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One of the worlds premier batsmen was furiously practicing his forward defensives. He lunged as far as he could and leaned over the imaginary ball so his bat could sing a little lullaby. Go to sleep... go to sleep... go to sleep, little darling. Dont you spin... Dont you spin... Dont you spin off the rough now... And ruddy send me sprawling.Elsewhere, a bowler capable of waking every last demon in a pitch warmed up with great vigour.There was activity everywhere. Some seemed nervous, others excited. Visakhapatnam had never hosted a Test before and its people were being spoiled rotten by India, England and the theatre of the fifth day.They saw a debutant produce the delivery of the match, making it drift in the air to force Ben Stokes to square up and play inside the line. Not even Liam Neeson could have stopped the off stump from being taken. So now Jayant Yadav has a decision to make. He had said dismissing AB de Villiers in a warm-up match last year was the best wicket of his career.Then Mohammed Shami conjured reverse-swing in the eighth over with the new ball. Neither of these incidents would have happened had the pitch not been so abrasive. It had needed a fifth day to get that way. The fifth day is under threat.There is merit to the argument that Test cricket needs help. It asks a lot of people who prefer their news in 140 characters and their videos to get to the point in 120 seconds. Besides, there are far more convenient ways to follow the game.The Andhra Cricket Association allowed free entry on the first day here and while the crowd was impressive it didnt threaten the stadiums capacity. Why would it, when instead of travelling outside the city, getting probed by security, sitting in the sun, and barely getting to see your favourite players, you just touch a button on your phone, get your info and move on with your life. It is hard to imagine making Tests a day lighter would change any of this. A better effort might be to make the pitches more responsive, redress the balance between bat and ball and add context to every match that happens.Besides, why must we push for something that wont allow for Haseeb Hameed and Alastair Cooks remarkable stonewalling. Something that could lead to a savage pursuit for home advantage and limit the chances for a team to grow. Something that reduces the time available for a narrative shift - like in Visakhapatnam when four days of hard-fought cricket and spirited counters culminated in two and a half hours of spectacular action.R Ashwin tossed the ball up with cover open for the right-hander to beat his inside edge by miles. Ravindra Jadeja did not care for point as he aimed for the footmarks to generate variable bounce. No reasonable person will grudge this when it happens on the fifth day.Good batsmen go so far as to enjoy it. Kohli produced a masterful innings in tough conditions. Joe Root combated them by adjusting his technique mid-match, crouching more in his stance and shortening his backlift to be ready for the grubber.At a time when cricket is under pressure to shed its flab, this series has strengthened the argument to keep it roly-poly.Buy Shoes Black Friday . The Oilers come in having lost five in a row (0-4-1) and 16 of their last 20 games, dropping a 2-1 decision to the Vancouver Canucks on Tuesday. Wholesale Shoes Black Friday .Y. -- Leading 3-0 with only 11:25 left, the Colorado Avalanche committed a seemingly meaningless penalty to give the New York Islanders a power play. https://www.cheapshoesblackfriday.com/ . In the response filed Wednesday to the complaint by 30-year-old Alexander Bradley, attorneys say the former University of Florida player is invoking his Fifth Amendment right that protects people from incriminating themselves. China Shoes Black Friday . Malkin got tangled up with Detroits Luke Glendening early in the third period and his left skate took the brunt of collision with the boards behind Pittsburghs net. Fake Shoes Black Friday . Self was acquired from the Buffalo Bandits in a trade for Alex Hill midway through last season, and made his debut in Rochester on March 16, 2013.RIO DE JANEIRO -- If you strapped weights to Usain Bolts chest, replaced his six-pack stomach with abs stretched out of shape, de-tuned his muscular frame and explosive power by jellifying his joints, and forced him to take the best part of nine months off, how amazed would we all be if the worlds fastest man fully recovered from that fitness-shredding assault to once again vie for medals at the Olympic Games?Short answer: stunned. Likely adoring.Yet, across the Rio Games, amazing women are doing exactly this without the celebrate-this-from-rooftops full fanfare they deserve.Were talking, of course, about Olympic moms.By competing post-pregnancy, the likes of self-declared Momma on a Mission Dana Vollmer, a swimmer, are showing that having children and a continuing career in elite sport need not be mutually exclusive. That freedom to not have to choose either one or the other is important in encouraging women to compete for longer and later into their lives.On the most fundamental level, if nationalism and the race for medals are stripped away, the Olympics showcase what an astounding piece of machinery the human body is: malleable, adaptable, capable of absorbing and recovering from great punishment.Olympians who have put their bodies through motherhood and then willed and beaten them back into world-conquering shape are the purest embodiment of this.They are also something of a scientific mystery.Kari Bo, a Norwegian School of Sport Sciences researcher working on IOC-backed studies in this field, notes big holes in the scientific communitys understanding of how pregnancy affects elite athletes bodies. One common yet not fully understood impact is on joints.In pregnancy, the body produces a hormone, relaxin, that helps loosen up ligaments and the pelvic area for birth.Once back in the Olympic business of aiming faster, higher and stronger, looser joints arent necessarily a plus.British 10,000-meter runner Jo Pavey, competing at her fifth Olympics, blames relaxin for collapsing the arch of her left foot during pregnancy. She had to wear a bigger shoe on her left foot than on her right and stress-fractured her big toe, with a diagonal crack through a bone.Vollmer, who has an individual bronze and relay silver so far in Rio, says looser ligaments were a big thing for me in her post-pregnancy comeback. Having battled injuries in the past, she worried about over-extending her newly more flexible joints.I played it really cautious, she says. Just trying to make sure that everything was really stable before I really cranked on my strokes.And what of her post-preggnancy abs, so vital in her stroke, the butterfly?There were none, she says matter of factly.ddddddddddddfter seven weeks of enforced bed rest and having gained 50 pounds (22 kilograms), the triple gold medalist at the 2012 London Games was probably 10 percent of the athlete she used to be when she started working out again following her son Arlens birth in March 2015, says her coach, Teri McKeever.Gains and shifts in weight from pregnancy and breastfeeding also disrupt balance and change your relationship with the water, McKeever says.She still had a nice stroke but you go 100 meters and you have to stop, the coach says. Its amazing how quickly you lose it.Defending Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill also became a mother between London and Rio. To stop her from comparing herself to the athlete she was before son Reggies birth in July 2014, her coach, Toni Minichiello, wiped the slate clean, using what he calls post-pregnancy personal bests to measure Ennis-Hills progress since.Physically she wasnt the same person, Minichiello says on a blog chronicling their Rio journey. It was really tough mentally. Her body was changing month to month.Weakened ankles were a post-pregnancy problem for U.S. high jumper Chaunte Lowe, competing at her fourth games, because I had been waddling for so many months.It felt like it was impossible, she says of resuming jumping. You have that question of whether you have lost it forever.Second and third pregnancies broadened out what had been slim, boyish hips, giving Lowe less ideal new curves to squeeze over the high bar.By the third time, I felt like I had it down, she says. But then I was sleep deprived.So why start a column about amazing women with an amazing man, Bolt?Because if men were capable of all this, you can be sure more fuss would be made.Theres a school of thought which holds that it demeans women to make a big deal of pregnancy. After all, the argument goes, women have babies all the time.But few of them, too few, come back to compete at the Olympics. Just 10 of the 298 U.S. women are also moms.I was told that you can never get your body back, Vollmer says. I wanted to show that you can. I think it will keep women in sports much longer, that you can have family and you can make it work.They deserve our applause.---John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at http://twitter.com/johnleicester ' ' '