Paying for it now

I knew I should have kept up with dancing while I was traveling.

I spend most of my working hours sitting, and I've gotten so good at it that my body starts aching if I spend too much time standing. That's part of the reason I decided to go back to dancing -- to get my ass out of a chair and move.

On last week's trip I spent three full days standing. Ow.

I had an appointment scheduled with my massage therapist for the day after I got home, but she had to cancel. The hurricane prevented me from getting an appointment with my backup CMT until this morning. He did a great job working out knots and loosening things up, but his style is less relaxing and more like a visit to a physical therapist. The result is that I was sore all afternoon from being stretched like a pretzel (not really, but sometimes it feels like it) and then I went to class this evening. Now I hurt in a half dozen places.

The promised new barre didn't arrive as scheduled. They swear it's a shipping delay and it'll be here soon. I'll believe it when I see it. But then again, the instructor keeps threatening that as soon as we have a stable barre she's going to add barre stretches. Just great.

HOWEVER!! I'm not here just to whine and moan. We got a new student today. She's another one of those women who took ballet as a child and is now taking class as an older adult. The comparison made me feel like I've actually made some significant progress since I started back dancing in... May? Has it really been 4 months?

In deference to the new student we went back to just Parts A and B, which is just balancé in combination with chaînés and piqué passé. I was a little unsteady with the chaînés but the piqué passé worked pretty well. Not content with overwhelming the new student with all that, we did a simple combination of tombé and pas-de-bourrée moving to the side, repeated one after the other. This, I discovered, I could do. I could do it to the relatively fast music, and I didn't struggle with it. Didn't even have to think about the feet, and had brain-cycles left to think about arms and how to make it look decent. It's nice to feel like a dancer and not a klutz sometimes!