Starting

It's been my goal for over two years now to be superfit. Something I used to be. Something I achieved with relatively little struggle once upon a timee.... long.... ago. In a faraway time, in a distant land. Why is it so hard now?. I refuse to accept aging as the reason. Over the last two years every possible obstacle, & reasonable or unreasonable excuse has been played out. Preventing me from reaching my goal Everyone has a different definition of what "fitness" is. Somewhere around seven I was introduced to gymnastics. After going from being a tiny premature baby (one of twins) to the littlest kid in the class, with my feet always dangling well above the ground in any photo that included a chair, all of a sudden I'd grown up a bit.... and out. At 7 I'd progressed from tiny to slightly taller and chubby. I remember failing to complete a single sit up at my first gym class. But immediately falling in love with a sport that could literally turn my world upside down. There was no great pressure in my small school to achieve gymnastics greatness in any hurry. The first grades involved simple things like forward rolls and then handstands and cartwheels. The back yard became my practice ground. Mum always preferred us to be outside as much as possible a anyway whenever the weather was good, and sometimes even when it wasn't. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I started to go to a dedicated gymnastics club. But in the meantime the fitness training and stretching required to develop the skills of gymnastic - sit ups and press ups etc had began. When I finally started at the YMCA class around ten I had grown up some more and slimmed down again. I was at intermediate school now. A two year school that was meant to take kids through the awkward transition from child to teenager. Because I started school a year early, I was a year younger than most of the kids in my class. My family had always encouraged us (me and my five brothers and sisters) to be active. We walked or biked everywhere, swam in the sea a lot in summer...and sometimes in winter to if we could convince dad to take us. We climbed trees and canoed around the river that wove through the farmland behind our holiday house at the beach. But gymnastic took my fitness to a new level. As well as sit-ups and press ups, other core exercises like v sits were added to my regime, and we had to do pull ups to prepare us for the asymmetrical bars. We started to use the beam and vault as well. Up until then we'd only done floor work. My new club was still relatively casual compared to some of the other more competitive clubs. At ten some of their gymnasts were already doing quite advanced moves. I can still remember how my stomach muscles hurt after the first time I practice backbends at home in the back yard. Once I joined the club I practiced everyday after school. And at school every lunchtime I'd be swinging round and round on the bars then flipping off them. I was never going to become a great gymnast. I'd started late and progressed slowly without interest, pressure, or support from my parents who only cared about my schoolwork. But I'd found something I loved passionately. I loved the freedom of movement. As I progressed from backbends to walkovers and back flips my fitness also increased. By my second year at intermediate school I was the fittest person in my year due to the rigourous training I got at gym, I continued training at home too. My next door neighbour had a trampoline and also did gym so we worked together on our press handstands and splits. Unlike mine, her parents pushed her to succeed in gymnastics so she was ahead of me in her skills. She was also going to a more competitive club that demanded more of its students. I missed a catch on the bars one day and broke my arm. Luckily just a minor fracture. After it healed and I was ready to go back to training I asked my parents to let me go to a better club. So I changed clubs. But unfortunately it didn't work out well for me. I was older and less advanced than others my age. Due to the clubs competitive focus they preferred to put energy into the likely competition winners. I would've have been better to stay at my old club and just keep progressing slowly and having fun. I wasn't helped by the fact that my mum realised she could use withholding gymnastics as a punishment. If we fought she wouldn't allow me to go to training, and sometimes even to competitions.She wanted me to be a violinist and a scholar not a gymnast. Eventually the club gave me a choice between coaching or leaving and I chose to leave. My family moved to England for a year when I was twelve and I started going to a club there. It was fun but again I felt I was too old to really get the help I needed from the coaches whose focus was on the younger more advanced girls. My gymnastics at clubs faltered although my interest was still there. When I returned to New Zealand I didn't go back to a club but a love of fitness and flexibility remained and i kept my skills and training up for many years. At high school I started running. Not all that seriously but without that much effort I was able to win the cross country and the mile races in the school athletics. I enjoyed it but it didn't give me the joy that flying through the air or bending into crazy shapes did. At fifteen there was a fitness test at school and because I was still doing hundreds of ab exercises and arm excercises etc every day I came top of the whole school in the fitness test again. Somehow though I never gave myself any credit for that, and felt that the race wins and the test score were some kind of fluke rather than a result of my efforts. My parents never valued my physical achievements and it never occurred to me to see than as achievements either. In the end though my love of physicality has always been about the love of the feeling of having a body and using it. I love how strength and flexibility feel. The feeling of running when I'm fit, of swimming in cold water etc. At the deepest and most satisfying level it's not about someone elses measurement or acknowledgement, but about the joy of being alive and moving. When I left home I discovered weights and yoga and tramping. My twenties were full of all kinds of exercise...and I won a weightlifting competition at my gym when I was pregnant. But then I had a baby...on my own. A whole lot of stuff happened that made it hard to look after myself and focus on my health and fitness. I developed severe asthma and allergies and had a long battle to get my health and energy back. And now all of a sudden here I am, decades later and I want - more than anything, I want gymnastics back. I want fitness, but especially, and specifically I want gymnastics back. So this is the story of of trying to get back the skills and the energy back that I once had. It's a struggle that involves researching nutrition and originality and even the nature of reality. And it's a story that involves a dog. And a town that is a fitness & outdoors lifestyle paradise. Now it's time for sleep. Tomorrow I'll start my fitness journey again. The dog is sleeping and I should be too.

Come on body - I expect more from you than waking up way too early and then wanting to sleep for the most useful parts of the day. My quest to be the super athlete I know I can be (until proven otherwise) is challenged daily by my inability to sleep at convenient times. I woke up today at 7am. Got up, made a smoothie, and now - at 8:20 am I feel sleep calling me again. The dog hasn't even bothered to get up.

She knows me too well. I've been watching a video on Instagram by superhumanyogi. In the video he's working out in the snow and the rain doing his handstand press ups and making other superhuman stuff look like child's play. I want that stuff. I want it really bad, but I want to sleep more. I'm going back to sleep as soon as I've finished writing this post. In fact, I'm not even going to finish this post - I'm going back to sleep now. I've wanted to write for a while now, but I've procrastinated forever on starting a new blog. Now it's done. It's started. I got up early. I made an amazing smoothie with nuts and fruit and spirulina. I was on fire for about half an hour. I sat in bed with my smoothie reading a book by an ultramarathon runner. Now I'm done. The weights, the hill trail, the ab session and yoga will have to wake until I'm back from wherever it is that we go when we sleep.