flexagon | Another work week over

This week I read The Glass Castle -- the first book I've ever seen that documents a childhood sort of like mine. Oh, I don't think my parents were quite as crazy as the parents in the book, and their dynamic was quite different, but parts of it were outright spooky: the substandard housing thing with fake plans for something better, the kids drawing up a budget for the parents to use and the parents just not doing it, the parents studying esoteric subjects while basic needs around them aren't being met. The kids creating solid city lives with high priority placed on housing and yes, putting food on the table. It's true that I never scavenged out of garbage cans... might've though, if my parents had had four kids, and that's why I never say I wish I'd had siblings. Reading this book though, I wanted them for the first time. Yeah, it might have been awful, but imagine allies, real allies my size helping to plot the escape.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot of crossfit.com stuff this week in an attempt to ignore

heisenbug being gone. I used the lat pulldown machine yesterday to see how close I am to a bar muscle-up... 80 pounds was easy and 90 was just a little too hard, which makes me think I could possibly do 90 if I was fresh but am nowhere close to 130. (I also tweaked my thumb a little; no wonder these things are usually done on rings). It might be nice to do some reps of those. I also want to start timing myself on L-sits, which I used to not be able to do at all and now I can do for up to 5 seconds. Crossfit recommends working up to 3 minutes... huh, whatever... my goal is more like 15 seconds.

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3 minutes, haha. i wouold like 30 secs or maybe a minute. i'm taking a hss break after the hs-a-thon so i'm going to work l-sits and straddle ls :)

Crossfit throws out a lot of ridiculous-sounding goals -- for example, they're very into hss and hspus, which is how I wandered back to their site to begin with, and they say you should aim at walking all the way down a football field on your hands (!).

In a way it's good -- sometimes just knowing something is possible will keep a person working when otherwise they'd just figure they were at an okay level.

haha. do you suppose they mean you can come down as often as needed but all the traveling must be done on hands? that seems semi doable. where do they say that?

No! They say "without falling". I still want to know who can actually do this... but it's part of their manifesto defining what they think fitness is on page 6 with the rest of the (brief) handstand discussion. Laugh with me about how nonchalant they are: "after you can hold a handstand for several minutes without benefit of the wall or a spotter it is time to develop a pirouette." Right, that'll be in 2013 then.

I do actually like their definition of fitness, though it's not important to me to be so non-specialized and I also consider sports completely irrelevant.

hmmm... flexiprincess on lj is my hs idol and her goal is to walk all 4 sides of a competition gymnastics floor without falling. how does that compare to a football field? she still hasn't done it and i could go on forever about the things she can do.

i know crossfit is pretty male-geared and handwalking is easier for men, but.... it's taken me a year to get a single minut freestanding. several minutes? and one can develop a pirouette well before that. wel, anyway! hahaha.

Walking handstands are much easier for guys. Several of the older guys in my gym could walk the length of the gym and back pretty easily, which was probably close to 100 yards. They did it almost every day.

It's also usually easier for the younger women (distibution of weight and all that). I, of course, could do no such thing as go the length of the gym, but I could hold a handstand for 5+ minutes and do pretty much whatever I wanted to while in it.

The pirouette thing sounds awesome, they mean really on one hand, right? I would think friction might be an issue.

5 minutes!? Wow, this is going to come out wrong but I had no idea you were ever that good. 5 minutes is a long, long time. I'm impressed.

Pirouettes in handstand aren't on one hand though. You lift one hand, turn it in, step on it, turn the other hand to match, etc. I've seen people work on it in gymnastics sometimes, although there the goal never seems to be "just balance", it's like "get up, do something, then come back down". I know I only have one data point here, but it's really much, much less controlled than they seem to teach it in a circus context.

Ah, have I never told you I was on the junior national team? I was pretty serious about it until between age 11 and 12 I grew 4 inches, went from no boobs to a C cup, and instantly had hips. I started hurting myself all the time, my coach was on me about my weight all the time, or at least seemed disappointed all the time, we were moving so I had to switch gyms anyway, and it was really expensive, so that was when I decided to quit.

However, honestly, 5 min. wasn't particularly good where I was. The expectations were pretty high. I could definitely do a pirouette as you describe though.

If you did, I think I didn't really understand what it meant. I'm impressed now, that's for damn sure.

Eh, don't be. I started when I was 4, practiced 4+ hrs/day (not when I was 4!), 5-6 days/wk. It would have been sad if I hadn't been any good. I am still a little pissed/disappointed/embarrassed about how it ended though. Oh well. Life was so fucked up at that point if I hadn't grown it would have been something else.

That sounds like a good read. A buy-it read or get-it-from-the-library read?

Speaking of this topic, have you done any work expanding your zine? I almost thought you might do Nano because of that.

I thought it was "buy it, so you can immediately lend it". It was really well-written.

I haven't been expanding the first zine but I have the scrappy beginnings of a volume 2. I am always so interested in Nano but it's really not consistent with my fitness goals/schedule right now.

The glass castle *is* extraodrinary.

Another work week over

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