Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Mind Games

I've been erging a lot this month (it's Concept 2 holiday challenge time again--I have just over 62,000 meters to go before the gym closes for the year on December 23), and I've noticed that I can take whole seconds off my split times by thinking the right thing at the right time. (For some reason, mentally yelling "FEET!" is very effective.) It feels like mental yelling is I'm doing--although the machine says I'm rowing faster, I don't feel I'm exerting any more effort. That's lucky for me, since I'm lazy about hard workouts... so lazy that after a while, I forget to yell at myself and slow down again.

Only 2 of the ergs really work, and they're right next to each other, so as soon as there are 2 of us, we have to sit right next to each other (where we can read each others' monitor screens). My favorite is when super-athletic (but non-rowing) guys notice that I'm going faster than they are. (It's not that I'm especially good--it's just that the way you're supposed to erg is much faster than the crazy way people usually do.) For some reason, they find this disconcerting--what ever would they think if they could hear me yelling "FEET!" to myself??!

Speaking of meters to finish, I'm just about done with my holiday knitting--I have about 200 meters of the original distance left to go. That should be little enough to finish without resorting to frantic marathon knitting, although there's some danger that I'll get distracted: I did finally cast on for my last holiday project earlier tonight, but over the last couple of days I also slipped in two entirely unplanned projects (hey, they were small!), started a shawl for me, and did some planning and math for a shawl for Schaefer. Babies don't know exactly when Christmas is, right?

2 comments:

Peaceful Knitter said...

Perhaps your knitting speed will also increase if you yell "HANDS!" or "KNIT!" to yourself.... good luck with both endeavors!

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering if it's a rhythm thing. Have you tried erging to music? Maybe the Flight of the Bumblebee???