Fly, spot, fly. Base, spot, base.

[flexagon]

So the acrobatic fun is over -- oh, not over forever, acrobatics is a lifelong journey, but I'm back in Boston and no longer pushing my deltoids to their limits. Going back to regular vinyasa yoga today I felt all sorts of new precision and alignment in my body, as I was thinking of all the acrobatic principles of weight placement and hollow body and so forth. Near the end of the class we held a headstand for a while, and the teacher said "if you're still up you can pike down halfway and hold it. ... ... if you're still up, see if you can touch your straight legs to the floor and come back up in one breath." I did. I'm not sure anyone else did -- all I could see was a bunch of child's poses -- though K on my right is a very good regular and might have been up with me.

I feel I should explain, I wasn't stuck on the floor basing for the entire time. About 2 hours of every day was on individual work (asana, handstands, stretching, strength exercises and warmups). Another hour was in same-size trios where I alternated between basing and flying. The second half of each day, in our acrobatic trios, is when I was basing, and even there I was alternating between basing and spotting. The final bit of info you need is that I like basing, quite a bit. It just doesn't make me totally effervesce like flying does. So in an intensive when I base, I mostly pour energy into the solo work in the mornings, and enjoy taking care of my flyer the rest of the time. I think I had a breakthrough this week on how to keep my shoulders from moving when I'm in handstands (step one: be able to feel them moving), and I have some new exercises to play with in the gym, so I'm happy.

Now I'm filling out an application for the so-called Acrotastic Extravaganza in April -- a 5-day thing in Oakland led by the acroyoga founders and the YogaSlackers and Lux/Dawn from Seattle who are amazingly good. All those folks were at the festival and I want MORE.

Going back to work on Friday was a mixed bag. The two prima donnas in my team are about to bite each other's heads off. The next week or two comprise my last chance to suck information out of the head of my group's tech lead before I'm the tech lead, so I need to get my brain all spongy and receptive for that. After he goes, we'll be down to one prima donna and I think life will get simpler in some ways.

I also think that being TL is going to be some basing and a lot of spotting, no flying at all.

Comments

[randysmith]

The flying's rare but it does happen--sometimes you're really the right person to do some key bit of debugging, or design, or something like that, because you're right at the center of everything and you can see how it works. But yes, I think biasing against it, for all the obvious reasons, is the right thing. And as you point out, there can be a lot of satisfaction in basing and spotting.