Did the form this morning with a little more gusto and verve than I did yesterday, and did it successfully without having to stumble my way through. You forget a lot in a month away from the form. I know it’s been a month because I was doing tai chi under the full moon in August, out in Colorado Springs.
How far away that world seems now. Of late it’s been meetings and meetings, with a side helping of meetings, and more meetings for dessert.
Anyway, the form. I did about a third of it isometrically, with resistance in my arms as I did the form. No real problems. It’s usually easier at the beginning of the hundred days; near the end you have lots more problems. I’ve lost a lot of my slowness, though; I’m going to have to learn to halve my speed, so that the form which took 6 minutes today takes 15 minutes by the end of the semester.
So after tai chi, I went for a run. I feel better already. OK, it was more like a two-quarters of a run, with a walk in between, but I ran from home to the main road down to the pond, then walked around the pond to maintenance, and then ran home. So it was an acceptable bit of exercise.
Ideally I’m going to go for a walk/run every morning and do tai chi down by the pond. It means getting up earlier than I usually would, but today I got up at 5:20 and I was home in time to get showered and dressed. 5:00a would be better; that way I build in time now to get down to ideal speed.
I’d really like to start doing yoga, but I think it’s going to have to wait until Spring term. Between classes, sports, and other pieces of the program I’m doing around here, there’s not a lot of extra time to do much else. I may even have to pass on doing a pottery class this autumn, and save it for spring.
I planning to use mom’s stars system. My mom uses star stickers to motivate herself to exercise. She has red, blue and gold stars; when she does one form of exercise in a day, she puts a red star in her day planner: it means GOOD! but also Warning! Too many days with only red stars or blanks, and she gets unhappy. Blue Stars are better; those are for two types of exercise in the same day. A gold star means three forms of exercise, which for her are either yoga or tai chi, a walk of a minimum length or a bikeride of longer duration, and kayaking or canoeing. It’s a good system, and I hope to emulate it as best I can this fall. In essence, I have the same six sports as she does, so this is a good place to start.
