Posted by Sorry, I’m just not in the mood for hopeful, optimistic or inspirational quotes today. More on that later.
The floor was crowded last night. Every instructor had a student or a couple. Now, we just have OwnerGuy, Z and three instructors so you could still carve out some space. But it is the most people I’ve seen on the floor in quite some time.
Spent the entire lesson going over the Waltz and the Waltz footwork. OK, I mean I know the footwork but my technique is not where it needs to be. I spent time this week working on using the whole foot which is kind of where we are trying to go. The first step is a heel and then you roll through the entire foot and peel the heel to get onto the ball and start the rise. There is weight transfer and head position and other factors but this was the basic focus. Probably something I’ve been taught but, let’s be honest, if you don’t get hyper focused on it and burn it into memory, it is easy to get a little lazy.
We talked more about learning styles which is a good thing. I said I’m not an auditory learner – give me too much information and my eyes glaze over. I’m more of a visual/kinetic learner. Probably mostly a kinetic learner because I have to “feel” it to really lock it in. The visual part is just seeing what I’m supposed to do so I can try to imitate. Then it is just repeating it and trying to feel my way towards what is the desired outcome.
I ended up waking up at 3AM to ice my knee. And my legs are dead today. So I decided to skip my workout which I feel a little guilty about but I think I need to listen to my body. I’m going to have to make more changes to my workout routine because I normally do some leg stuff today. But as these dance lessons become more like workouts, I’ll need to shift focus a little bit. Fortunately, I can easily move days around on my app to find the best balance.
This is all good. The more I attempt to do what she wants, the more it becomes feasible and I like being pushed in a way I haven’t been before.
But I’m finding that dance still isn’t quite the escape it used to be. It is nice to have something different to break up the week but with the masks and other things, it still doesn’t feel “normal”. Just a constant reminder of the sucky times we live in.
And now I’m going to throw myself into the pit of despair. In other places, this virus has followed relatively predictable patterns. I’m now convinced that there is something different about the experience here. I don’t think we are really going down the doom and gloom path but I also think a lot of the twitter types I follow who crunch numbers have been overly optimistic.
A central premise is that this thing is going to run until it reaches some kind of saturation level. Meaning if you lock down too soon, you just delay the inevitable. Personally, I have some theories about what could be going on but I don’t have any way of checking or verifying so I won’t speculate. What I will say is that nobody really can say with 100% certainty why we are seeing a new rise. And that just means that we will have endless arguments because there is no right answer and your opinion will depend on whether you are team blue or team red. Because politics ruins everything.
How bad can it get? Per worldometers, we currently sit at 3,616,827 cases with 140,144 deaths.
In terms of cases per million, the US currently sits at #12. Most of the places above us are much smaller (French Guiana, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Panama as examples). The largest country above us is Chile with 16,797 cases per million people. The US is at 10,924 cases per million. If we were to reach Chile’s level, that would be 5,561,179 cases. Seems like a lot but at 70000 cases per day, it will only take a month to reach that. Personally, I think we’ll go beyond that figure. Why? I don’t know. We seem to have great deal of success in finding cases.
With deaths, we currently sit at 423 per million people which is 9th. Above us are the places in Europe that were hardest hit – the UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden and France. Near the top is poor Belgium with 844 deaths per million people. For the US, that would translate to 279,674 deaths or essentially double where we are right now. That seems a bit high but who knows. If I were going to guess, I’d say we’ll end up more like Sweden at 552 deaths per million or a total of 182,757.
Or we could end up just being far and away worse than any place in the world. I don’t know anymore and I almost don’t really care anymore.
Facing Diagonal Wall 
One thing that I was shown that might help you is that the rolling over the whole foot becomes an automatic thing if you really focus on driving yourself with your back leg on the first step. Take a basic Natural Turn, for instance: if your are pushing yourself forward with your left leg before you take the first step on the right foot – pushing so much so that you are almost extending your left leg straight behind you that is – in order to not fall over you have to take that step with the right foot using your heel. From there, you should have momentum behind you that will propel your body forward, which will roll you over your right foot as you move on to take the next step.
It’s a bit of a weird thing to think about if no one has gone over it with you, but from experience I can tell you that if you really get good at driving yourself from that back leg on each of the forward steps you take in a figure, the footwork follows automatically because that is how the body is built to move. It’s neat once the concept sets in, and you’ll see that if you are told that you are doing the footwork wrong the way to fix it is to look at the action you are doing before you take the step. 🙂