Ow, my face

I went skiing last week - same destination as those in my previous skiing-related posts, but with a different group of people. It's been over 2 years since I was last skiing, and because of that I feared a bit for my fitness, or lack thereof, and returning state of health.

I can't remember if I've ever mentioned this before, but I'm a very unfit person. I don't exercise regularly - dance classes were the closest thing I had to exercise, but I haven't been going for half a year now; and sometimes I go swimming, emphasis on 'sometimes' - and my day job involves me sitting at a desk and typing-out gibberish in a language that a computer can understand. (Now that I say that, I guess the only difference between my day job and this blog is that this blog is human-readable.) Opportunities for exercise are plentiful (I count several gyms within walking distance of home and work), but I often consume my time with hobbies that put me in positions similar to work and/or blog writing: sitting at a desk, working my fingers at a keyboard or controller.

So when I'd return from the previous ski trips, one thing that always happened was that I'd spend the rest of the week limping to my destinations because of all the sudden exercise that my poorly-used legs received.

I returned last Friday, so I had the weekend to rest my legs, but I noticed when I was walking everywhere that I was walking everywhere, not limping like in previous years! However, my life seems to be one big balancing act because even with this minor victory, other parts of me were hurting to take the place of the limp.

One thing that hurt when I came back was my neck. Specifically, the front of my neck, just along the muscles running either side of my throat. That one started hurting during ski week, so I got to ask everyone else about it and they were all suffering from the same thing. They said it was from the whiplash of your head colliding with the snow. As bad as that sounded, I did fall a helluva lot of times last week, mostly from being too tired to stay in control of my movements than anything else.

The second thing doesn't really hurt, nor would I really classify it as some kind of injury, but I forgot to bring along some chapstick. My climate-changing-sensitive lips have been documented before, so it was stupid of me really to have not brought any along with me (I thought I had, but a look through my bags turned up nothing). By our final day my lips were as dry as a desert and bleeding at almost every opportunity.

I've been applying a generous amount of chapstick to my lips in the days since my return home, and a look in the mirror just an hour ago has shown a lot of progress in the right direction - the cracks of my lips no longer reminding me of harsh or rough cracks in the Earth like canyons and trenches, but rather the smoother cracks you'd find on the backside of a plumber.