bodies_in_motion

^β(The bulk of this is cross-posted from our personal journal, but a few minor details are access-locked.)

Today, at the urging of a good friend, we wound up trying ice skating for the first time! “first” meaning that the zeroth/first of us had taken some basic classes about… fifteen years ago? We weren't sure whether there was any motor memory of it left. This is also part of more general Adventurousness Training, of which “retraining the visceral, body-facing side wrt things like risk tolerance” is a major part.

Illum was fronting most of the time today; at some point I want to try it more thoroughly myself, but I still caught a lot of it.

Results so far:

No reliable memory of how to brake properly.
Error recovery is still pretty wonky in general.
How to balance on the ice seems mostly workable.
These reflexes work for falling, sort of.
It's an interesting sort of exercise… I assume this involves core muscles quite a bit?
These foot arches complain a lot, and it's not clear what to do about this.
They don't have half-sizes of skates, but a 13 “wide” worked better than a raw 13.
No reliable memory of how to properly lace the things either, 403 had to show us. c..c
Definitely noticing a lot of flickery signaling waking up on the other side of the system↔body rubble while trying out motion in that environment.

I'm a little stymied by the foot arch issue, since that seems the most significant. These feet have gotten pretty wonky over the years in general, and I feel like there might both be some arch issues and some circulation problems. Same for the sizing… I don't know if any of this is common enough that any of y'all might be able to give quick answers to it.

Thinking of going back for some basic classes, resources permitting. Would appreciate sharing of other experiences, or feedback on ways to get more out of this kind of practice. :-)

(ETA: oh, for those of you who might not be aware, since I'm not sure we've posted here before: we're the in-same-body successors of the one behind this comment thread, and the “get the somatic link working properly” matter has surfaced in its own way in our era, having undergone interesting twists and turns. Just in case the context is useful.)