I can walk again!

As I mentioned in my reply to my previous post, the day after class I was a hurting puppy. I had tickets to The Washington Ballet in downtown DC, and to avoid parking nightmares we took Metrorail. That meant a fair bit of walking. Normally I'd love that, but I suspect the Ministry of Silly Walks would have had something to say about my technique. Thinking it might be better to give my calf muscles a rest, I skipped class the following Tuesday. That was probably a good idea, as it wasn't until late the next day, four days after the class, that I could walk without inhibiting discomfort.

At first I was raring to challenge that class at BDC again the following weekend. The longer it took to recover the more I wondered if I shouldn't give myself more time. In the end, personal obligations got in the way of taking any classes last weekend or earlier this week.

Yesterday was my company's annual "hooky" day, a company outing to a local professional baseball game. It ended up being a fairly short game, and by 6pm I was laying on my bed at home feeling like the thing to do was to take a nice afternoon nap. But the thought of going back to class Saturday afternoon having not had a class in two weeks sounded like a bad idea, so I changed into my ballet gear and went off to the "easy" class at MSD.

Over the years my definition of an "easy" class has definitely evolved. This one is "easy" because the combinations are short and don't generally involve steps I haven't done repeatedly. The challenge becomes doing them well, rather than doing them at all. Rather than worrying about falling over attempting a pirouette, it's working on form and proper spotting. It's finishing a tour jeté with the proper balance so the next movement flows cleanly. And working on keeping pace with the petit allegro.

As the instructor was introducing the grand allegro combination she asked, "Does everyone remember 'précipité'?" Apparently they did this recently, but having not been in this particular class in months I could only reply "I remember the name, but not the step." Oddly, when I went to check the statistics for this blog this morning I found that of the four views overnight, one was to a posting I made four years ago entitled Précipité. Coincidence?

After class I felt tired but I was glad I went. I'd had a couple of minor incipient cramps in my feet but nothing that couldn't be handled with some stretching. Most importantly, I feel better prepared for class Saturday.