Marching On

If you have never seen March Fourth Marching Band, I will tell you this: it is exactly as fantastic as everyone claims. We went to the late show on Friday night, and it was 100% AMAZEBALLS. The music was fantastic, the costumes were rich and envy-inducing, and the showmanship was above and beyond. I'm absolutely in for next year's show, and I intend to wear a much more ridiculous-and-awesome getup! I need more hats.

I also surprised the hell out of myself by jumping on stage and dancing my ass off, during their audience-participation Dance-Off. As I worked my way towards the stage, I kept thinking, "what the crap? I'm not actually going up there." But, then I got to the front, and somehow talked myself into it. I didn't win the trophy, and I have no idea what anyone else was doing, dance-wise, but I had a surprisingly good time flailing around like an idiot in front of a room full of strangers, and at least I had room to dance without having some idiot spill half of his beer all over my leg. (yes, that actually happened) It was completely exhausting, but in that good way.

All the dancing and the lack of sleep on Saturday made practice truly brutal, but after some unexpected bumps in my schedule, and having crepes with katlyn, I rolled on over to watch Brutal Beauty with a handful of Wreckers and Freshies. It was amusing seeing people we recognized from the league in the documentary, and it was fun

On Sunday, I picked up a few things for some house-prettifying projects, one of them involving a trip to the Rebuilding Center. I was sorely tempted to tear apart my downstairs bathroom, while there, because they had the perfect matching toilet/sink/bathtub set there, but, fortunately, I talked myself out of that. ;) I still have plans to throw down some accent wall paint soon, however, and I have a good lead on a free dining room table that will be far more awesome than the current one. (which is, quite literally, on its last legs, hurhurhur) After that bit of running around, I also did some website-prettifying tasks for Real American Dollars.

I got done with the latter early enough to talk myself into going to extra off-skates training before derby practice, and that turned into a serious beating. Something about off-skates derby training flips my overachiever switch, so I blew myself out during the off-skates, and then barely made it through the hour of on-skates practice. There was a point during pace line drills when my lower back muscles hurt so badly that I nearly started hyperventilating.

I don't think I've ever, ever trained through that much pain in my life, and I don't want to move today. Like, at all. But, damned if I didn't pull through that entire practice, and keep skating for the rest of the hour, after the endurance-cleared skaters were excused at quarter-til. The human body is an amazing thing.

And yes, I was the only not-cleared skater at practice yesterday. The few other not-cleared skaters were either sick, injured, or had quit Fresh Meat entirely. I was strangely not bothered by the fact that I was doing laps around the track by myself, while everyone else packed up.

Anyhoo, the question looming on my mind today? Whether to stick with the 8K for the Shamrock Run, or downgrade to the 5K. My foot seems to be doing somewhat better than it was the other day, especially the Achilles, but The Plague that's been going around at derby seems like it's trying to take me down. And, well, I haven't run anything beyond a 5K since I registered, so, er, that's not a great sign.

Well, whatever. I plan to go home tonight, sleep off Teh Sick, and then get up tomorrow and keep marching on.