Editions of Me

"The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called  Le Cirque des Rêves , and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang ...

My knee injury has been lingering awhile, so I finally got to see a physical therapist yesterday about it, to see exactly what was wrong. Basically, I still can't bend my knee into a deep squat, and I can't kneel on my knee. My PT, Nicole, surprised me by asking me right away what my derby name is! It turns out, she's a derby fan, and she was excited about me coming in because it was in my file that I'm a derby skater (because that's how I got injured). It was really great that I happened to get an appointment with someone who is familiar with my sport and who has an appreciation for the kind of impact and injuries that result. (Of COURSE I invited her to our bout.) After a few assessments, she determined that there's nothing WRONG wrong with my knee (like, my ligaments are fine and all that) - my IT band and the surrounding muscles in my knee have healed really tight and my knee is out of alignment with the rest of me. My homework is to foam-roll a whole bu...

What's MY excuse? I'm busy knocking people to the floor.

Before I start, I want to make it clear that I am NOT criticizing this woman or women who look like her. Nor am I criticizing anyone who draws inspiration from this photo to make positive changes in her own life. But I AM about to get a bit ranty. I've been seeing these "fit mom" memes everywhere for a long time, and in truth, they rub me the wrong way, and here's why. If you ask me who I think the fittest people in the world are, I would have to say Crossfitters and endurance athletes. Whether it's your first marathon or your fiftieth, whether it takes you five minutes to complete a WOD or fifteen, it takes a certain baseline of fitness. But if you show up to ANY start line or ANY CrossFit box, you will notice that not everyone looks the same. SOME people look like the woman in the photo - feminine, conventionally hot, tanned, non-cellulite-y, smooth-skinned with nary a blemish. But many other people do NOT look like that, and before you interject to tell...

Who shows up to a half marathon with a knee injury and zero base mileage and does it anyway? *raises hand* Me. There's a fine line between gutsy and stupid, and I think I pretty much live on that line. I own REAL ESTATE on that line. I have claimed it on behalf of my mother land. I injured my knee three weeks ago, and while it's mostly better, it's not 100%. I had hoped to be able to run SOME of this race, but as it turned out, a few 3-minute repeats brought on some sharp pains behind my kneecap, and I knew that it was going to be a looooong morning. It's hard going from averaging 3 hours for a half (with a PR of 2:44) to knowing that I would be taking longer than 4 hours. It's a definitely blow to my ego. I haven't taken that long for a few YEARS (not counting last year's Summit Rock half which took me 5 hours because it was hilly as f***. I climbed a damn mountain .) Add to that the fact that Morgan Hill was my first FULL marathon, and here I...

It's been a while since I did a real, legit blog post, so I thought I'd do one now, since I have a lot of time. Why do I have a lot of time? Because I'm INJURED. Last weekend, I skated in a team-on-team scrimmage against the BAD skater pool, and I was super nervous because it was my first THING since returning to roller derby, and I know as well as anyone else that BAD skaters aren't ones to mess with. I had ONE goal, and that was to not get injured. (Well, yeah... you can see how well that turned out.) So it's been over a week now, and I'm ALMOST back to normal. I'm not limping so much anymore, and most of the pressure/swelling has gone. I still have a hard time walking down stairs and I definitely still can't kneel on it without pain. (Which would be a big problem if I were to skate and then fall on it.) I've been off it completely, which is really hard for me. Ironically, I haven't been running or doing anything other than skating late...