I took one of my kites out on Saturday. I do love going kiting and it's a good few weeks since my last trip up to the cenotaph to play. My kites aren't the little diamonds tied to the end of a string with a tail of ribbons, nor sharply angled stunt kites like brightly coloured stealth fighters (interesting and unrelated note: apparently pink aircraft are better camouflaged than black). They're power kites, for snow-kiting. In lieu of standing on a ski field, I often take them out to the cenotaph if the wind's high at lunchtime, and get launched around on the grass. As power kites go, mine are just babies. The three of them range from 2.5-4.5 m2 and all have entirely different controls. The most insane one is the 3.5, running on a pair of handles instead of a control bar. It's safety features are that the handles will probably be yanked out of your hands in a strong gust. I prefer to keep a tighter grip and see how far it'll pull me. In a decent wind, it's pretty easy to go from sitting down to jumping five metres across the grass with just a twitch of the kite lines. School long-jump, eat your heart out...
The general consensus on kiting is that it's more than dangerous enough to be classed as an extreme sport, whether it's on snow, land or water. Me, I think it's a fun way to get outside during the day. It isn't much of a workout for the legs, but it's still pretty exhausting. I don't have a harness on my smaller kites, so all that power goes straight through the arms. An hour of that in a strong wind and I (almost) wished I'd been doing chinups instead.
Walking back toward North Hobart, I noticed something interesting on the cenotaph. I've seen this feature countless times before, but never considered its potential. There are timber bollards there, probably meant to keep cars off the grass. Walking past them, I was struck with the desire to see how long I could balance on one of them on one leg. I didn't have a timer, but it turns out that it's long enough to set the calf burning. That's not exactly balanced exercise though. It works the core muscles, but only one leg. So when I finally toppled off my chosen bollard, I swapped legs and tried again. When that leg eventually gave up, too, a sensible person would have kept walking home. I'm rarely accused of being sensible, and looked up to see a line of wooden posts stretching roughly in the direction I was walking. They were too far to jump between (without kite assistance), but they would do for setting a challenge. Still bereft of a timer, I settled for going from one to the next, seeing how long I could balance on one leg before I fell off. Anything less than thirty seconds (calculated using the precise method of good enough) didn't count and I had to try that bollard again. I was only a dozen or so bollards away from the end, just enough to test it out. By the time I reached the highway and returned to contemplating the uphill walk home, both legs were once again considering seceding their affiliations with my body. I had to make it up to them, and soon.
Clearly apologies aren't my strength, as this one ended up being four hours of very energetic bush-dancing, tied off with a polka endurance test between dancers and band. If you haven't done much bush dancing (other than at school, which resembles it in name only and doesn't count), that might not mean much to you. If you're not an obsessive dancer, a polka is somewhat like skipping around the room with a partner, while spinning. It's fast, energetic, exhausting and a lot of fun when there's a room full of couples all trying to avoid high-speed collisions.
The legs definitely deserved their rest after that, so they got a night's reprieve. A new day dawned to reveal Mt Wellington thoroughly doused in snow, and I was sorely tempted to go for a wander up there. Driving up would have felt too lazy though, and I was pretty sure my legs weren't up to walking up and back in the snow (something I'll really have to work on...) so I decided to try a few of the exercises from last weekend's parkour instead. Finding a suitable ledge to jump off repeatedly is always easy enough, and amounts to doing high speed squats. A kids' playground provided a wonderful rope... thingy, which gave me a chance to have fun leaping through restricted spaces to try and land on loose ropes. There are always plenty of walls to be found for practising throwing some weight around for speed climbing. I also discovered a good rail at last. Horizontal, around twelve metres long and with a choice of a moderate drop onto concrete on one side or a much larger drop onto grass on the other, so plenty of incentive to fight for balance. Walking forward along a rail isn't much of a problem and I'm getting the hang of walking backwards, but I'm still struggling with turning around on a rail. I had plenty of bonus practise landing while I tried to figure that out...
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