Still alive!

I just realised that I haven't updated my blog in quite some time. Been quite busy with school and work and this has affected my training negatively. There's only so much time in a day and sadly even us pandas don't live on goodwill alone. I've still managed to hit the gym pretty much four times a week and made atleast some improvement there, although my shoulder is still giving me problems from time to time.

Haven't really touched the pole since the Finnish Championships (had a private class after them! :P), but that is gonna change if my current plans will become reality. I'm trying to change jobs and get a more set schedule going, so that I could have a more defined training schedule for summer.

This week would have been a perfect training week for me... and then I got sick, again. It's the good ol' flu again, trying to ruin my fun and keep me indoors when the Sun is finally starting to show up! Luckily I've come up with a plan to battle it. My secret weapon shall be this:

I hate being sick

Meeh, I'm still sick and this little influenza bugger or whatever seems to be quite tough. No amount of tea or vitamins seem to have any effect on it. So no training for panda, no pole practice for panda... I'm getting quite annoyed with this situation since I can't do anything but sit and wait.

Screw you winter.

Sincerely yours,

The Angry Panda

Guess

I'll just leave these two here ;)

A quick update

It's been a little while since I last made a new post. My new pole was broken from the beginning and I had to wait for a replacement part. Thanks to Pole-a-holic I didn't have to wait that long and the pole is now up in the living room, ready for use.

Sadly, I've fallen victim to the seasonal cold. To make matters worse, I managed to hurt my right shoulder a bit while doing some military presses. The pole has to wait for a while still, standing all alone in the living room. Hopefully I can get to business next week!

The pole is here...

Waking up to a random call is seldom something you enjoy, but this morning I was pretty thrilled when I got a call from the postal office and they told me they'll be delivering my 50mm chrome Xpert. Due to school I didn't have time to take it out of the box after delivery so I spent the classes thinking about what I need to do in order to get it set up.

So, I come home and start tearing at the packet (okay, I used scissors and did it the civilized way but you get the point!) and find all these strange things inside. With the help of the instructions manual I then identify all these tubes and whatnot and start putting them together. I get the A-pole and floorpiece together and pick one of the joints up and then it hits me, the end of the A-pole is busted. The joint won't fit in... Now I'm wondering if I should use FORCE and make the pole round again or not. Oh well, I guess I'll contact the retailer tomorrow and see what they think about it.

Meh, now I want some ice cream.

ps. if you can identify the album on the table I applaud you :)

Great sports weekend!

This weekend is perhaps one of the best this year when it comes to big sports spectacles. Last night was dedicated to UFC 143 in Las Vegas and tonight we'll get to enjoy one of the biggest spectacles on Earth as Super Bowl XLVI will commence just after midnight.

UFC 143 was very entertaining, plenty of high powered matches with spectacular KO's. The main match of the night, between Diaz and Condit for the welterweight Interim Championship, was a real thriller and saw many opportunities unfolding for both fighters. In the end, Condit stuck to his gameplan and thus made Diaz pretty much harmless (as harmless as one of the top fighters in the whole world can be) in the octagon. Even though the match went to the judges and sparked some grumbling from fans after Condit was announced the victor, I thought that the belt went to the right man.

UFC 143 made sure that the weekend started quite nicely for me and I just hope that the game between New England Patriots and New York Giants will be as satisfactory. I expect very strong shows from both teams, although I'll be rooting for the Patriots as they have cheerleaders unlike Giants :D

The only minus for all of this is that I don't really get to sleep much due to the timezone differences between Europe and North America. Oh well, I'm no rookie when it comes to staying awake for long periods. Then again, even if I can stay awake I won't be functioning at 100% so I decided to re-schedule my next pole dancing class, which would have been tomorrow morning at 9AM. This means that I have to wait until friday before I get to spin on the pole again.

The slippery pole

I bet everyone familiar with pole dancing has at some point in their lives encountered some troubles with friction. Today it seemed to be something all of us in the class were struggling with even though the poles were clean and warm.

It's fun hanging upside down when your thighs just slide along the pole and your grip feels like it could loosen at any moment. So fun actually that pretty much everyone, me included, decided not to let go of the pole while doing inverts and that pretty much made the whole practice obsolete. Standing and sitting on the pole was quite hard too, most were just sliding down as soon as they got up.

Now then, what might be the reason for all of this? I'd wager it's the weather, some -15 degrees Celsius and very low humidity that we're currently enjoying here in Helsinki. Oh well, atleast I got to do some spins and practice the moves.

I've also started wondering if I'm invisible or something because this evening was the second time someone walks on me in the mens locker room. Granted, I'm a rarity at the studio but still, how hard is it to remember that there was a tall guy in the class with you? :D