jiggy pain love

whew! busy weekend. lots and lots of hooping. unfortunately, walked away sick, sore and beaten up.  but getting there had its moments.

it started friday night with two solid hours of unlit practice in the studio with firish.  we are prepping for our next performance as part of solar flare at decompression.  we dove headfirst into detail work.  good practice. great group of spinners.  i think there is a bright future ahead for this project.

afterwards, i headed over to an impromptu international HooppaiN at proudmari’s.  they’d been at it for two hours by the time i showed up.  i made some new aussie and tokyo friends and got to watch some great hooping.  had one really sweet spin.  then home to pass out.

photo by joseph perla, 2009.

the next day i found myself in one of my playa getups for lovEvolution, the bay area’s version of the love parade.  bah starts the parade every year- we were able to enjoy the apex of mounting excitement.  hooping in the parade was fun but grueling.  there was weird footing with the trolley tracks and amorphous hoop space to work with, but, really the tiring thing was the constant forward movement.  music was hit and miss- we ended up moving backwards en masse in the lineup to latch on to better music.  all complaining aside, it was hooping with friends in costume in the sunshine down market street to cheering crowds.  pretty damn awesome.  kudos to all of my fellow hoopers who rocked it hard!

once inside the festival area, i spent the next several hours hooping in and out of small groups. i was feeling pretty worn out by the time this started, which sucked because this is usually my favorite part of these kinds of festivals.  i still hooped for awhile at a few different spots, said hi to friends, did a little dancing, but at the core i was wiped out.  i was a little surprised- thought my tolerance was a bit higher.

photo by philo hagen, 2009.

by the mid-afternoon the crowds had swelled to that obnoxious size when you can’t move from point a to point b without having to sample everyone’s b.o.  i was done.  i decided to scratch the idea of an after party in favor of a quiet night in bed.  in retrospect, i should have started the day with a banana and a multivitamin and brought electrolytes to the festival.  my cramping hands and feet screamed potassium depletion.  you’d think i didn’t regularly camp in the desert…

sunday, i carried my hoop to the hardly strictly bluegrass festival with the intention of hooping, but never made it happen.  no umph.  nothing.  lots of shoulder soreness and general malaise.  definitely starting to wonder, am i getting sick?  is my inner swine coming out?  everybody i know has been sick as a dog lately.

(the answer, unfortunately, is yes, my friends got me sick.)

looking at the weekend as a whole, the only time i really found my zone was at HooppaiN.  that was one of my better spins in some time.  other than that, didn’t really hit my groove at all at the love in.  on my perfectionist flow scale, i give myself a four, mostly for effort.  still happy i was able to attend everything.  i look at every hoop opportunity as an opportunity.  as to the whole notion of just overdoing it, i think it is important sometimes to push yourself beyond your limits so that you are reminded exactly where they are.

(my lady doesn’t quite agree with me on that one.)