I rowed on Saturday morning, did weights Sunday night, and took yesterday off. My body was definitely not recovered and ready for more weights this morning! Actually, the arms were ready, just not the legs. This is because I’ve been trying to do proper squats, all the way down until my femur is parallel to the ground, which turns out to be much lower than you’d think possible. (One useful tip in an article someone pointed me to is to place a 12″ step behind you and squat until the back of your leg touches it. This is great because then you have an objective test – and because you only have to do it a few times, then set the safety rails on the cage appropriately and squat until the bar nearly touches them.) I’ve had to lighten way up on the weights to go down that far, 55 lbs instead of the 85 I was using. The squats have already paid off; yesterday I had occasion to walk up 11 flights of stairs (there was a line for the elevator after lunch). Last time I did that my knees hurt for a couple of days afterward. This time, not a twinge. Still, I did a lighter workout today: front squats with a bare bar, “assisted” chin-ups because I can only do about two real ones right now (“assisted” meaning I prop my feet on the weight bar but try not to lift with them), upright row, girly push-ups (knees on the ground), calf raises with body weight only (we haven’t figured out how to do real ones with the set-up we have), butterflies with light weights while lying on my back and then on my front (there’s probably a better name for those). I’m still feeling all the squats when I walk, though it’s better now that I’ve walked a bit more.
Last night was our first Dutch lesson. It went better than expected, but still I don’t envy anyone who has to teach me and Rudder a language in the same class. The problem is that I like language, have studied linguistics a bit, have the vocabulary to talk about languages, and actually care about things like unstressed pronouns. Rudder’s brain works totally differently: he has little memory for sequences of letters or numbers so spelling is difficult, doesn’t memorize well in general, and can’t hear distinctions in sounds that I can. (Not a hearing issue but a language learning one: I can’t hear differences between long and short vowels or between the fricative ‘v’ and the teacher-claims-it-isn’t-a-fricative-but-I-think-it’s-just-very-short ‘w’ that are obvious to native Dutch speakers.) And of course because it’s harder for him, he wants to learn the basics and not the minutiae that fascinate me. Actually I thought the teacher did a fairly good job in managing to serve both of us; she ended up spending more time on reading and less on the listening comprehension that’s a higher priority for us, but then it was only the first class.
(None of the above should be taken as a critique of Rudder. Our brains work differently, is all, and his does other tricks that mine can’t. His spatial ability is probably as good as my verbal one, for instance, which translates to everything from being able to go back to any place he’s been to once, to being able to organize a surprising amount of stuff in limited space.)
Fascinating! I have both the spatial aptitude and the language ability. (Other science students took a language because it is a requirement for a B.A.; I took extra ones for “unrelateds” because they were fun.) The language thing, however, seems to be somewhat genetic; both my dad and his brother (whom I never knew) had the ability to learn enough of almost any language to make its speakers comfortable. It would be a worthwhile psychology/sociology study — if only I could see well enough to study something.