No Celery Please

My sister has asked me to participate in a “mini triathalon” with her and I have foolishly agreed.

It’s actually not that much of an event… Run 2 miles.  Bike 10 miles.  Swim some amount… not too far… But still.  Something that’s gonna take a little work.

I do not run.  I like my cardio exercise to involve wheels… bikes, skates, elliptical machines, anything like that.  But putting one foot in front of the other very fast – well, that sounds like a lot of work.

But I said yes, and so I guess, if she actually goes ahead and signs up, then I am gonna be on the hook for this.

Running is good conditioning work, so I can’t complain about the health benefits.  And it should help with strength for derby too.

Still… when I think of myself… I think of me being very lazy.  A triathalon (even a mini one) doesn’t really squre with that. 

Guess I’ll have to rethink my definitions.

I got an email this morning from SkyNet Delivery Service. No Subject.

My first thought?  “Why is the computer that is going to destroy humanity in the future sending me email?”

OK, OK, so it was one of those Nigerian check scams.  But still, you’d think people might do just a little more research when setting up their fake companies and NOT NAME THEM AFTER THE MOST EVIL COMPUTER IN (fictional) HISTORY!!!!!

I will wait and see if a crazed robot shows up at my house to kill me for deleting the spam.

I think I understand something now that I have been struggling with.

(yet another derby post for those of you who are sick of them – you might want to just move on to the WVSR or something)

I fall down a lot when we move into the more complicated drills like pack work and hitting, etc.

I am told by the training folks that I need to “get lower” and “have a wider stance” and this will make me stable and not fall down so much.

It’s HARD to get lower.  It takes a lot of thigh muscle to skate in the very low derby position they want me to adopt.  Now –  my muscles are a bazillion times stronger than they were when I first started this adventure, but I still find that skating very low takes a huge amount of effort and makes me hurt.

And here’s where the realization part comes in…

I am trying REALLY hard to skate lower all the time.

This makes my thighs tired and shaky.

Then… when I start to lose my balance, instead of being able to correct, my thighs go… “We give up!”  and I fall down.

This seems to be something of a vicious cycle.  I need to get lower in order to be more stable, but skating that low makes me tired and unstable and I fall down.  At which point, the helpful training people tell me to GET LOWER!!!

I have never been big on strength training exercises…  weights are heavy and I have never liked to lift them… so I am not really sure how to go about building up my muscles to the point where they can support the required position without giving out on me.

I know I can do squats and lunges… but then when I do those during the day, it makes my muscles even MORE tired and prone to failure when I skate.  Am I overworking them?  I know there’s some kind of “time off” dealy with muscle building that is supposed to be when the muscles grow and get stronger.

I guess I shall have to turn to the interwebs and find out more about strength training to figure out how to bust out of this cycle.

So… the final roster for Sunday’s bout is up.  And I am an alternate (which means I only get put in if someone gets hurt bad enough to get yanked).

99% of me is hugely relieved that I am not going to have to go down there and play in a bout for which I know in my heart of hearts I am totally not ready.

There is a tiny part of me that does sting a little.  I mean… it’s one thing to know in your heart of hearts that you are simply not up to doing something.  It’s another thing to have a committee of people CONFIRM your suckage for you and announce that while you were originally scheduled to play, you simply haven’t been able to pull it together enough and the girl who was originally slated to be the alternate will, in fact, be playing while you sit on the bench wallowing in your suckiness. (Not that they put it that way – they really are nice people)

Still.  The 99% part is doing a little happy dance that I am not going to have to go play against the team that has the player who was the catalyst for the breaking of the arm/shoulder of a girl the last time we played them (a girl who was also, although she might not admit it, not really ready to be in a bout).

So.. still going to the game on Sunday, but in a thankfully much more bench-riding capacity.  I have no doubt that I’ll be bouting soon enough.  I will get good enough.  I just need more work and practice.

So I have been kind of a freak for a few days, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better until Monday.

First, over the weekend, I had a diet melt-down… I just was sick of having to monitor what I ate and worry about my weight and feel like my life is so restricted because I had conceived of a crazed desire to squeeze my buttocks comfortably into a size 8 pair of jeans. Part of it was reaction to having been so salady while in NYC.  Anyway, I went kind of overboard in the opposite direction and then on Monday when I did the shrinking piggies report, I was up four pounds.  FOUR!!! 

Anyway…  In a way it was good, because over the weekend I realized that I had gotten a little crazed and obsessive about the dieting and that my goals had gotten out of whack with what my body is actually capable of supporting.  So I have managed to rein in that crazy a little and have settled back down to my original goal of a nice, healthy 140.  Add to that the fact that I guess some of that extra 4 pounds must have been water because today I am only up 2 pounds from where I was before NYC (and no one can actually lose 2 pounds in a day).  So I am feeling a little better about that.

But that’s not the only thing making me crazy.  On Sunday… I am going to be in my first real Derby Bout… and I am panicking just  a smidge on that point.

In my sensible brain, I know that playing this team will not be too much worse or different than scrimmaging against our A-Team…. our A-Team girls are better than the team we are going to play on Sunday.  In my crazy brain, I have built this team up into a manic derby hitting powerhouse team, and I am afraid. (when really, I think they only have two hard hitters.) 

Still.  Gah!  One minute I feel like I’ll do OK, and the next I am freaking out because WHAT AM I DOING PLAYING IN A REAL BOUT SO SOON!!!???

Anyway… I suspect the crazy will continue unabated all week.  Perhaps on Monday (a holiday!), I’ll be able to get back to “normal”

Man… there is just something about this city.  The buildings.  The lights.  The people.  The million different things going on.

It was ABSOLUTELY FREEZING here the entire week.

I did nothing touristy… I was either in training or back at the hotel catching up on work I missed during the day.

It does not matter.  The very act of BEING HERE, the walk up and down broadway every day between the hotel and the building I was going to.  This place is magic, I swear.

As much as I dream of living here, I know I never could make enough money to afford it (I would HAVE to live in Manhattan if I did come here), and it would be cold in the winter…  brrrr.

So I will have to be content with being a sometime visitor, and loving NYC from afar.  I have GOT to get here more often.

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In somewhat related news.  The building I am in for training this week has what has got to be the COOLEST elevator EVER! (yes, I am a dork)

Instead of hitting an “up” or “down” call button, you enter the floor you want to go to in the keypad of the elevator lobby.  Then the screen tells you which of the 8 elevators to get on.  The elevator doors open and there’s a little display with 2 or 3 floors listed.  You get on, and it just goes to those floors. – no horrible trips where you are stopping at all these extra floors – so cool!

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In one final NYC  thing…  I managed to behave myself foodaly all week (since the Sandwich on Sunday) with lots of salady salad.  But I am leaving tomorrow… and I just couldn’t pass up one last chance to take advantage of the food in this city.  So for dinner tonight I am having a piece of carrot cake from the stage deli.  It cost $10 and is practically the size of my head.  And OH MY GOD it’s good.  It’s also the first piece of cake I’ve had in the month since I started the shrinking piggies plan… and I’m practically giddy with a frosting high. Weighing myself on Saturday morning is gonna be scary, but if I’ve gone back up, I’ll just have to rein it in again (a much easier prospect with the stability of work and home).

So tonight I arrived for the week of software training I am doing in New York.

I am going to try to behave myself food-wise, even though I am in the tasty food capital of the country. For the rest of the week, I will endeavor to stick to salad and fruit.

But tonight, I threw caution to the wind and went to the Stage Deli, which happens to be a block from my hotel.

I had a brisket on rye with thousand island and pickles and a chocolate chip cookie.

It was about 20 pounds of food.  OK, OK, maybe a pound and a half, but it FELT like 20.

If there was a scale here, I imagine that my weigh in tomorrow morning would be 2 or three pounds more than it was this morning.

It was TOTALLY worth it.