Rebecca's Law of Motion

What keeps us moving is almost the same as what keeps us standing. Our feet, gravity, and oxygen. Therefore, if you can stand, you can move. If you can move, the possibilities are endless because then you can increase your intake of oxygen and defy gravity, concurrently. In my yoga class, there is a woman who wants to move again. She does yoga from a chair. She is heavy, she is old, she has an incredible sense of humor and of herself. She hurts from her hips to her toes. Her spirit and willingness to be there and put that much effort into movement and healing inspire me.

Newton’s second law of motion tells us that every particle attracts every other particle with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Not the greatest example of a summary or of overt plagarism, but there is a point to this trip down thank-goodness-I-got-out-of-upper-level-physics- memory lane: Why doesn’t every athlete study basic physics? The discipline is there to research nutrition and create detailed spreadsheets of our workouts. So why not set aside some time to get the basics of how movement really works? What could be more motivating or more telling than physics?

In Newton’s second law of motion, I have found my own law of motion: The amount of effort you put into something and the strength you exude while doing it will determine how far away you are from getting what you want.

Going Streaking

My fascination of late has to do with barefoot running. For a while, I was a little religious about it. I was really happy barefoot running, for several months after I tore a muscle in my hip a year and a half ago. Not only did barefoot running completely rehab my hip, but also I was convinced, at the time, that my back and neck felt like they had just been massaged every time after barefoot runs. Not sure what happened with that. I forgot about it. I think that part of me thought that I didn’t need it anymore after I got to the point where I could train for a full marathon again.

This whole experience with this metal plate in my foot has got me thinking about barefoot running again. Once that plate comes out, and this body is good to go, I think the new feet are going to go streaking on the beach once more. In college, I hung by this guy in one of my chemistry labs who was a physiology student. Big-time fan of barefoot running. He believed that all of the equipment designed to protect your feet and hold them in place, in fact did more harm than good for the majority of runners. A running purist. A running hippy, I always used to call him. He took it as a compliment. He may have been on to something. Your body possesses one of the most genius memory systems of breakdown and repair of any machine. Think about the mechanics of something as simple as a water blister or scar tissue.

I have my tetanus shot. I’m going back to the beach.

The Sky is Falling

The excitement of a new goal has once again fallen from the sky and onto my lap:

http://hundredpushups.com/index.html
By the way, in case you are fooled into thinking I am cool, let me just clarify from the start that these will be girl pushups.

How lucky I am to have caught this one, as I have been waiting for one of these. Yoga has reminded me that I am actually capable of waiting, and this last marathon has taught me that you simply cannot stop moving (ever) just because you happen to be waiting for something. Regardless, these pieces of the sky seem to be much harder to catch when they are not running related. Ninety-nine percent of the time I just trip over them because I am a goal junkie and mentally in such a raw state of panic about not knowing where the next goal will come from that I forget to just be open for the catch.

There are several reasons this new goal may be harder than running a marathon: 1) I have never done 100 pushups before; 2) I am not exactly sure if it is even possible; 3) The gratification will not be the same as running; and 4) I still have a long way to go before what it is that I am doing actually even resembles a pushup. Likewise, there are several reasons that this new goal may, in fact, be easier than running a marathon: 1) I don’t have to eat my body weight in food every day to have the energy to do this; 2) I can have a social life while I do this; 3) I can put my cell phone on speaker and listen to my Mom and Shana talk while I do this; and 4) Similar to running, doing this actually makes my neck and back feel amazing.

Supposedly, there is some little piece of floating bone in my thumb joint, which for some reason, they couldn’t find in order to pin it to the rest of the pieces. My theory has always been that pushups hurt my wrist because of this. As of this moment, I am not entirely convinced that this is true. I found out a while ago that you could actually do pushups on top of free weights to take the pressure off your wrists. Genius idea (not mine). Little by little, the sharp shooting pain started disappearing. It’s still not the most comfortable position in the world (I prefer to do them on top of the weights), but the pain has substantially dulled.

My new theory is that perhaps, after some point in time, the pain I was experiencing was of the imaginary kind.