Ordinary Extraordinary

Sam-een

For those who are celebrating Samhain this evening, brightest blessings for the New Year.

For those who are celebrating Halloween, I wish you more treats than tricks and a hangover-free Thursday morning.

Detour

The week before my sophomore year of high school, my class went on an adventure / bonding / team building retreat. It was, to quote Eddie Izzard, ...an activity center, where you climb a tree and eat a sausage and it's kind of… It builds your character so you know about sausages.

Though I'd been at the same school since age 5, I'd been well entrenched as an outcast for the past two years. (Ah 13, the magic age when girls turn on each other and boys turn into knuckle-dragging pack animals) When we were divided up into teams, I was paired up with the Most Hated Girl in School and her three henchmen - all in the name of making us "bond," of course. They were doing an excellent job of ignoring me and I was doing my best not to smack them all senseless until we got to the adventure wall portion of the day.

You know the one... 8' tall wall with no ropes or ladders... get your whole team to the top and revel in your newfound sisterhood.

Or, in my case, listen to the girls who hated me the most count to "3" and then drop me when I was almost to the top. I landed heavily on my left knee and felt the simultaneously strange and revolting sensation of my knee bending to the left, rather than to the front as is normal.  The only thing I could hear as rolled around in pain was the muffled sound of them snickering into their hands.

I learned some unpleasant lessons that day.

The diagnosis was a severe lateral ligament sprain with a little anterior cruciate ligament  stretching thrown in for good measure. I spent the next 8 weeks with my knee immobilized, hobbling from class to class and trying not to think about the fact that my volleyball, field hockey, and horseback riding careers had all come to a screeching halt.

I healed, eventually, but that knee has always been weak. Anyone's who's known me for a good amount of time has seen it go out when I've spent too many hours dancing, or been hiking too long without a break. It's always a reminder of that day.

I tell you this story now so that you may all appreciate my gut-wrenching frustration after my knee gave out again on Friday, in the first 5 minutes of my training session.

It was bound to happen. I've been working myself very hard and the joint is not yet as strong as my mind wants it to be. But as I lay on the mat, looking up at the skylight and waiting for the pain to subside enough for me to straighten my leg and assess the damage, I just wanted to cry; it was such a bitter pill. For a split second, I wanted to wave the white flag. For a split second, I wanted to just limp home and give up. For a split second, I was utterly defeated.

I sat up eventually, and Chief came over to see what had happened. When I explained, he told me in no uncertain terms that I would not be jumping or kicking anymore - I was so afraid that he was going to boot me from the class. Nope, instead he told me that we could use this "opportunity" to build strength in my upper body, my abs, and eventually my weak knee and that then I can jump and kick.

Never before have I been so glad to hear the words more sit-ups for you!

I'm still a little gimpy, but after three days off I was back at the gym tonight working on all of the things that don't involve my knee - trust me, that's plenty. Abs! Biceps! Triceps! More Abs! At least I finally got to break in my new gloves (which were waiting on my doorstep when I limped home Friday night, of course) with a few rounds on the heavy bag.

I'm trying to think of this as a detour, rather than a roadblock. I'm not so much a kickboxer right now as I am a boxer, but I'm working my way back up to the kicking one day at a time.

Meh

That pretty much sums up today and indeed, the last few days.

Meh.

If it's wrong to go to bed at 8:45 then I don't want to be right.

I'll be in my bunk.

Sometimes, I love my job: Part 2

So we did a walkthrough with the leopard handlers, which prompted this email from my boss:

the one note we did get was that the jib movement could spook [the leopard], so whatever you can do to minimize that would be great.

And the following response from our smart ass Technical Director:

Should we keep an iso reel running on [the jib op], so we have some cool video in the event he is mauled*? :)

On days like this, it's hard not to love my job.

_____
*Never fear, animal lovers - the leopard will be in a cage so there is no danger to her or to anyone else.

Multitasking

This morning, as I was driving through the Cahuenga Pass, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw this:

(Sorry for the image quality, the camera on my Treo is craptastic!)

Now, I have seen people do a lot of things while driving in Los Angeles. Eating and drinking, talking on their cell phones, putting on make-up, curling their hair, shaving their legs (one hand on the wheel, one leg on the dashboard), but this is the first time that I have seen someone reading and highlighting something while going 25mph. I can only assume that he was steering with his knees because his hands were full. His eyes were also nowhere near the road.

I changed lanes pretty quickly after that.

More Muay Thai!

I am so sore. Breathing hurts. Typing hurts. Hell, I think blinking hurts. And yet, I just can't stay away.

I have not spent less than two hours at the gym any day this week and yesterday I had a private lesson with Chief wherein he kicked my ass up and down the gym. Repeatedly. Right after he told me that I hit like a girl.

Since Chief is the first person ever to describe me as "too girly," I re-doubled my efforts and struck with full strength and speed for the first time since I started this adventure. It felt amazing. Granted, my hands and wrists are killing me today from doing that for 45 minutes straight, but there's something both empowering and freeing about unleashing the entirety of your strength in one well-placed strike. When I'd finally done it correctly once, Chief started to chase me around the room calling out combination numbers for me. I dropped my head, touched my gloves to my cheekbones, and for three 15-minute stretches I didn't focus on anything other than the pads he was holding and the numbers that he was calling.

I don't hit like a girl anymore.

I do, however, walk like an old lady because he also made me do evil leg strikes in which I hold one leg up behind me, femur parallel to the floor, and kick at the heavy bag behind me a couple of hundred times (No, seriously. We do things in sets of 50 or 100). Oh, my poor ass.

Are you guys bored hearing about this yet?

I can't help it - studying Muay Thai is such a strange and wonderful new experience for me that it's all I want to talk about. It's been a long, long time since I found something like this, something that I really love doing even though it's physically and mentally exhausting. I work my body to its limits every day and the first thing I think the next morning is "As soon as I figure out how to sit up without using my ab muscles, I'm totally going back!"

And it's not just about the physical exertion; there's something very spiritual about my training too. Maybe it's the fact that I've been in a bit of an introspective phase since my birthday, maybe it's just the nature of martial arts, but every time I leave the gym I take with me guidance for both my Muay Thai technique and my life as a whole. I always thought the "wise martial arts master veiling life lessons as training advice " was just a movie cliche... until Chief started saying things like this:

• Don't look down; the answers aren't there. If you look down you get blindsided. Look up. Look out. That's where the answers are.
• Hit it, hit it, hit it. You're stopping yourself short at the last second. Don't. Follow through. No mater what, follow through.
• Stop thinking. You're in your head too much and it's messing you up. Feel it. Just let go, and let yourself feel.

Hard to believe the man's only known me a week.

Sometimes, I love my job

I just got the following from my boss:

Just an fyi there will be a live leopard in the studio on thursday.

That was the entirety of the email.

Could Have 2

I'm way too sore & tired to put together one coherent post, so it's time for another random collection of things I could have written about!

• California? Still on fire. Fortunately none of the wildfires are burning too close to me, but several friends have been evacuated already and many others are packed and ready to go. Please send extra special mojo to the Greaser and his wife - the condo that they bought last week is directly in the path of one of the Valencia-area fires.


• I'm finally on the Twitter bandwagon. Follow me, won't you?


• Keith & I nearly got blown onto Santa Monica Blvd when we were at Century City on Saturday night; that should have been a warning about how bad this round of fires was going to be.


• I am a dork, a big one. I was supposed to join my company's team for AIDS Walk Los Angeles on Sunday, but I forgot to set my alarm and slept right through it. I have agreed to repent by offering many rounds of margaritas to the two girlfriends with whom I was supposed to walk.


• I met Paul Joiner at the laundromat on Sunday night. That name won't mean much to you if you're not a college football fan, but if you are you'll remember that in the mid-nineties he was a starting linebacker at Cal and one of the most promising young linebackers of the decade. His career ended when, in the summer between his junior & senior years, he got behind the wheel of a car drunk and high and totaled it. Though the 4 passengers all escaped with minor injuries, he was in a coma for a couple of weeks and had to re-learn everything - even how to swallow. He's doing pretty well, all things considered. He's an interesting guy. My title as Queen of Random Supermarket and Laundromat Experiences is secure.


• Work has exploded all over my life and I'm trying to clean it up because I am doggedly determined to keep some semblance of balance as I head into my crazy season.


• A huge number of my friends have either recently had babies or are due to have them soon. I suspect this is directly related to the zillions of weddings that I went to one spring/summer a couple of years ago.


• I willingly and happily spent 2.5 hours at the gym tonight. I got there early to warm up and have someone show me how to wrap my hands (again), then class ran a little long, and  then as I was hanging onto the heavy bag for dear life after my 100th knee strike (ow) Chief poked his head around the bag and said "Hey, can you stay? I want you to do 30 minutes on the bike before you go." For some reason, I said "Sure!" I blame temporary insanity.
  


• I'm considering starting a separate Muay Thai blog because I want to talk about it all the time, but I don't want to bore all of you to tears. Because my usual posts are soooo riveting. :-)


• What's everyone doing for Halloween? I want to do something, but I am completely devoid of inspiration.

Something In The Air

I think they pump something into the air at the kickboxing gym.

In spite of the fact that I was so sore today that I could barely blink, by the time I got home from work I was jonesing for more time on the mats.

Generally, I am not the type of person who wants to go work out. I go to yoga because it's good for me, and it helps me stay limber. I go walking because yoga's not exactly aerobic and, unless I'm on site, I spend most of my day sitting on my ass. Even when I was training for the Honolulu Marathon I didn't want to go running. I did it because intellectually I understood that one cannot run 26.2 miles unless one runs smaller increments at regular intervals, but I didn't wake up in the morning and go "Oooh, I simply have to go running!" 

Work was uncharacteristically mellow today and every time I had a few minutes, my mind wandered to yesterday's lesson; my feet itched to practice the footwork and my arms longed to strike. I wanted to be back in the gym.

Sadly I can't go sign my paperwork until tomorrow or Friday, so no gym for me today. Instead I dug out my jump rope, my yoga mat, and my shuffle as soon as I got home and hit my front walk. I jumped, I high-stepped and shadow boxed, and I did the dreaded push-ups and crunches. 45 minutes later, I collapsed on my front lawn sweaty but energized.

I looked up at the moon for awhile and watched a bat closing in on a moth. I felt my breathing return to normal. I willed my limbs to work long enough to let me stand up.  Once I finally managed to drag myself back into the house,  I was surprised to realize that it was 8:15 and I'd missed the first 15 minutes of Pushing Daisies.

This situation is getting serious.

Don't Look Down

Don't look down; the answers aren't there. If you look down you get blindsided. Look up. Look out. That's where the answers are. -Chief

I had a bunch of things to take care of today, so I took the day off work. I ran a couple of errands, tidied up the house, did some laundry, the usual stuff.

Oh yeah, and I took my first kickboxing lesson.

Let me clarify: I went to a boxing gym and took a 90-minute private Muay Thai lesson with one of the first Americans to be certified by both the World Muay Thai Institute and the Muay Thai Institute of Bangkok.

Holy crap, I hurt in places I didn't know I have. No wussy cardio kickboxing for me*! I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow.

I've wanted to try Muay Thai for awhile (like... twenty years) and last week I just got it in my head that I'd procrastinated long enough. So I did some research, found a gym that looked promising, and signed myself up for a trial lesson. I'm kind of glad that I didn't think about it too much; if I had I totally would have psyched myself out and not gone.

Fortunately I did go and I had a great time. Well, as great a time as you can have when someone is making you jump rope for 10 hours minutes at a stretch and making you strike while holding 15lb weights. (Hello, first lesson. What the hell will I have to do in the second one?)

I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I went in with my hackles up.  Gyms do not generally welcome fat girls with open arms and I was walking into a place where pro kickboxers & mixed martial artists train, so I was ready to fight for my right to be there, for my right to try. Much to my surprise, the people there could not have been nicer. Not only did everyone know each other, all of them were also genuinely friendly and welcoming.   

(I should also mention here that the men were all ridiculously, brutally gorgeous. It was all I could do not to get distracted by all the abs and quads and fall flat on my face.)

My instructor, whom I'll call Chief from now on, is both the Chief Instructor and the owner of the gym (and is probably under 35, and also distractingly handsome). After he introduced himself he spent a few minutes talking to me to learn a little bit about my background, as well as why I'm interested in Muay Thai and what I want to get out of my training. The point, apparently, was to determine how to teach me because he says that he's never taught two students the same way.

After he'd made that assessment, he kicked my ass for 90 minutes.

Aside from the jumping rope and the hardest push-ups ever, he also taught me how to strike, how to hook, how to knee, and how to do the basic footwork combinations. I like to think of myself as a fairly graceful and coordinated but people, I have never felt less graceful than I did today. Boxing footwork seems like it should be easy, but it's really not. And boxing footwork plus strikes and hooks? Forget it - I was arms and legs all akimbo. I looked like a complete idiot for most of the lesson, but I was surprisingly ok with that.

Once Chief had reduced me to a sweating, panting pile of jelly-filled limbs, he invited me to stay and train with the class that was about to start. I knew I was hooked when I actually contemplated it, even though I could barely lift my legs to get back up to street level.

Did I mention that the gym is down two flights of stairs? Such a cruel joke.

I think it's safe to say that I loved it - my only concern was how to pay for it. It's a private gym so it's a bit pricey and we all know that I'm broke. Going without food didn't really seem like much of an option so I was stymied. Thankfully, my Dad came through with a solution and made me a deal: he and my mom will split the cost with me if I promise to stick with it for at least 6 months. (If I don't stick with it I get to repay them, with interest)

So that's it then. I'll go in on Friday and sign all the paperwork.

And I won't look down.

_____
*If you read through the Wikipedia page, you'll notice that Frank Thiboutot developed cardio kickboxing because Muay Thai is too dangerous to be done in a health club environment. Yeah. That's what I just signed myself up for. I may be insane.