Trampoline Dream

A long, long time ago, when people walked the earth even when they weren't exercising, and everybody thought that would always be normal, I was staying at home and jumping up and down on a trampoline.  It's jolly good fun, and surprisingly effective exercise, especially if you do a quick knees-to-chest at the top of each bounce.  This is particularly relevant as training for the fabled front flip - of which more later.  Anyway, one day I thought it would be amusing to fall forwards from standing and see how high I could rebound towards standing again.  Apparently there are people who can do this on hard ground, and (a) take the hit with their arms without breaking their wrists, and (b) do such a powerful pushup that they get back to standing again.  Wow...

So the trampoline version seemed like a reasonable idea, just as an experiment.  To be cautious, I tried it from kneeling first.  That proved to be so easy as to be a bit trivial. So then I went for standing - which looks about twice as high, and about eight times as scary, for some strange reason.  Insufficiently daunted by this perspective, I went for it. What happened was, I fell forward and the trampoline took all the impact out of landing on my hands, as expected; but it did that by making a big dent for each of my outstretched hands to to live in, with my fingers facing up a very steep hill.  Slightly more uphill than my left wrist was prepared accommodate, in fact, causing it to hurt a little bit.  At this point I stopped trampolining for the day, and waited to see whether I'd done a bad thing.

Not really.  It did ache a little bit for a while, but it seemed to be getting better on its own, so I carried on pretty much as normal (except for giving up trampolining, just to be on the safe side, and generally trying to protect it).

After about six weeks of this, I thought it was time to start training it to be strong again, so I tried giving it a bit more work to do.  No dice - that just made it hurt again.  After a month or two of on-off, on-off slightly annoying not-much-happening-ness, I sought medical advice; and got myself an appointment with a physio.  I also started trying to convince the Exeter gymnastics club that they should sell me a bit of one-to-one training on trampoline safety and front flip technique, although I think that for some reason, they prefer training young people who might actually become gymnasts, rather than doddery old twits with a bizarre bucket list item. 

Then came Covid-19, and all these sensible courses of action just vapourised.  So I felt that the only course of action open to me was to get back to the trampoline on my own.

So far so good.  No new injuries - but also precious little progress with the front flip.  I can't seem to get both height and rotation, so I end up landing on my bum most of the time.  I actually did a better one before the wrist incident. It's frustrating, but I'm still determined.

Meanwhile, my oh-so-slightly strained wrist is still somewhat buggered, after nearly six months!  Which is actually the point of this dreary history (for anyone still reading it).  When you're old, things take a bloody long time to mend.  Which means you don't get as much done as you thought you might, and it hurts more.  So the moral of the story is: don't wait until you retire, at 67 or 70 or whatever someone else says is the right age.  It might very well be too late.  Do it now instead.  Carpe diem, and all that.  Really.

Well! Since this post has all been a bit serious so far, here's some lighter entertainment.

First, for lovers of blog titles which are reminiscent of pioneering transcendental synth music bands, here's a bit of Tangerine Dream (I never liked them much in 1974 to be honest, but they were undoubtedly pioneers, and it's a good name for a band).

And then, for lovers of slapstick, here's a bit a video of me doing a bit of rotation, but not much height, on the trampoline, and generally flopping around like a limp thingy, Russian style.
https://youtu.be/0n7lDDwFiMA  

In other news, I'm about to embark on a garden watering project, very possibly using bits of old washing machine and a newly-redundant 32-bit computer.  So that's something to look forward to!

Oh, and I've started a new blog for things that are nothing to do with retirement.  It's hosted at my own site using Wordpress, and I'm told by my first visitor that it doesn't work on Safari, so I'd be interested if anyone else can confirm whether that's true for all Safari users.  I'm hoping it might just be a cacheing issue (or otherwise fix itself!).  Any other comments welcome, of course.  Check it out at http://interestingthings.aprendo.co.uk (if you dare).

I always put at least one picture in each post on this blog, so here's today's, brazenly stolen from the internet:

Doesn't the fool know we're copyrighted?