Weird day on the ice—I felt like hell, kitted up anyway, and halfway laced up, looser than usual. Well, we’ve determined I was Vitamin B deficient (not taking my vitamins, on a diet that restricts starches, ergo B vitamins)—
I took a pill. I was in too foul a mood to bother with what I thought a bad lacing, just go out there, skate a bit, get off the ice and go read a newspaper.
Something happened. All of a sudden I was ‘into’ my boots and the blades were making real contact with the ice in a good way, absolute control of my edges in a way I haven’t had in a whole year. I mean, I hit things that would have thrown me last Friday: ‘fast’ patches—it was cold as hell’s hinges and you get spots more frozen than others, which can feel as if someone jerked your skates forward. If you don’t have your knees bent and your butt and hip and upper leg muscles strong enough to yank you up even with your skates, you can crash and burn for no apparent reason. And hockey trenches. Hockey skates provide little trenches that can grab a figure blade and yank you on a sideways curve like a train hitting a thrown switching-point at high speed. Again, either you’re ‘over’ your skate blade with strength in those muscles, or you’re apt to go down. I hit both, several times, and they were just ‘well, interesting’, not a heart-stopping moment. The legs were there, and most of all, the blades were under me and responding to the littlest pressures of my feet—pressing down on the heel under the anklebone, sideways, drives you forward with real bite, and doing the opposite side sends you on an outside curve: backwards is behind the ball of the big toe, and backwards outside curve is the ball of the little toe, and if your center of balance is solidly low and ‘over’ your skate blade, you’re just going to be steady and sure in all those moves. It’s when you freak and stiffen your knees and stand up that you’re going to go boom—or if you wave your hands around [poor little girl had been doing fine out there yesterday, and then she hit a spate of waving her arms around and every time she’d wave back behind her median side-line, boom! down she’d go. Which only made her more frustrated and nervous, which made her wave her hands more—the things we could tell the little ones, if only they could understand.]
Anyway, it was a day of the perfect boot lacing. I went back to the locker room in a much better mood and took careful stock of exactly how I’d done that lace-up, undoing it and measuring, and thinking back over what I’d done. I want to do that Wednesday! I mean, I was so steady I decided to try my backward outside edge pattern for the first time in a year, (a real balance challenge) and actually stuck it for a bit.
Glad you had a good day on the skates. I signed up for Karate (Kendo) at my granddaughter’s Karate school.
Where is the progress bar for the next book – we have to keep on the pressure – just kidding, write as you have to.
Heh.
I’ve been doing various short pieces, which I don’t do during a novel.
I don’t skate, but I am working on improving my general balance for daily movements. Managing those little foot muscles is tricky – my right foot is more stable than my left. There are also changes depending on the shoes I wear, or when I wear none. Before I started working on this I had no idea how subtle foot muscle use is, and what a difference it can make.
You aren’t kidding. One of the best exercises is to stand facing a corner, stand on one foot, then shut your eyes and try to maintain balance. Alternate feet. Repeat. Do daily until you feel your foot rock. Hint: easiest to stand like this on the outside edge of your foot.
My chiropractor has this weird device that ‘resequences’ the spinal muscles: sounded like voodoo to me, but basically you stand against a tall board, they tighten several bands across shoulders, hips, etc, I mean really tighten, and somehow it does actually improve balance: Dr. Shane says we compensate for so many little injuries all day long that the tiny spinal muscles eventually forget to react properly, and concentrate instead on specific areas to ‘protect’ from this and that pain. Somehow this major stretchout gets them (they claim) cooperating together again and they get back to their regular jobs. I’d have consigned that one to the crop circles files, but for one thing, it feels good as you get totally straightened out, recompressed, reordered, and then set out upright, and for another, the darn thing actually seemed to help with the balance test.
Another method to realign your back muscles is to lie supine on a cylinder of that whitish, firm, lightweight closed-cell foam about 10 – 12″ in diameter that stretches from your head to your tailbone, knees flexed, and feet and arms relaxed on the floor. First one simply relaxes the muscles for a couple of minutes. Next you roll side to side on the cylinder, remaining supine and initiating the movement with your hips. The final exercise is to reach high toward the ceiling alternating your arms. It is supposed to realign the spinal processes, those little bone spurs on the vertebrae that the muscles attach to. I know for a fact that it does cut way down on muscle tension in the back. I think it works by inverting the normal order of things where the muscles tell your spine where to be; directly supporting your body from the spine and instead letting the spine tell the muscles where to be.
March 1 – 0.77″ of rain, fields flooded, water over the road, washed away gravel on the far shoulder washed gravel out of my driveway so I have a trench at the end of the drive. This rain was on top of 3″ of snow which was on top of 1.5″ of ice which was on top of 4″ snow There was enough water in my fields that I could have taken my kayak out, except for the strong current that was flowing toward the culvert.
March 5 – 0.25″ of rain and the cycle of draining the fields continues. I drove by the neighbor’s house, there’s an even larger channel that runs past his house and it was almost overflowing. No wonder my fields aren’t draining, too much water in the other channels. I’d have thought maybe a venturi effect would help, but apparently not.
At least the rain has moved on and it’s just runoff, but several roads in the county are flooded, I drove by the river yesterday and it’s a very angry river. Driving across one of the bridges, I could see the water was within 6 feet of the deck beams. If it had been over the bridge deck, there would have been a LOT of places under water. We live in a valley, and sometimes, the river reminds us of who was there first. My sump pump has been running continuously for over 10 days. My foundation is mainly field stone so there are considerable gaps between stones. Fortunately, the sump pump handles the water that flows in. Too bad the mud settles in the low spots on the floor.