I don’t quite know if I’m ready for the Grand Canyon, but I think I’m as ready as I’m going to be. The weird thing is how my body is reacting to all of the stair climbing, weight carrying, and long distance walking that I’ve been doing.
My weight hasn’t changed any after the initial drop when I started but it’s shifted. My upper body has shrunk (including my bra size, alas) but my now larger thighs feel like solid blocks of rock. I keep poking them, surprised at how little they give way under my fingers. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, I also have lots of little round bruises on them now.
I’ve got almost everything that I need now, I just need to make a grocery run for some incidentals (fruit, hot cocoa, sunscreen) and I’ll be ready to leave all bright and early Sunday morning. And when I say early I mean seriously early, if Alaska Airlines lets me switch my flight I’ll be leaving the rainy Emerald City at 7:30 in the morning, which means I’ll be plowing through tourists sometime around 6:30 and in route even earlier. At least I’m not driving up from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon though, so I can catch some zzzz on the way.
Other things that I’ve been up to besides training: I spent a weekend recently in Vancouver eating everything my roommate and I could find. Seriously, we came for the Night Market food and for Dim Sum and only realized when we got there that we hadn’t planned anything else for the trip. But we made do, mostly finding other ways to eat while we explored. We hunted out maple sugar candy (which we never found, although we did find some awesome maple sugar gelato), strange chip flavors (ketchup and onions and “all dressed”- a mixture of vinegar and some other stuff), poutine (which was enjoyable but unusual, I mean, I like my cheese curds and french fries as well as the next person but throwing gravy into the mix just seemed a little unusual) and Tim Horton donuts (which were an amazing ninety cents).
We ran into grocery stores and marveled at what was really cheap and what was strangely expensive. We explored Chinatown shops and read about the history of the area. We saw the steam clock, sat down by the pier, walked all through downtown, and took the sky train back and forth- marveling at the giant ball of lights and the weirdly similar apartment skyscrapers. We didn’t get to any of the normal sights, like Stanley Park, but we were satisfactorily stuffed and footsore enough from what we did do.
I also took a trapeze class recently. It was a Groupon that I had bought about a year ago and was about to expire. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who had forgotten to use the Groupon until it was almost too late and so all the Circus Taster classes over at Emerald City Trapeze Arts my coupon was supposed to be used for were full. Luckily ECTA was nice enough to let me take one of their trapeze classes instead. In one two hour period we learned how to do a knee hang catch which… you know, how about I just show you:
That? See that? I did that! Although it took me longer than anyone else in the class. It was a bit difficult for me to get my knees up on the bar in time to arch back for the catch, to the extent that I never got a cowbell telling me that I could proceed. By all rights I should have sat out that last run, the one with a live person on the other side trying to catch me.
But the nice people at ECTA really really want you to learn how to do this. So they went ahead and sent me up a couple more times than everyone else and, when I still hadn’t gotten it perfect yet, they decided to just go ahead and throw me into the last run.
“If you do the catch then, great! If not, no worries,” they said to me.
First time I tried the catch I didn’t even make it to the leg hang. I was nervous and uncomfortable and actually let go of the bar early.
But the second time? The second time I made it. And since I was the last one up I did it to the cheers of everyone else in the class. And, even better, succeeding after trying and trying to get it right and failing felt better than getting it on my first try.
It felt like I earned it.