Salsa workout class at the Y went terribly last night. We were doing all this work on isolating the hips and the torso. I started out great, and my hips were swinging back and forth like everyone else's in coordination with my knees, but I have been experimenting with jazz shoes for dancing (I looked for a picture of the shoes I bought, but haven't found them yet) and my foot started getting really sore. By the end, I could barely keep up with what we were doing. I made up for it by swimming laps for twenty minutes or so after, thinking that a two-activity workout is greater than the sum of its parts. It did actually make me feel like a little bit of a bad-ass and afterwards I ran into one of the students in the class who very kindly said that I was doing fine.
Whenever I get into a situation like this, where I can't keep up with what people around me are doing, I get transported back to eighth grade gym class, when my survival instinct told me to check out of whatever was going on. There are lots of uncomfortable memories of this, running up to hurdles and stopping and walking over them, walking the cross country course because I got tired, the tumbling unit where we had to do cartwheels in front of everyone, and I just physically could not propel myself over myself on my hands. I don't want to wax too melodramatic over something as hackneyed and clicheed as eighth grade gym, but I think its important to remind myself that I am trying to go about responding to disappointment and frustration differently, by meeting challenges with open arms, rather than throwing in the towel and going home.
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