Hurdles

by | Jul 21, 2017

I have a draft of a blog post, all about how I’ve decided to push myself to a new and scary goal: to get to a full split.

I intended to hold onto it until I got to the full split, at which point it would be a huge celebratory post about how you can achieve whatever goals you put your mind to.

But right now I’m not feeling quite so optimistic.

I wasn’t very flexible as a kid. I never quite nailed my splits, though I worked on them week after week. (and therein is the problem: I didn’t practice them, or stretch out at all, between ballet classes. Doing them on Tuesdays and Saturdays just wasn’t enough!)

I wanted to get to a split, but I didn’t get there. I’m not sure how much of it was my body making it difficult, and how much was the fact that I didn’t practice it other than during class.

So I decided that this would be my summer. I would stretch out daily.

I recruited my kids (well, two of them: the oldest is struggling with flexibility too) to coach me and do it with me.

For the first few weeks it went great. We stretched daily and I was noticing progress.

But after 3-4 weeks, I started noticing that my hamstring was hurting if I stretched daily. So I would give it longer to recover…which messed up my rhythm.

Now I’m stretching every 2-3 days and giving my body time to recover…but last night I was disheartened to realize that I’ve lost some of my flexibility.

 

So now, here I am. Late July, definitely more flexible than I was when I started in early June, but nothing like where I’d hoped to achieve at this point.

I would love your comments and stories. Is this something you’ve struggled with in the past (or you still do now)? Or is there something else that you just feel like you should be able to do, but for some reason it’s a bigger hurdle than you expected? What are you doing to overcome?

I’m asking you to inspire ME today!