Updates From The FitnessZone(TM)

[wolffyluna]

...because I could not think of a non-silly title for this post.

So, recent adventures in swimming and horseriding!

Swimming

I've started going swimming recently. It's been sort of a family bonding activity now that I free from university. Even if well all end up in different lanes, I'm still counting it as family bonding.

The pool we go to actually has two pools: a 25m long, 1.6m at the deepest one, and a "10m" long and 1.2m at the deepest one. I swim in the latter. I am-- not good with deep water, where deep is anything where I could not stand up and have my head completely out of the water. And I am also not great at swimming, so I can sometimes end up swimming while making no forward progress. In shallow water, this is merely annoying, and can be fixed by letting my feet touch the bottom and hopping in place for a bit to get my momentum back. But in deep water, it has the risk of being a One Way Ticket To Freak Out City.

So I swim in the smaller pool. And it's nice. It's a little bit too hot for me (people often compliment pools on being the temperature of a bath, and I do not understand these people), but it's otherwise a nice pool.

And I've been doing about 30 laps of it a session. Partially because that's a number I can do pretty comfortably by going "Come on Wolffy, just one more, you can do it!"-- and also because that's the number I get to by going "I'm not getting out of this pool before my mother gets of the one she's in." (My mother is a spoonie, and this may be silly, but it seems personally silly for me to cry uncle re:exercise before she does. It's silly, but at least it motivates me.)

So, I thought I'd been swimming about 300m. Which is pretty respectable! Not as much as my parents, who try to go to 500m a session, but I haven't swum as much as them, so I'm probably not quite as fit--

Except the pool isn't actually 10m long. I only found out about this yesterday. It's actually 17m long. Meaning that by doing 30 laps, I've been swimming 510m.

...So, that's pretty good.

Horseriding

I've still been regularly horseriding! There's not been much to say about it, no exciting stories-- until this week.

The week before, our instructor asked the class if we wanted to go on a trail ride next lesson. We were all "Yes! :D Trail rides are awesome."

The days ticked by. A heatwave rolled over. And then, following on the heels of the heatwave, a dust storm rolled over.

And our :D turned to D:

But, we were going on a trail ride!

I ended up riding Gary. Gary is a lovely horse. He feels like the horse a sheriff would ride into town on in a old Western movie. Part of that is because he is an appaloosa stock horse, part of that is he has a very dramatic, sway-y gait. I hadn't ridden him much recently, because he's been recovering from an injury.

We check our tack, get mounted up, and fix up our stirrups-- on a slope. Now, this might just be a me thing, but I am very bad at working out if my stirrups are even if I'm on a slope.

So we set off, with me with embarrassingly uneven stirrups. But I can compensate! And I plan to, when we stop at some point, sneakily fix them up.

The ride starts out fairly uneventful. We only have our instructor in the lead, and we don't have a helper in the back like normal, because we are a small and 'competent' class, so that adds a little frisson of risk, but whatever. We warm the horses up, and our instructor answers questions about 'Whatever happened to [lesson horse we haven't seen around for a while]'. The answers ranged from 'Unfortunately, he's dead' to 'We found out that he was actually way better at helping train horses we are breaking in than as a lesson horse. Actually, see that horse in the paddock we're riding past? That's him.'

And then we start going on a different trail than our normal one. And then we encounter a gate. Our instructor opens it, and tells us to go on ahead, she'll catch up to us. Just ride up that hill. Oh, actually, trot up it. And steer the horses around the worst of the rocks, but otherwise let them work it out.

This wasn't an absurd thing to ask of us? We are definitely competent to trot up a rocky hill, with no one in front of us, with someone keeping an eye on us from further down the hill. But I still found it a bit O.O

And also nervewracking. Because yes, we were competent to do that. But trotting up a hill, with uneven stirrups, on a largely unfamiliar horse, while trying to work out the right balance between steering around the rocks and letting the horse work it out, and not looking at the ground too much (because when you're horseriding, where you're looking is probably where you'll end up going.) And Gary keeps half-stumbling, which is a little alarming.

But we get to the top of the hill, and our instructor catches up. Now all we have to do is go down it.

...the downward side of the hill does not have a path. It is littered with loose rocks. And it is, arguably, not a hill so much as a cliff.

But hey, apparently if we lean right back, stick our legs out as far as we can, and let the horses sort our the rest, we can do it. The horses are perfectly capable of this, we just have to trust them.

And we hadn't stopped, so I had no chance to fix my stirrups. So I was off balance.

So we pick our way down the hill, me trying to compensate for my stirrup mistakes, and hoping that Gary could make it down the hill (because honestly I did not know him well enough to trust him.) This was made awkward because his strategy for getting down the hill seemed to be a) follow his friends, as they tried to walk down the hill be walking sideways along it and b) nearly blunder into rabbit holes.

But we get to the bottom of the hill, and we walk along the little gully for a bit, before we get told to turn around, and trot up a more paddock-y bit of hill, back onto the path.

So we do that. Or, well, try to do that, because every single one of those horses decided to canter up it instead.

At that point, I was done. I was incapable of worrying about me or the horse doing something stupid and one or more of us falling over. I was done. So I cantered up that hill, gently pulling on Gary's reins to say 'No, that's not what I asked. Break to the trot and go a little slower, please.'

Apparently, I did one of my best canters yet just then.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Ah, I have done any swimming in years. Since I started uni, even. It's such a commitment of time and energy to find my way to a pool and then to shower off afterwards and so forth. And I'm really not a "Physical exercise" kind of person. I get quite enough walking up and down the hill my house is on. But it was fun (and easy on my bad leg, which is why I did it regularly in my early teens when that was a more important issue).

[wolffyluna]

Yeah, I'm pretty much only going because I've currently got more free time than I know what to do with, and people who are willing to transport me to the pool.

[contrarianarchon]

"I've currently got more free time than I know what to do with"

What's it like, living over there in a patently fictional universe

(I have spent the last couple of days doing what feels like nothing but urgent might-stop-my-next-years-plans paperwork and fire-extinguishing. I feel like panicked shit right now)

[wolffyluna]

Oh no! Hopefully the paperwork stops bursting into flames soon!