Student-mode

Recently, while in the lift with le sis, we met a neighbour she was acquainted with. It was a weekday night, so I was in office attire and she was wearing the Singaporean tertiary school uniform (t-shirt, shorts, slippers). The neighbour stared hard at both of us and went "who's the older one?". Le sis responded that I was. To that, the neighbour blinked and then went "ohhhhh, but you're twins right?"

For those who don't know, my sis is a good 4 years younger than I am ;) The above situation is also v common.

Then at the IT fair yesterday (where I was scouring for a new laptop), there was this salesman. Clearly I look like I've just finished my O levels, coz he asked if I was buying a laptop in time for poly to start. Or it could be that he was being exceedingly polite. So I shook my head slightly and he corrected himself: "Oh, starting uni?".

The attire probably played a part -- t-shirt, shorts, slippers FTW.

So it seems, school hasn't left me yet. Or maybe adulthood hasn't found me yet xD
In any case, I don't mind!

Some pain, some gain

Not sure if I've ever mentioned here, but I believe in fate. Mostly coz multiple times now, I've gotten this feeling that life's been neatly planning itself into a prescription. This includes meeting (literally) painful lessons which I'd very much like to avoid.

Rewind a few weeks back to sometime in Feb, where my left shoulder decided to go exploring the world outside its socket. Once it felt like the bone was invading muscle space, I disengaged and leaped off the wall so the shoulder didn't come out completely. Still, it was damaged enough to end my climb right there. SADDED. I think... I'd somehow failed/forgotten to engage the surrounding muscles before moving off from a straight-armed position. Kinda like hanging from the skeleton and trying to pull with one arm all of a sudden.

Most interestingly, this happened at the time I was (mildly) considering staving off climbing for a bit to let my wrists regain some normalcy. But yea, all climbers know that the hardest thing about climbing is not climbing, so while I was indeed considering pausing... I prob wouldn't have done it. *Dry laughter* So life handed me a better reason to stop.

Well, life for me doesn't revolve around climbing, but in any case it's dreadful having to stay away. So even more curious was how everything else kinda fit into this particular chapter and made it lots better than it could've been. It so happens that in those weeks following the curious shoulder incident, I wouldn't have climbed after work anyway (coz busy/sleepy). And on the weekends, there was this coincidental abundance of other fun sporty stuff to keep me happily exhausted.

[Must admit though, I did climb a tiiiiny bit coz of the UMC alumni event. Restraint was hard work. My favourite kinds of routes involve inclines and heel hooks, but my shoulder couldn't seem to tank the overhangs much :( If you like food, it's kinda like refraining from eating that one more serving of whatever sinful thing it is you shouldn't be eating too much of. So I spent lots more time than usual on the flat wall. Or else I sat firmly on the mat and resisted the itch to do some fun (but likely damaging) stuff. Was nice to be back at least -- it's the place where it all started.]

Other highlights of the past few weekends include running around in NTU, running around the CBD, and also running around in GBTB trying to corral runaway children. It's no fun to wake at/before 6am on weekends just to get to places on time [always a loyal pasir ris girl but living here does have its drawbacks]. That's actually even earlier than workdays. Yes, I do question why I treat myself this way at the start of 2h journeys, but lo and behold these journeys have always been more than worth!

Out of all these, I think most deserving of attention would be the Urban Adventure Trek with team Cockfosters. [Cockfosters is nothing vulgar -- it's the name of a terminal tube station in London. But as young ppl, we find these things amusing.] After all, we almost won. Coz it happened that for that set of station activities, being a team of climbers was pretty advantageous ;) Slacklining, anyone? 10 seconds for a full 3 points was a pretty steep requirement, esp for non-climbers seeing the line for the first time. But we aced it! K not saying I'm any good, but proud to say my team member cleared a whopping 17 seconds on the line. Totally should've given us more points for that haha. So in terms of mastery (being one of the rare teams to complete all stations with full points and visit all photo checkpoints), we'd have won... If not for a slight slip up in technology: a single lost photo which cost us the winning point and put us in 14th place.

Live better indeed. Without climbing and all these other sports stuff, I'd become a potato soon enough given the excessive consumption of muffins at work lately.

I like that we just shrugged and went off for lunch with our nice new free towels. Would've been nice to win, but winning isn't everything! The whole thing was pretty fun -- getting up the low wall without help, doing random legwork activities, being smart enough to understand hints. I realised something from all these team events (both sports and non-sports) I've been joining. I can be quite chill about things, and I don't enter competitive events with a competitive frame of mind. It's only when/if the feeling comes that we stand a chance, that I fire up the engines. It seems like my team was mostly like that too -- IIRC we only started running from station to station after the slackline challenge ;)

Getting injured sucks. But wow, in a flash it's been ~3 weeks since my last proper climb and things haven't really been all that bad! Aiming to get back on the wall soon, maybe climb cautiously... Which means, it might be a good time to gather some new kakis from the workplace as well!

Last bit! One restless day after work I took the 1.5h walk to Stadium, and took this pic:

Person who guessed this place wrongly I am disappointed in you xD

So yes, it is possible for me to get to a post-work climb session by walking, provided I have some form of dinner with me. That aside, what was nice was that from my chosen sitting spot, much of the distance covered was visible (as can be seen from the photo). *Thinks philosophical thoughts* I get this feeling sometimes, that in climbing we don't always appreciate our own improvement and that it takes time. Because climbing is a sport of continual challenge, from the micro POV it can become about sending that one hard route now or else leaving the session feeling unaccomplished. Yalor, so that's prob why I kept trying moves that hurt. It's only when forced to step away from the grind that the bigger picture, and the past, become more apparent. It'll prob be healthy for me to rmb that it took all these years for me to get to my current standard, and if I'm gonna continue for years, I need that same functional body to take me through.

Haha I think I've learnt the lesson life wanted to knock into my head and yet tried to make comfortable for me. Enough of using my body in an unsustainable manner, there's still a long way to go.