Let the Whining Begin...

Bear with me; I've been feeling a bit whiny lately.

First, it seems that I am, indeed, in worse shape than I usually am at this time of year.  After last week's inaugural and pathetic first-dryland-of-the-season, I had three more dryland workouts--6 minutes, 10 minutes, and 14 minutes.  They went OK, but I realized that, at that point, the sum total of my dryland this season--36 minutes--is exactly the number of minutes that next Monday's dryland workout is supposed to total, as well well as being just 5 minutes more than my first dryland workout of last April.  Only this time, it took me 5 workouts to total those 36 minutes.

I don't see 36 minutes happening in one workout on Monday.

Then, I went for a quick skate at my favorite local trail today.  I'm hoping to skate with my sister Energizer Bunny tomorrow, but the weather is supposed to be iffy so I figured I'd hedge my bets and do a short skate today.  6.2 miles, 27 minutes--and a heart rate way higher than I usually record for this trail at this speed.  Both average HR and max HR were about 20 beats per minute more that what I usually hit (and how many 48-year-old women do you know who can hit a HR of 193 on an "easy" trail skate?  And that wasn't even on one of the many hills--it was on a nice flat section where I got down into "speedskating" position and tried to skate "right," although not necessarily "hard.")  Clearly, I'm out of shape.

Then, to top it off, I dropped a slideboard on my foot.

A two-foot-by-eight-foot, plywood slideboard.

On the edge.

On my bare foot.

I'm blaming it on the Hubster, although he wasn't even here when it happened.  Last winter--when I was skating on ice as well as shirking my yoga-and-stretching, and thus had no need for my basement slideboard-and-stretching space--the Hubster moved his broomball-broom business into our basement.  I have no problem with that--he needs a place to assemble the brooms, the basement isn't used much, and I think it's really cool that he and his business partner have started this successful broomball broom business from scratch. But, as this spring has progressed, I've been finding myself needing an exercise space--my sadistic thorough chiropractor has me doing stretching/strengthening exercises twice a day, and I see the need for some slideboard in my near future.

Here's the old workout room...clearly, no exercise will be taking place in here anytime soon..

That's "Evil Slideboard of Doom" leaning up against the bookcase in the foreground on the right.  Looks heavy, doesn't it?

So today, I decided to move my exercise operation upstairs, to the "family room" that's really only used when one of us wants to talk on the phone and the other one has the TV on too loud in the living room.  I needed to rearrange some furniture to make room for yoga mat and exercise ball and slideboard.  I managed to move the ginormous book shelf and the humongous couch without help, then went downstairs for the slideboard.

Here's the new space, with said ginormouse book shelf and humongous couch (on the left) already safely moved, and that nice bare spot on the right wall just waiting for a slideboard...

If memory serves me correctly, I moved this slideboard--which I got a while ago from another skater, to replace my vast 4-foot-by8-foot slideboard--into the house myself.  I figured I could get it up the stairs with a little effort.

I carefully slid the board out from behind a stack of brooms-in-progress, then lifted it up.  I knew immediately that I'd need to set it down and re-do my grip, so I did...but I accidentally set one edge of it on a box of broomball something-or-others.  My brain just had time to caution "that slideboard is gonna fall off that box and right onto your foot" before the slideboard did, indeed, fall off the box and onto my foot.

I don't think I broke anything, but it's sore, and I'm thinking that skating tomorrow and dryland on Monday are going to be interesting.

So that's the first part of my whine--the superficial part.  There's more that's been nagging at me in my skating life, though; something more global and all-encompassing, which I'll have to get back to in a bit...I need to hobble downstairs and get some laundry out of the dryer now...