I'm learning to dance

Pretty much all my life I've consider myself a bit of a clumsy person not in the sense that I could not do the stuff, I could do it. It just would not look as clean as it should. At some point in the past I was good at Taekwondo, I could do all kinds of double and multiple, jump and spinning kicks. It just was not ballet-dancer-clean-like but it was effective and I did kick hard(if I warm up enough, I can still do some stuff).

On the other hand there was some music I recognize I've never been good. I've been told I'm kind of a Chandler style dancer, as in:



Which, truth be told, it's quite an accurate description of my dancing skills. Not that I dance much better these days or not that I actually care, I just enjoy the music, but recently someone tried to convince myself that I dance like this:


I wish.

Anyway, I've given up on ever learning to dance properly and I do just enjoy the music if I'm in the mood, at least on the horizontal plane. And yes, this was all a deceiving introduction, stupid you may say but I felt like writing it. I am learning to dance in the vertical plane, or tilted or, I hope that if I train enough in some time I'll be able to turn my dance floor around pi.

I am learning to climb and I love it. It's tremendously fun and challenging. As I say, and I'm just borrowing Eric Horst words, climbing is a vertical or a horizontally hanging dance. Most people, myself in the beginning included, think that it only requires a tremendous amount of physical strength and nothing else. It could not be more wrong. Of course it requires a minimum of upper body strength but that's easily achievable and it's only then when you start realizing how complex this sport is. I'm a newbie, I've only been to the walls a few times, but I'm hooked. In particular I boulder, with no ropes and I do it in the indoor gym because that's what I have available. Bouldering it's the equivalent of having a big rock and climbing it up just for the sake of it. Few moves but hopefully challenging ones. I've tried ropes a couple of times but either I was tired from bouldering or I just lack the stamina needed for it, I'm not quite convinced I like it that much, but I have to get better at it, someday. As I was writing, climbing is a vertical dance but it's also a live physics/optimization problem: your goal is to move in the most efficient way and compensating all the forces so as to get the most stable position. Which appeals to the physicists in me, well, I'm a physicists so that's basically saying that it appeals me.

Indicentally, last night I inaugurated the list of worst climbing sessions ever. It was the third time I went climbing in less than 7 days with running in between so I was a bit tired and I could feel my joints, my right elbow in particular, a bit stressed so I ended up not staying for more than one and a half hours and failing at pretty much everything I attempted(other than the easy traverse and the yellow roof traverse route). That was the last session of the year, in the UK at least, and that left me a bit disappointed, but hey, not everyday can be tremendously good, some days are just going to be bad. I've had those days running too, when I had to walk back a couple of miles back home just because after 4 or 5 miles my legs just decided to stop. I guess I needed to be reminded of the importance of recovery.