I think I am slowly finding my pace. Here is my record so far:
4/13/2009: averaged 14 min/mile (did 3 miles)
4/23/2009: averaged 11.52 min/mile (in the first 4 miles), averaged 13 min/mile in total 5 miles (walk the 5th mile). I
5/4/2009: averaged 11.42 min/mile (in the first 4 miles), averaged 12 min/miles (in the first 5 miles). In total, did 6 miles (averaging 13.2 min/mile when run the first 5 miles and walk the 6th mile).
My understanding so far in running long distance:
*** very important to clear mind of everything. Although there is a TV screen in front of me, I don’t watch it. It is of foremost importance to not see anything and just focus.
1st mile, very slow — pace 13 or 14 min/ mile
2nd, 3rd, 4th mile, gaining pace, full power — pace is 10 min/ mile
(In my mind, while doing 2-4th mile, was screaming “CRANK IT CRANK IT!!!!!!” I believe this is what they call runner’s high)
5th mile — pace is 13 mil / hour….feel like the back of my knee is bleeding. Strange pain in strange places.
Between 5th – 6th mile — Hey, I feel like I can do more!
It is during 5th – 6th mile when I felt that, yes, I can do 10, because the “CRANK IT CRANK IT” voice was reemerging during those miles.
My bones do not listen to me. I’m genuinely annoyed by the fact that my body is so inflexible. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But now that I am on my 3rd serious ballet lesson, I realized that out of about 10 women and 1 man in the class, I am the most inflexible!
My ballet class is so slow that it goes like a yoga class, where the predominant amount of class time is devoted to stretch excercises. Whenever the instructor told us to lean down to touch the toes, or lean down to touch the floor, or to do butterfly (press knees down and lean down), I would look at the mirror and I would be the single head popped up with body. The only part of my body that is leaning down is my head. Everybody would be waist down on the floor. I mean, for goodness sakes, even the 40+ women who had babies already are down on the floor (as well as the single male)!
So I went online to search for how to be more flexible. Then I see all these youtube clips of 6-year old telling me how to do a split. Yeah, right.
But ballet is sort of like yoga. The point is to be flexible. After my first lesson, I went home feeling like doing an upside down arch on the floor the whole week. Or just turning my whole body upside down. It’s sort of wierd how simple stretches can make you feel.
Can trying to be flexible become addictive?
PS. I display the following picture, borrowed from the site of “first day of Yoga” to demonstrate what I meant, by people’s head and waist touching the floor in my ballet class (in the following picture, it’s yoga).
Filed under: Lifestyle
After my ballet session, the instructor came to ask whether this was my first time. I said I had lessons for a year or so when I was 5 or 6. She said,
“It shows! You still got it in you!”
Enough said.
P.S. One of the songs that the live pianist played during one of the excercise is Scott Joplin’s tune which I also used to constantly play on my piano.
Every Friday, I talk to an “advisor” whose advices I am growing to appreciate by each week.
Today, she explains to me why “manners” in talking, or what I interchange with “being fake”, is an important thing to do, and why it overwhelms whatever altruistic benefits you assign to just being blunt (most people will be 0 or negative benefits; but for some reasons for me is positive; but I am learning it’s negative).
Analogy: in a wolf pack, wolves survive by having manners to other wolves.
This post continues a series of post which will document the beginning loss of naivete of yours truly.
Masterpiece theatre broadcasted Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’uberbille last couple weeks. And towards the end, the friends of the heroine wrote a cryptic letter to the good guy’s family, saying “Beware of an enemy disguised as a friend.”
This warning in fact should be applicable in real life. As I observe and think, not just believe, I suppose that there are indeed a couple possibilities of such people. We all have ambitions and when they conflict, people do whatever they can to advance themselves in the real world. Might as well. Fair enough. We are all selfish homo erectus constrained by the scarcity of resources.
Yet the stupid thing that I do all the time is to make the same mistakes of trusting people and saying things that should have been said to only people I trust.
Once I begin to doubt people’s words, I also begin to doubt their motives. Yet I have faith that I can still be a happy person despite becoming an untrusting person because I will only trust a selected few people. That should have been what I should be doing all along…now I hope it’s not too late.
Filed under: Lifestyle
An hour or so before, I was cursing while waiting for the bus in front of the library in a freezing -4F: why the hell should we play broomball (a game of running in an ice rink with a broom trying to hit a small ball into the goal) during the coldest day of the week (at 8pm)? Everywhere you look, things are freezing. The floor has a thin white tinge to it; car windows are fogged up; glasses are fogged up.
An hour later (now 9pm), still shaken from being active outside until -4F for an hour, I am still recovering from the excitement of the game. Before the game started, we encountered a crisis of not having enough girls (you need 4 girls and 4 boys to play), due to the cold weather and other reasons. After the game, the people who reluctantly had agreed to come had signed up to be on the team to play permanently. That was how exciting the game had been!
The game lasted about 30-40 minutes. Basically, our team dominated the whole game. I supposed that at the beginning, people were kind of cautious (running on ice). But as the game progressed, people were dropping left and right (I am one of those people of course). In fact, I’ve discovered that a rather cool strategy is to throw myself in front of other people (and while laying down, utilize my “invisible hands”). Also, I saw many people using feet and hand to push people away. I myself was pushed in several instances (that’s why at last I resort to my “roadkill” and “invisible hands” strategy).
Next time: more cushioning in the butt area. Ski pants. Shoes that do not slide. Less clothes.
Filed under: Lifestyle
I KNOW for a fact that I am not homesick, due to my constantly being on the chopping block at home this winter. Yet subconsciously, I could be homesick. How else can I explain the daily dreams of parents ever since I came back to Chicago? I came back on Tuesday night, and since then my body has felt this strange exhaustion, and whenever I woke up from a night of sleep, I would feel this total relaxation of my body. I felt like a jellyfish. It is probably these nights of total relaxation, to be finally be in my own apartment and bed, that I could go into deep sleep, consequently having these dreams.
Anyways, yesterday night (or today morning), I had this wondrous dream that my parents had moved into a new house in US. (In Arizona specifically, probably since I watched a HDTV program on buying houses in Arizona for old people before I went to sleep). This house is BIG. I mean, it’s HUGE. I have a very vivid image of how the house look like. The dark wooden floors. Rooms after rooms! I saw myself exploring every room. Every bathroom. Going down the stairs. Although my parents and I and the dogs are in the same house, I could here my dad reomotely, and physically were indeed far apart. I remember jumping down stairs, which are all upholstered! There are many pianos in the house, strangely. There was a 2-level keyboard. There are dark grand piano. There is definitely a sense of mystique in the house. But mostly, it was the many rooms. I went in and out, making discoveries after discoveries. I even discovered a basement, stocked with the most modern home theatre equipments….somehow, when I was young I also had a recurring dream of a big house, but not with such details.
In the same night, I had this bad dream: a middle-age pimply face and ugly and fat white man and a old woman (which he claims is his mother) came knocking on my parents’ door and claimed that he is my husband. I wasn’t present then so my parents took them in. When I came home, and they told me this, I realized I had suffered such a degree of memory loss that I could not deny the truth of the situation. I realized that at the interim period I had suffered from a black out. So anything could have happened.
So this white, ugly, pimply, fat, middle age man continues to claim a spot in my household. He even went to sea with us. He directed my sail-kayak and saw it succeed in taking advantage of the wind at sea. He claimed all the credit.
Then I came out from my blackout. I realized that it was all a scam. (don’t know how!) So I confronted the dude, and I distinctly remember myself screaming (really loudly!) — ” YOU LIER, I’ll CUT YOUR THROAT!”. Meanwhile, I made real my threats by waving a gigantic steak knife right in front of his eyes. He and his mother fled. That’s the end of that dream.
In this kind of freezing weather, it behooves one NOT to do the following.
1. wear contacts outside
2. cry on the street
Otherwise, the result would be the case of “glassy eyes”.
Yes, today we redefine glassy eyes as describing the situation when you eyeballs froze, as the following mini-me demonstrated.
Snowing resumed yesterday night, and continued throughout the day. The road is snowy and icy. At these times, I felt it is EXTREMELY unwise for me (specifically, me) to be on the road. Here is why:
1. If I drive, my car skids. Yes, I know I know…my car is supposed to be “SUV”, meaning it should skid less than normal cars. But it does not. Comparing my car’s skid rate at the same driving speed as other sedans on the road, I felt my car skids much easier. By now I know enough about my car such that when I drive, I know it is extremely unsafe. The feeling of the car losing control is very scary, trust me. So at this time, I should not drive, unless the road is empty at least 200 yards within the vicinity of my car.
2. Even if I were a pedestrian, cars that skid will crash toward me. Even in snowy places like Chicago, cars don’t put on snow chains. And the scene on the road is not like Lake Tahoe, where all the cars are SUV and have snow chains. CARS DON’T PUT ON SNOW CHAINS HERE and they drive like 30mph on a snowy road. Which means that they do skid, and when they do and if I happen to be within the vicinity of those cars, I’ll die. So I also make sure that I won’t be such an unsuspecting victim by staying at least 200 yards away from any cars I see on the road. And on a street with normal traffic flow, this is impossible. So I should not be on the road.
Conclusion: better stay home to work.
P.S. the reason why I wrote this post is because I am on the road right now, and contemplating the wisdom of it.
Indeed, the 3rd time is the charm.
This is my 3rd time to stay in Washington DC, and I have never enjoyed it more, one week into my stay. Although so far I have been staying in the ghetto area, I’ve realized some of my secretly relished dreams.
1. I found a cheap liquidation mart in the ghetto area. Living in DC for 2 years between 2004-2006, I always loathe that there’s not gigantic chain store i.e. K-Mart, Walmart, Target in the district area. So it turns out the gigantic discount store is located in the ghetto! There I can buy cheap bedsheets and cheap furnitures.
2. I had dinner at Afterwords (my favorite favorite favorite restaurant! (behind Kramers bookstore), lunch at Luna Grill, dinner at this outdoor cool place on 17th street and had mango margarita, and dinner at another diner at Union Station, soon dinner at another of my favorite favorite at Ebbit Grill, and soon Vanilla Custard at Old Town Alexandria. The lack of choices of restaurants in Hyde Park has given me a new appreciation for the variety of bars and restaurants that DC has to offer. And I seek these restaurants boldly and enthusiastically. Oh how I love the choice of food DC has to offer! How decadent!
3. Today at my old workplace, a former colleague remarked I carried myself now more maturely. I know the truth of that statement, as now when I walk into a bar, I level my glances in a calm surveillance of the environment. I can hold my Bud Light (3 beers in a row), and I can sit by myself at the bar table and strike coversations with strangers while holding my poise. (at least I think I have)
