BH 13: Out of the frying pan and into The Valley-adjacent
Extreme heat may well be building a Slow Pain Movement
A month away from my last 24-Hour Fitness workout. Almost two weeks since I exchanged a new and successful low-impact fitness routine for the unpredictable workout that is elementary school activities leader. Some new sensations awakened. Southern California’s severe heat wave had not come.
Last Saturday’s pain was novel as only the pain of aging can be—unfathomably interesting.
Agony worth examining.
Every waking morning since 50, probably, my back has hurt. Only a half hour or so of stretching makes it right. On last Saturday though? My elbow shrieked from the week’s pick-up football. Pitcher’s Elbow had been a sting unfamiliar to me since my youth’s daylong street games, and this lower-back tightness and hip and groin pain were so specifically aching that both discomforts deserved note.
The amount of clarity that I might get from working with elementary-school kids came from the first job, last spring in MacArthur Park, not at the new NELA assignment.
Five weeks ago there was a tautness to my body, brought on by a master cleanse, food scarcity, and the aforementioned Greenfield resistance machines of Echo Park. Now, my body is as soft as it’s been since December in Tacoma, when this chapter of my physical journey began.
My mobility and balance remain strong. The fatty part is making me nuts though. My belly seems hopelessly soft, my inner thighs so mushy and bereft of integrity. They miss the the leg press machine.
When I lost my first 20 pounds nearly 10 years ago, I began squatting. Most of humanity sits this way, to their benefit. Regardless, my then-partner found the posture off-putting, so I’d only occasionally squat at meal time in our studio apartment.
Never squatted in a restaurant. Or even at a food cart.
When they weren’t around I squatted constantly. Squatted to read a book, squatted to write articles. In concert with leg day at the gym, the position ushered in progress via my ability to execute yoga’s Crow Pose.
Shaky as the early efforts were, they were foundational. No matter the state of my musculature, there’s always balance beneath its movement.
Leg presses were only part of what gave me the thigh strength to execute Crow Pose. Warrior Pose was a stable of my 2010s practice, no matter who in Oregon was teaching me. And there wasn’t a yogini in my experience who has gone deeper into the pose than Hairong “Karen” Gui. A 90-pound trained dancer, Gui wanted my bent knee, thigh, and hip to form as close to a right angle as feasible.
“Deeep-er,” Harong would command from the front of the class. “Deep-er!”
She was very convincing—almost demanding—and I would go there.
Gui taught my first hot yoga class, one weeknight in Beaverton. Initially, the pain of using my muscles the way she wanted was exquisite and fresh. As holding that pose for so long taught my body to accept the stress, the ability to pull off Crow Pose became more regular. Less shaky.
As I type, Crow Pose isn’t the friend it used to be. Even in the early days of trying to make it happen, when I would crash face first onto the studio floor, there was a confidence in the power of my thighs. Security lay in them. Now the posture is elusive. These chocolate pudding thighs conform to the contours of my elbows rather than buttress and support.
The foundation is weak. The elbows push through to my femur.
I’m a bit of a physical wreck, a damaged ship at sea.
The amount of clarity that I might get from working with elementary-school kids came from the first job, last spring in MacArthur Park, not at the new NELA gig.
I was actually teaching. While I was helpful in English, math was a bit of a struggle. My students would be calling, “Mr. Alexander!” I’d have my nose pressed up against my tablet computer, absorbing the lesson that the kids were waiting to have taught.
“Hold on,” I’d tell them. “I’m trying to read.”
What I learned from fourth-grade math was how to bracket my problems. They say that we rarely use elevated mathematics in our every day lives. I haven’t gone a day since teaching at that Central City elementary school without applying the bracket principal to my own personal puzzles.
Now, correctly, my employers have steered me away from math and toward games where I am properly deployed. I can’t keep my swoll, as Jamie Foxx used to say in his healthier 50s. It’s tough to keep your body-building gains.
This fall, my commitment is to return to form. I’m going to find the proper balance, the right kinds of pain. My emerging sense of my physical self says this will come by radically improving my diet. And I’m going to swim. The new place where I’m dwelling has a pool. And as soon as I get out of this file I’ll be diving into it.
[Swimming + protein] - [carbs + sloth] = Senior Games-ready Donny Shell.
New Move
Some of my stuff is still in the City of Los Angeles—the rest remains in Fresno—and I’d like to wait to get it until the weather simmers down. That probably won’t be an option, as the local 5-day forecast is for Hades on Earth. With or without more inhuman heat, I live a little too close to Bakersfield for my comfort. But I love the artists who rent me the space, so the experience should be another great adventure.
A kind of running joke
One about tipping. You see, I know that mostly writers read me. Most writers don’t have any money. The other big subset of The Sojourn followers comes from the cannabis industry, which manages to have its own earning issues. (Despite more people smoking weed than ever)
Yeah, it’s almost an insult, hinting to deep readers that they might want to tip me. Yet, the “almost” is what we all need to focus on here. That nearly thing is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.