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hawkwing_lbMile in 10 minutes. 19 mins. on treadmill total, for a little over 1.6 miles.
Then climbing. I finally made the route that's been defeating me since the beginning of the year. Wiped out on the other two I've been trying - the easier of which, twice, and yet I could do it Tuesday. Then tried the easiest route, attempting something like better technique: I was tired by then.
#
I've been thinking about the crazy/useful sports I've either sampled or done for quite a while. When I was eight or so, it was horseriding. That ended when I was eleven and the horse I'd been riding - a schoolfriend's family kept horses, and gave lessons cheaply - broke a leg and had to be put down. Sixteen, I took up karate, and haven't seriously put it down since: let it lapse a bit, maybe, but I get to have time to go back soonish. Seventeen, I sampled dinghy sailing for a week. Eighteen, tried my hand at diving and fell in love with it. Twenty-one, took up climbing, and in seven weeks I'm going to be learning to sail a tallship, too.
Wide variety of experiences, yes. Less wide than some, but still.
Things to do before I'm thirty, the non-academic variety: play with archery, shoot a rifle and learn how to take one apart and put it back together again, learn how to navigate by compass and sextant, take up jujutsu or some other martial art with weapons, spend a small amount of time some year learning to ride and care for a horse again, get a first aid qualification...
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my non-academic, non-writing-related ambitions. Well, that, and if I can afford it, become a divemaster or equivalent.
Sometimes I wonder if part of my attraction to aggressively active sports is my grandmother's influence. Because, you know, being of the generation and class and general mindset she is, she pushed me at cooking and knitting and sewing - or rather, pushed them at me at precisely the right angle to make me want to avoid them the whole rest of my life.
Because, really, reading and viewing the kind of material that says girls can have cool adventures too! and then getting the nice girls are homemakers propaganda from a woman whose understanding of gender roles was created in the thirties and forties, and consolidated by Ireland in the fifties and sixties - not the most progressive place and time on earth - did leave me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. (I'll take the cool adventures, thanks.)
And even though intellectually I recognise that the ability to cook, and to make and mend one's own clothes, and likewise other household-ish skills, are both cool and useful, in my brain they're framed as one side of a pair of mutually exclusive choices.
You can be tough and active and cool. Or you can be a person like my grandmother was then and to some extent is now, and allow your identity, your personhood, to stagnate into bitterness and identification - overidentification, even - with an outmoded and unfair role.
And, yeah, it's probably not a good thing that useful skills, in my head, are associated with that particularly unuseful paradigm.
Um. I'm pretty sure I had a point to this when I started. But it's getting on for midnight, and I've been awake for eighteen hours on about five hours' sleep, and that does not help the brain go.
Then climbing. I finally made the route that's been defeating me since the beginning of the year. Wiped out on the other two I've been trying - the easier of which, twice, and yet I could do it Tuesday. Then tried the easiest route, attempting something like better technique: I was tired by then.
#
I've been thinking about the crazy/useful sports I've either sampled or done for quite a while. When I was eight or so, it was horseriding. That ended when I was eleven and the horse I'd been riding - a schoolfriend's family kept horses, and gave lessons cheaply - broke a leg and had to be put down. Sixteen, I took up karate, and haven't seriously put it down since: let it lapse a bit, maybe, but I get to have time to go back soonish. Seventeen, I sampled dinghy sailing for a week. Eighteen, tried my hand at diving and fell in love with it. Twenty-one, took up climbing, and in seven weeks I'm going to be learning to sail a tallship, too.
Wide variety of experiences, yes. Less wide than some, but still.
Things to do before I'm thirty, the non-academic variety: play with archery, shoot a rifle and learn how to take one apart and put it back together again, learn how to navigate by compass and sextant, take up jujutsu or some other martial art with weapons, spend a small amount of time some year learning to ride and care for a horse again, get a first aid qualification...
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my non-academic, non-writing-related ambitions. Well, that, and if I can afford it, become a divemaster or equivalent.
Sometimes I wonder if part of my attraction to aggressively active sports is my grandmother's influence. Because, you know, being of the generation and class and general mindset she is, she pushed me at cooking and knitting and sewing - or rather, pushed them at me at precisely the right angle to make me want to avoid them the whole rest of my life.
Because, really, reading and viewing the kind of material that says girls can have cool adventures too! and then getting the nice girls are homemakers propaganda from a woman whose understanding of gender roles was created in the thirties and forties, and consolidated by Ireland in the fifties and sixties - not the most progressive place and time on earth - did leave me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. (I'll take the cool adventures, thanks.)
And even though intellectually I recognise that the ability to cook, and to make and mend one's own clothes, and likewise other household-ish skills, are both cool and useful, in my brain they're framed as one side of a pair of mutually exclusive choices.
You can be tough and active and cool. Or you can be a person like my grandmother was then and to some extent is now, and allow your identity, your personhood, to stagnate into bitterness and identification - overidentification, even - with an outmoded and unfair role.
And, yeah, it's probably not a good thing that useful skills, in my head, are associated with that particularly unuseful paradigm.
Um. I'm pretty sure I had a point to this when I started. But it's getting on for midnight, and I've been awake for eighteen hours on about five hours' sleep, and that does not help the brain go.
