I'm paying for all my studio fuckery on Monday. My launch leg is fine, probably because the jump mainly uses the same muscles as walking, and God knows I do enough of that. My landing foot is also fine -- see previous comment about walking, and note also that almost all of my good walking-around shoes have 1"-2" heels on them. My landing leg is sore in bits that Google informs me are the gluteus minimus and one of the adductor muscles. I would guess the former is from the half-circle rotation just before takeoff, and the latter from stopping the rotation and not falling flat on my face after touchdown.

You apparently also use the adductors in your thigh when going up and down stairs. I got frequent reminders of this. Boston is made of stairs, especially if you ride around on the T.

Central Square is very slippery right now. The skies opened up and dumped snow on us the other night, and though it hasn't been above freezing since then, there's a lot of foot traffic in downtown Cambridge that's smashed, squashed, and smeared the snow cover into a thin slick on the red brick sidewalks. The ad/news/weather ticker monitors in Park Street Under informed me that it was 14°F at quarter to eight tonight. Fourteen degrees -- the current exchange rate makes that about -21 degrees Canadian -- is right around where salt water freezes, rendering all the efforts of the combined Camberville municipal works pretty much moot.

The ice has already taken two of the other Circlet editors down with sneak attacks, one right before Arisia and one on her way into the con on Sunday. (Both laid up with injured ankles, one given what I'm told are the really fun painkillers.) I'm still fine. My feet slide around just like everyone else's; I just don't care, because I have a pretty good idea of where they're sliding to.

I do walk differently on ice. The main thing is to be prepared to put up some resistance to your feet scooting out from under you. If you can keep the angle between your feet well-controlled, then when you skid your foot doesn't slide forward, you slide forward, which keeps your weight in a stable position with respect to your support. It involves enough core muscles that it's a bit twingy if I've had one of those horrible coughing plagues recently, but my thighs handle it fine. The skid itself doesn't bother me -- oh noes, I've accelerated somewhat in the direction I'm already going anyway! Not really a problem. Keeping my hips stable also means that it doesn't matter if my back foot slides out. My weight has already been rocked forward by that point, so I can just let it go.

It occurs to me that this may not be normal. I've never thought to ask. I figured it out on my own, I assumed everyone did. I do this a lot, and not infrequently I find that I've managed to teach myself something that baffles people who learned to do it properly from someone else. My way generally works (see: knitting, typing, guitar tuning), it's just bizarrely idiosyncratic.

I also find it disconcerting when something physical makes this much sense this quickly. Intellectually, I'm aware that I'm pretty coordinated and aware of what all my limbs are doing, but most of my childhood was full of people who insisted I do things their way instead of my way, regardless of whether it worked for me or not. Given basic principles and left to work it out for myself I'm often okay, but most instructors won't goddamn do that for some reason. I'm used to getting frustrated to the point of quitting when I can't get something to feel natural. Going from "never tried it" to "I know what I'm supposed to be doing even if I can't quite do it yet" in an hour is weird and gives me the nagging feeling that I've missed something important.

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