I’ve been scanning and posting a few rock climbing pictures from my days in Massachusetts (and a few from here in Colorado). There are some great shots of me and my friends from those days (most notably Miracle Ed and Hanh).
Makes me wistful.
And a bit depressed… As Ed put it to me “You should get skinny again. You were pretty.”
As of right now, the notions of getting skinny and getting back into climbing are almost a chicken and egg proposition… Nothing to it but to do it, right?
(Did I mention rock climbing is how I seduced my wife? It’s somewhat true.)
Actually, it was more like two and a half years ago that I first noticed kettlebells, thanks to (the now humbled and retired) Kostya Tszyu.
Since then, I’ve actually seen kettlebells on TV a few times. One show was totally unrelated to fitness (it was probably a home renovation show or something), but the featured “real person” was a kettlebell trainer, and they showed him doing his thing.
Now BuzzFeed says it’s the latest craze. (They do have some good, recent links, it should be noted.)
Go figure. 
(See what I did there? Double meaning. I’m clever!)
After at least 7 years of not climbing anything harder than a ladder, I went to the Boulder Rock Club last night with Peter, my former co-worker and now neighbor, and his fiance Ann. I wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was certainly mildly depressing motivational.
The first hit to my ego was just digging up my old gear and trying on my old harness. I got excited when I realized it was a size large, but then I realized that’s “large for climber types” and not “large for fat American types”. And so I had to wander over to the world-famous Neptune Mountaineering shop and (*sigh*) get myself an extra-large climbing harness.
At the gym, I climbed a few “ladders” (nothing past vertical, thanks) in the 5.7 and 5.8 range, and it was plenty tough for me. I’m only mildly sore today, but I was embarrassingly exhausted after my four climbs. My one attempt at playing in a bouldering cave convinced me that being overweight and understrong are a bad mix. Hauling my 200+ pounds around by my now-sissified fingertips just wasn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, Ann, who is a tiny pixie of a person, was flinging herself up 5.9s and a 5.10 or two. Why do I always choose to climb with these annoying Asians? (That’s an inside joke, y’all.)
It was cool though. I suppose I’ll try to keep going (I bought a new harness, after all.), and hopefully this will add an extra kick to me current “get the hell back in shape” regime.
(Pronounce that like you’re from the Bronx or something: tuh-MAY-duhs)
Just a quick shout out to Kevin, Chief Body Bender at the old hotbox, who mentioned after class tonight that he had stopped by the blog. He seemed to think we had set our expectations a bit low previously — Personally, I think I was just setting myself up for success.
So, how am I doing? Well, I’ve got good, questionable, and amusing data points for you:
- Good: My flexibility has improved markedly.
- Questionable: My back still feels a bit shredded. I’ve come to realize that up until now, I never bent my back in the “back-bend” direction. Perhaps when I was climbing, but not to the extremes I try in yoga. I think I may have done too much too soon, and have slowed my roll a bit in that respect.
- Amusing: You might recall how I raved like little woman about my glowing post-yoga complexion… Well, a part of that is a bright, shining - nigh unto strobing - red nose. Like a not-so-wee cherry tomato. It’s hilarious (to me).
Tonight it was extra fun: It’s 6 degrees outside so when we left, great plumes of steam rose from our bodies [insert profound steaming body simile or metaphor here].
I love that.
Published in BiblioThingy,
Code Monkeying,
Curiosities,
Folx,
Food and Cookery,
Getting Fit,
Homebody,
Hooliganimals,
TechnoLust,
Televisio,
The Intarweb and
TuneStuff .
So, yeah… I’m still here. Here’s a little catch-up:
- My efforts at work on the superultramegaubercrazy-high priority project have come to a rather frustrating result so far thanks to interoperability problems between ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9. Every time we hit the Oracle9 database it causes the memory usage of the ColdFusion server to climb, with that memory never being released. This eventually causes the connection to the database to die with an S1001 Memory Allocation Error, which requires a ColdFusion restart to fix the problem (until the memory allocation builds back up again). Super-fucking-duper.
- The Big Blue Couches rock. While we are trying to keep the pets off them, it’s obviously futile. At least the puddles of Mingus hair come off the ultra-luscious blue microsuede without a problem. I’m just extra-pleased with the fact taht I can lie completely prostrate on the big sofa without touching either arm.
- The Wife and I have been to the hotbox yoga a total of three times so far. I am enjoying it quite a bit, though I think I may have overstretched my back the last time out. We hope to squeeze a couple more classes into our two week trial period.
- My motorcycle wrenching buddy Erik and his wife are inches away from having their baby boy. Very exciting times for them!
- I’ll be brining the second turkey of the month for Thanksgiving festivities starting tonight. If you haven’t brined a turkey or at least eaten the product of said process, I can’t even express how much you need to try it.
- I’m almost done with the Tales of the Otori trilogy. I highly recommend all three books.
- Now let’s turn the lens outward a bit:
And thus concludes today’s category smorgasbord.
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