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Monday, July 08, 2002 16:51
Been a long timeIt has been a long time, I know. At the moment there is much upheaval going on in ravenfamily land. For this wing (ha!) anyway. The Booze Monkey, Frood and I are just about to complete buying a house. Frood and I haven't owned a house before so it's quite exciting, and this one is right out in the sticks. There aren't even any street lights, which suits me down to the ground as I'm a supporter of the Campaign for Dark Skies. One day we might put a window in the attic and I can get an astronomical telescope, which would be fabulous. I'm also entering a brand new training period, both physical and non-physical. My training goals have changed completely, I'm no longer looking at lifting massive amounts of iron. I realised that my ideas of strength do not distinguish between the sort of strength that allows a soldier to march across Dartmoor for 36 hours and the sort of strength that allows a strongman to lift a bus. What I want is the former, but this seems to mean, for me, that I need the latter as well. That makes no sense, physiologically. I've also been getting little telling-offs from my T'ai-Chi teacher for lifting weights, as he says that it compresses the joints and closes the energetic gates, which is counter-productive for T'ai-Chi. Then I had a dream in which my strength, my inner strength, was what mattered, and I realised that I don't want a brutish strength. I want to be lean and strong and lithe, capable of great endurance. So that is what I am going to be training for. The new house is quite a bit further away from work, so I will be upping my weekly mileage by around 50% just by continuing to commute to work. After some months of being left to get on with things, I was paid a visit one night by an old friend who told me, quite abruptly, that it was "Time for you to go back into training, girl" and so things have been rather fast and furious ever since. That dream I had about strength was only last week, and there was me and a couple of others on a training course, set at a ski resort somewhere very high up in the mountains. It was a place where people could continue to ski in places even during the summer, and the training course was in part of the resort complex. The building was this massive affair made out of dark-stained timber and smoked glass, with a huge frontage that leaned up and over, somewhat like a scallop shell stuck at an angle into the sand, or the Sydney Opera house flattened out. We underwent weapons training, sniper training, scout and reconnaissance training. There were compulsory marches out into the surrounding countryside. On one of these marches we visited a monastery, which was quite a strange place. There was a shop there, within the walls. It wasn't exactly a tourist shop - the order was not supposed to allow outsiders within the walls of the monastery, but the shop had been opened in an effort to bring in funds because the monks had been struggling. It was the sort of shop that only the right sort of people got to hear about, and only the right sort of people who had the right sort of contacts were able to find out where it was. Whenever any visitor went in to the shop, the monk accompanying them had to genuflect in the quad and beg God for forgiveness. It was quite surreal. The monk who actually ran the shop was rather handsome, with long, brown, wavy hair and a fine chin. He looked a little like Paul McGann, but slightly less effeminate. He had a good range of recurve hunting bows, including a model that was very similar to the target bow I have at home. We had a nice chat about technique. There was also a whole range of hunting and fishing equipment - this was not some tatty gift shop selling glow-in-the-dark Madonnas and statues of the Buddy Jesus. Towards the end of the course, a storm blew up on the mountain. Many people out there were walkers, because at that time of the year the snow conditions were intermittent and the views were good. On this afternoon, however, a storm came in over the mountain and it was suddenly like we were in the depths of winter. The chair lift was running even though conditions were officially too dangerous, because there was no other way the resort managers could get people off the mountain. Skiers could be left to make their own way down, but the walkers just couldn't get down in time. We watched through the big smoked windows while people clung to the chairs and the snow first confettied, then drifted across the glass. One of the other course attendees was a massive South African, a giant of a man, a Boer. His name was Skwook, and he was a brute. Not the brightest of people, although a lovely man. Something about the storm seemed to trigger something in his head. We were sitting in the bar/restaurant, watching the storm blacken the sky when he went a bit berserk. I seemed to feel it coming, only it didn't feel like I predicted it. It felt like I spotted it as soon as it started happening, but somehow blurred backwards in time so that I was prepared for him when he actually started to move. He came charging towards me, aiming for the big window behind, and somehow I was already up and out of my chair, running towards him. We clashed, and stopped moving. I had my arms around him, on either side of his great, barrel chest, but it was important that I didn't actually hold on to him. It was one direct force against a resisting force. He could have stepped backwards or sideways at any point, I wasn't restricting his movement in any way except forwards. He was about a foot taller than me. I had my right heel digging lightly into the floor behind me, my left foot slight raised off the ground, my whole body leaning in towards him, my hips tilted slightly to the right. There was no sense of my foot being pressed against the floor, no sliding. He was stopped dead. The only thing I had to do was maintain my focus and keep my breathing centred. I remember very clearly the sensation of centred breathing, and the complete confidence. I knew he couldn't shift me, that he was internally off-balance, and I knew that while he was a great brute of a man who could physically crush me, I had far greater internal strength than he did and that he could not win against me. Finally he started to subside and relax, and he gave me a hug. I have been quite poorly the last month or so as well. I caught a virus at work, and it just will not go away. I had to take a week off work, which I hated, and every time I think I have finally got rid of it, it comes back. Mugwort caught the same bug, and I did experiment with him. I tried tuning his immune system into the virus by 'talking' to his glands and clearing the blockage in his chest and throat nodes. Apparently he was violently sick a couple of hours later but is feeling quite a bit better now. I suppose I can say 'it didn't not work', which is just about all anyone can ever say about this sort of thing. Of course, I still haven't figured out how to effect that sort of work on myself, not properly. I suppose if I had, I would be able to sort myself out, but as it is I seem to be stuck with a bug that I can't shift. Then there's the Dunwich Dynamo in a week and a half - 125miles from London to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, overnight. Frood is going to the Truck festival near Oxford that weekend, which he arranged ages ago because I was doing the Dun Run. At this point, I'm not sure I will be fit enough to complete the ride, or whether it is a sensible thing to attempt. I am still feeling congested, have developed a raft of mouth ulcers, and my muscles and joints are still very stiff and sore, particularly my left ankle which is almost completely useless first thing in the morning. Of course, we have to move in the next couple of weeks as well, because the completion date is likely to be early next week. On top of all this, the trans-Atlantic pipe that allows Tiscali to connect to some sites in the US has gone down, which means I can only access Ravenfamily from work. That's ok for blogging and minor website sort of stuff, but means I have no access to my email at the moment - if you have been emailing me and I haven't responded, that is why. And I've had to strip down and rebuild Fingal about 6 times in the past week, in an attempt to identify and remedy this really annoying clicking sound. At first I thought it was the bottom bracket, then the chainset (which is a Sugino, and the Shimano fang tool won't get the bolt that sits behind the crank, it's nearly impossible to get the Campag version, so Booze Monkey spent an hour grinding a Shimano fang down with a dremmel, sigh), then the headset. All of which had to be taken apart, cleaned and rebuilt. I replaced the bottom bracket, with no luck. I cleaned and greased the bearings in the aheadset - no luck. Finally I think I traced the offending noise to part of the Avid V-brakes, and I'm hoping that the trip home tonight will be a silent one. Apart from the saddle creaking, as I seem to have broken my Terry Liberator - way past in, and out the other side to almost useless. And my nice new bell won't fit Ach well. Nearly time to go home. I'll tell you all about our new frog some other time. (0) comments | links to this post
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