Not too many years ago, I found myself in a nice circle of bloggers - a group of women of similar ages with similar interest in exercise and fitness. We were at similar points in life and generally supported one another, commented on one another's posts, and what I guess you could call an interwebs kind of way, felt kind of close. Well, I did, anyway; I can only speak for myself, but it was kind of like having a nice group of friends. People would drop in and out for various reasons - life getting in the way, basically - but that happens.
And today the last one seems to have dropped out, gone private, or closed her self up, or something. Whatever, I can no longer read her blog. I'd write and request access again, but somehow, it seems - not right. Maybe I have a warped sense of friendship but I'd think if you were going to drop out of sight and you wanted to keep a friend, you'd give them a forwarding address; not doing so means you no longer value the friendship. Sooo... Adieu, to the last of the group. Makes me sad.
I'm not really sure who treks through here any more. I'm not all that fond of my stat tracker - its data conflicts, internally, and I don't think it picks up all of the traffic, so I'm probably going to ditch it. Frankly I almost decided to ditch the blog entirely, but it has, interestingly, become a bit of a record for me. I started it around when I started in karate, and I can sift back through the posts to see when I hit certain milestones. It's also a race record - I never really raced before I was blogging, save one four miler - and I'm sort of sorry I didn't have this kind of quasi diary back when I was doing the horse trials. THAT could have been a whole lot of fun, having a blog-circle of barn mates, riding club members, and assorted friends and acquaintances. Then again, I don't know that blogging was all that big back then (which wasn't all that long ago!)... hard to believe the things we take for granted these days.
So, any way - onward I go, and I wish my erstwhile friends well.
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I've been mentioning jiu jitsu class in my Saturday workouts for a while. I frankly haven't really known what to say about this; I'm being taught off the books and I don't want anyone to get into trouble about it, although as things have been progressing, it's looking less and less likely that that might happen. Essentially what is happening is someone who is taking formal classes is teaching me, in turn, everything he learns and we practise together. I find it absolutely fascinating, and the more I learn the more I like it. I can definitely see pursuing it more on my own when I have the time and resources to do that.
The "am training" I speak of on Wednesdays is a bit different; I'm being taught Kyokushin by an actual Kyokushin sensei (sensei J). We focus mostly on fighting (which is apparently how you spend most of your time in a Kyokushin dojo), including foundations, technique, and sparring, sparring, and more sparring. It's actually a little intimidating but it's helping me tremendously. While I value what I've been taught in Shotokan, it's a bit - less gritty, for lack of a better descriptor. We have all of the same techniques in our kata but don't get into (or haven't yet gotten into) the nasty, direct application of those techniques. So it's a process for me, putting the things together, sparring with sensei then sparring in class. For a while I felt like a complete mess in both situations but things are starting to make sense to me - meaning, I'm definitely still a mess but at least I can see that I'm learning now.
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Hard to believe running season is almost over. I've been contemplating tomorrow's long run - actually probably my last long training run of the season. I'm repeating a route, something I rarely do, but it's a good route, a five town, five park tour that is mostly off road, which is always a good thing, and I really enjoyed it first time 'round. I figure next weekend I have the 5K Saturday so I will probably do a shorter run on Sunday (I'm thinking 8 miles or so) and the following week is the trail run. Wow. It seems as if it's been a long running season, but it's been a good one, I think.
I've been thinking a lot about next year, and it has occurred to me that IF everything goes according to Hoyle and I am starting grad school in the spring of 2012, it would be pretty darn cool to get that first ultra (I'm thinking either a 50K or a 12 or 24 hour race) under my belt before then. I'm more or less thinking that the way 2011 will go is that I'll finish Max. Strength in March and then go right back to being a runner again, using routines built from the Dos Remedios book for strength training.
Nice to have the next year semi-sewn up before Thanksgiving, eh?
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