24 Ways to Move More. Nicole TsongЧитать онлайн книгу.
Exercise at Home
my
movement journey
I couldn’t stop grinning, my hair plastered to my head. I was breathing hard, and I didn’t care. I shrieked with laughter as friends bounced me off-balance on a giant blue-and-yellow inflatable tube. I jumped off a tall platform onto a huge inflated landing pad.
Splashing around in a lake on inflatable toys, watching my friend Kristen scream as she flew over the water on a rope swing, cooling off from the intense heat in Texas hill country, I had never felt so strong, so trusting of my body, so happy it could play so hard. Not my adult self, anyway.
I knew, technically, that my strength was above average. For the previous six years, my body had endured long yoga practices several times a week. My legs no longer shook in an extended warrior hold, and I’d made progress on holding a handstand without a wall. For two years, I had taught the sweaty yoga I loved, encouraging my students in a high runner’s lunge or when they attempted a new arm balance. I took teacher trainings where practices sometimes lasted five hours, sweat dripping off my nose onto my mat in downward-facing dog.
Even so, I didn’t feel like a real mover. Sure, I did yoga four days a week. I felt stronger on hikes than I ever had. But I didn’t think of myself as a physical person, surely not an athlete.
But that day, playing at the lake, something inside me clicked. Moving my body in ways outside my norm didn’t feel overwhelming or hard. I laughed when other people bounced me off-balance. I raced around like a kid, convinced I could do anything on the inflatable toys scattered across the lake. I was gleeful jumping into the water.
I felt exhilarated—while moving my body.
The experience etched itself into my memory. A couple of years passed before the notion that moving my body was an instant pathway to feeling happy and joyful cemented itself—when I knew in my bones that my body was not only strong and capable but also that moving it was an essential ingredient to feeling good on a daily basis.
Now, I center my life around this fact: moving my body makes me happy.
If you had told me at age 16, 25, or even 30 that I would love moving so much that it would be a mandatory part of daily life, that I would write a weekly fitness column for The Seattle Times for six years and then turn it into a book dedicated to getting you to bust a move on the dance floor or lace up a pair of roller skates, you may as well have told me I was going to be an A-list movie star.
But that’s exactly what happened. The fitness part, not the movie star part.
A WOBBLY BEGINNING
Perhaps the memory of Dorothy Hamill and her 1976 Olympic gold medal lingered into the early 1980s, so it made sense to my mom that her two girls should learn to fly across the ice. Michelle Kwan was only a toddler then, years away from her Olympic medals. Credit to my mom for being at the forefront of the trend of Asian-American figure skaters.
At age five, the only reason I stepped out onto the slippery ice was to be like my older sister, Ingrid. I would do anything to keep up with her; I even pretended I wanted to ice skate. I didn’t like falling on the hard ice, so I skated carefully, going slowly as I stepped one foot over the other doing crossovers in the little rink where I learned to skate forward and backward and to perfect T-stops.
A few years later, my radio alarm clock went off twice a week in the morning darkness, startling me out of sleep. I hit snooze until my mom opened my door and snapped, “Nicole, you up?” I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, grumpy that I had to be up so early to practice.
I donned a teal-green zip-up jacket with matching short skirt, shiny tan tights, and scuffed white skates for private lessons with my coach, Yvonne. Yvonne’s feathered, grayed-out blonde hair looked almost white. She was taller than me, though not by much, and wore a long blue coat with a fluffy white lining to keep herself warm on the ice. She had kind blue eyes and a maternal quality.
Figure skaters showed up early at the ice arena’s parking circle, dropped off one by one, walking over a concrete bridge that crossed a tiny creek. When I opened the doors, the biting-cold smell of ice and dank carpet in the lobby hit my nose. I dropped my heavy duffel bag underneath the carpeted brown benches in the lobby and stuffed my toes into my tight boots, which hurt my feet every time I wore them. I carried clear nail polish in my ice skating bag in case I got a run in my tights.
Once on the ice, shivering, I skated in circles to warm up. Skating fast was the best part of practice. I felt free zooming around the ice. I didn’t have to think; muscle memory took over. I went to the same patch of ice every time, spinning on one foot and learning to waltz jump, skating forward on one foot and landing backward on another. I watched older girls throw themselves into difficult double loops or lutzes, stumbling or falling out of the jump and trying again.
One day, when I was eight, I skated up to Yvonne at the hockey bench where we met for my private lessons. Yvonne looked over the top of her glasses, assessing me.
“Nicole, I think it’s time for you to compete,” she said.
My heart fluttered in my chest. Ingrid was already competing. I envied the confidence of older skaters, heads held high as they danced around the ice in shiny, colorful dresses with shimmery sequins for competitions and the annual ice show. But I didn’t want to compete, not really. Skate alone in front of an audience, with people watching me? I squirmed inside.
“Okay,” I answered, obedient to my coach.
Yvonne wanted me to compete in freestyle solo and also in compulsory skills, showcasing technique. She asked if I also wanted to do interpretive figure skating, a free-form event where skaters are given an unknown song and don’t have a routine.
“No,” I said. I had some limits back then.
Yvonne didn’t push. She shuffled through her tapes.
“First, we have to figure out a song. Then we can create a program,” she said. “Do you want fast music or slow?”
Fast meant I would have to skate faster and jump higher. Fast would push me. Fast sounded terrifying.
“Slow,” I answered.
She chose “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie. I practiced my routine until I could do it without thinking, the jumps and the spins ingrained, timed to match every swell of Kermit’s voice.
At my first competition, I thought I might throw up waiting for my name to be called. I stood, shaking, at the side of rink. Yvonne rubbed my arms as I waited. Once I was on the ice, posing in my starting position in a new blue dress adorned with white and maroon sequins, the familiar strains of the song floated toward me. I moved, extending my arms side to side and following the program stamped into my muscles.
It took me years to understand the gift of my early years of ice skating and competition. I was much older before I appreciated how it cultivated balance and strength, how I learned discipline from the early morning practices, how the challenge