Sunday, April 12, 2015

Hitting reset

I think it was a mistake to try to get serious about running and weight lifting at the same time…while also continuing to swim, walk, cycle (a little), and do yoga. By some standards it was a really good exercise week last week, but I kind of hit a physical low yesterday, and then just now I kind of twinged my back while reaching into the fridge. It’s possible that my body is gently recommending that I take a day or two off. Which is exactly what I will do.

It was a good week on the knitting front, though. (I know that two months ago there was no “knitting front” to care about, but come on the journey with me.) True to form, I decided that the yoga mat strap I was starting was too wide, too boring, too time consuming of a stitch, and too ugly to really be worth it. So I ripped it all out and started trying to figure out what else I could do with double knitting. After a ton of trial and error, here’s what I came up with:


When I say “came up with,” I mean that, as far as I know, no one has ever done this particular stitch/technique in the history of knitting. And when I say “as far as I know,” I mean that, yeah, okay, someone almost certainly has, but I still hit upon it all by myself, so that’s fun for me.

This pattern suits my little project perfectly: It knits up pretty fast, it’s thick and sturdy, it doesn’t curl, it’s the same on both sides, and I love how it looks when it’s stretched out, as it will be when in use:


M.H. said I should start an Etsy empire of yoga mat straps, which would be a fine idea if I didn’t get bored so easily and liked working for 15 cents an hour.

1 comment:

  1. Comments about overtraining from "Challenging Beliefs: Memoirs of a Career" by Tim Noakes. "Bruce Fordyce always referred to overtraining as the 'dead legs' syndrome, or feeling the plod. Once reduced to 'the plod', it is only a matter of time before injury, infection or a bad competition performance occurs. We've come to understand this as the protective response of an exhausted body, which, rather than suffer additional damage, aims to make training impossible." Listen to your body, it's telling you something.

    As for an Etsy business, you'll make more money if your fellow yoga participants like it and will pay you for a custom strap for themselves and you won't have to do as many.

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