in which I was to blame for Miller’s accident.

One afternoon, I was crossing the field to go home and saw Miller got stuck when he was going over a fence — which wasn’t hard to climb if you had both arms.

I was standing not far from him.

His words free d me from my bad dreams.

Recently, I     1    (learn) a lot about the Hangzhou Asian Games. Everyone knows that Syria (叙利亚) is a war-torn country and a devastated (混乱的，不安的) country.

But we still struggled to get here because of the great country of China. While we are being sidelined by other countries, China not only provided charter flights, but     2     grand welcome ceremony was     3     arranged. We also believe in the absolute safety of Chinese escorts (护航). The President of Syria and his wife and the delegation avoided all unsafe countries. It took 11 hours and 13 minutes     4    (reach) China without you     5    (stop). And then when we only had 8 athletes playing, but gained the audience the only two lasting cheers, it also made us understand that we sympathize with each other. All the way, the hardships are worth     6    .

Just when you gave us a lot of moments of great enthusiasm and encouragement, I think this is sincerity meets     7    (kind). I want to say Chinese audience are the kindest and most righteous (正义的) audience in the world. The whole world needs such China. The     8    (strong) China is, the kinder the world will be. We’re not here     9     the gold medal, but we want to tell the world, our country     10    (work) hard. Now China has become so powerful, I believe we will have the same in Syria brilliant day. At that time, the rose of Damascus (大马士革) will bloom again in Syria.

8 . Compassion has not been a traditional characteristic of sport. With its UK roots in 19th-century British public schools and universities, modern sport developed as way of creating strong military leaders, training them to develop adaptability defined in those times by iron will and biting the bullet. Fear and harsh criticism were crucial to toughening up players and soldiers alike. The “tough guy” narrative was strengthened by 20th-century media stereotypes and Hollywood’s heroes and became rooted into sport and society.

I’ve heard countless stories like the popular culture I found when I joined the Olympic rowing team in the mid-1990s. We were expected to suffer after mistakes or losses to show that we truly cared, and everyone believed coaches needed to be severe and unforgiving to get results. These approaches still exist. But an alternative approach with compassion at its center addresses aims of performance and wellbeing for those with greater ambitions.

This isn’t some soft option which plays down hard work, as supporters of the earlier traditional sporting mindset might criticize. Research across branches of psychology — behavioral, sports, positive — shows how compassion creates the strongest foundation for adaptability and sustained performance under pressure whether in sport, the military, healthcare or business. Rather than activating our threat system which began to help us survive way back, compassion helps us to feel safe and protected, leaving us free to learn, connect with others and start exploring what we’re capable of.

The continuous need to improve performance has led top coaches to appreciate that high performance requires levels of support to match the level of challenge. When you provide that, players start thriving while striving to achieve more. Rooted in compassion, a different coach-athlete relationship thus develops.

The dictionary definition of compassion includes the recognition of another’s suffering and the desire and support to relieve it. Compassion has been shown to decrease fear of failure and increase the likelihood of trying again when failure does happen. But how many talented athletes experience that depth of support in moments of crisis and failure?

“Marilyn, you have so much determination and so much heart. If you work at it you’ll be a fine swimmer,” Gus Ryder said to me after I finished a one-mile race in the freezing cold Lake Ontario.

I believed him and started swimming for Gus. Every day, we trained for hours in open water. But no matter how hard I worked, I still came in third or fourth. Four years later, it was clear that I was never going to the Olympics. That’s when Gus suggested I challenge the famous American long-distance swimmer Florence Chadwick to swim the thirty-two miles across Lake Ontario from New York to Toronto.

The idea had never occurred to me, but Gus had made up his mind. “I wasn’t sure Florence could make it. If we could swim one stroke further than her, it would be worth it,” Gus encouraged me.

Eventually, I decided to do it for Gus, and for myself.

The race started at 10 pm on September 6. It was cloudy, windy, and very dark. When I looked around, I couldn’t see where the lake ended and the sky began.

“Marilyn, just follow my light and I will guide you across this lake,” said Gus, who had a big flashlight and shone it just ahead of me from the lifeboat.

Florence swam for about four hours before she quit. But it wasn’t until several hours later, when I was having difficulty, that Gus told me that Florence was out and that I was the only one left!

I felt very encouraged. But it was such a long night that Gus had to do his best to keep me going. At the dawn, he even began writing messages on a chalkboard to keep my thoughts positive. Once he wrote, “You know you can do it. You can do it for me!” Another time he even wrote, “If you give up, I give up.”

By midday I felt so tired that I started falling asleep. So Gus started swimming with me to get my attention back. “I’m here to swim with you, Marilyn. Come on!” he said.

At the very moment, I began to experience a very unusual feeling.

After twenty-one hours in the water, we began approaching the shore.