Equilibre

As it turns out, I lost the Gymnastic Bodies Contest. Coach Sommer offered me 50% off the price of tuition for coming in second, but all together the trip would cost me about $700, and I just don't have that extra cash right now.. Sooo, I will be staying home. I'm okay with that. It's actually the same weekend as my brother Ira's 30th birthday, so I will be able to go up to Olympia and celebrate his birthday, which is important to me. There will be more chances to meet and learn from Coach Sommer, I'm sure. Thanks to all of you who voted for me!

Last night Ramman and I went to the Parkour class and afterward did not feel like cooking anything so we stopped at Ole Ole, one of our favorite Mexican places, to pick up some dinner and grab a margarita. Big mistake. The dinners we usually get there are pretty well balanced, and although they are not Paleo (a little bit of beans and rice), they are Zone. We usually enjoy it and feel fine afterwards. Well we thought we would treat ourselves to a mango margarita, again something we have enjoyed in the past, and were sorely disappointed. After we finished them and were at home we both started feeling icky. Not like food poisening or anything that bad, but just OFF. The margaritas were WAY TOO SWEET. Although we didn't feel that great it was kind of cool to see how something that we used to think was a delicious treat was now something we never wanted to have again. Don't get me wrong, I will have a margarita again, probably a few in my lifetime, but just not those ones. The same goes for the food. There are plenty of much better Mexican places where you can get good quality meat and veggies, we won't be wasting our precious eating out dates on that crap anymore. Ole Ole, we are breaking up with you.

Now it is Thursday.. I am not being very good at finishing posts on the same day I start them! But, training comes first- blogging about it second. Yesterday was AWESOME. We went to CrossFit Portland for Ido Portal's workshops. The first session was on Equilibre, the art of balancing. As Ido said, Equilbre is not something that is very well learned in a 2 hour workshop as it takes years, a lifetime, to master it, and actually he says that no one ever acheives a perfectly straight line. I understand what he means, but I still learned a TON in 2 hours. He showed us some very good techniques and drills for achieving a straighter line and thus balance in the handstand. He also showed us some more grounded hand balancing positions used in capoeira and breakdancing.

The second session was more focused on gymnastic/acrobatic strength and conditioning. This session was VERY hard, but also fun. When one of the first exercises he showed us was Japanese Pushups (which I cannot find a video for on YouTube, so if you look it up and see a Japanese guy doing atrocious pushups, this is not what I am referring to!), I knew it was going to be a hard session. I learned a lot of cool, extremely difficult strength exercises, some of which I could not even do, like the Japanese pushup and the single leg squat holding your other leg behind you with both hands (for all of them there are modifications, of course). Ido is an endless resource for exericises that will help with acrobatics and hand balancing. After it was all said and done we had 5 full hours of learning and training.

Thank you Ido!