On Thursday, after weeks of absence from the gym, I decided to head on down there and get some natural endorphins and some relief from my lower backpain - the product of too much time behind a computer. The gym is a small gym on the basement level of our apartment, so one generally tends to run into the same people there quite often. One of these people is my good friend Rahaan. In the first few weeks that we lived in the building, he and I kept bumping into each other in the elevator, and eventually got chatting. He looks as if he could be Indian, but it turns out he's African American, and was born and grew up in Southeast Washington. He has done just about everything: he trained as a chef, does gigs as a magician, has skiied, played in a marching band and does personal training, and currently works at the concierge desk of a very smart hotel in downtown DC. And those are probably just the things I know about. He overcame some pretty rough socio-economic circumstances to get where he is today, and I love his 'can-do entrepreneurialism'. He's started offering me free personal training sessions whenever I bump into him at the gym (usually 10 or 15 minutes before a client is due to arrive), and, being as polite as I am, I usually allow him to crack the whip as I do exercises with heavy balls and dumbells. He told me I could have 'cuts' - I suppose muscle definition - within a few weeks, and I suppose I was flattered. But here's the thing: I don't do exercise for the aesthetic results (although they are welcome too): I exercise to relax, loosen my stiff back from sitting all day, and get some natural endorphins. While I welcome some strength training, I am in no hurry to do 100 push-ups, and I think the fact that he doesn't train with me regularly means that he doesn't realise exactly how dire my fitness levels are. The result is that every time I train with him, I end up with severe muscle stiffness for 2-3 days afterwards, which is misery. It leaves me with a bit of a dilemma, though: I want to keep up the friendship, and I realise what he is offering me for free is very valuable (worth $45 an hour, in fact), but I just don't feel it's worth the pain.
And this time it's really bad.
On Thursday, he tried to get me to do push-ups. I can't do a single 'regular' push-up. I can barely manage 2 'lady push-ups' with fresh arms. On Thursday, I had already been doing some heavy-ball exercises (and doing very well, thank you very much), when I was told I should do 20 push-ups. Oh heaven help me. He might as well have told me I should do 200 with one arm. I couldn't do any - not in the regular position, not in 'lady' position and not off the bench. Eventually, he had me pushing off from the wall. This was still ample to make life an utter misery for the past 3 days, causing grunting and puffing at the slightest movement. Today at least I can raise my arms above my shoulders without accute pain. In addition, all the squatting and jumping left me with bands of pain around my legs.
And in the midst of this, I helped a friend to move. I felt it shouldn't be her problem that I had overdone it at the gym, so I gamely turned up for the move yesterday morning, dosed up on ibuprofen. She is moving into an apartment in a very large house in Mount Pleasant, about 20 minutes' walk up the road from us. She (and, after the wedding, her future husband) will be living on the top floor - up 5 flights of stairs, to be precise. So I helped carry the light to moderately heavy things upstairs. The things we do for friends!
On Friday, I baked my first milk tart. I used a recipe from a South African magazine that a friend lent me, and it was a moderate success at best. After egg-separating drama (I dropped some yolk in the whites and had to go to the supermarket to buy more eggs), the tarts (because there was enough filling not for one, but for two tarts) came out extremely runny, with a golden crust on top. Oh well, I thought, at least it will make a tasty pudding. The occasion was that we were going to have dinner with a Mexican colleague of A's and his family out in Northern Virginia, so I packed the runny tart into a cake carrier and set off to take the metro down to L'Enfant Plaza to meet André. While waiting for him on the metro platform, I thought I might as well take out my Kindle and read a bit, and in wrestling with my rucksack and the cake carrier, I tilted the carrier too far and to my dismay felt warm milky stuff dripping down my leg. The tart had overflowed, and I did not have a single tissue with me. Fortunately, you can count on the kindness of strangers here, and the packet of tissues was accepted gratefully and used to clean up as much of the mess as possible. As I as doing so, someone actually asked me if I was ok. Flustered, I explained that the tart had overflowed onto me, but thank you for asking. It then occured to me that not only did it look as if a baby had spat up on me, it looked as if I had just been sick on the platform. Grand. By the time A arrived, I was not in the best of spirits.
When we got to Roberto and Liliana's house, I asked if I could put the tart back in the oven for a while (fortunately only a bit of the filling seems to have escaped), and that seems to have remedied the runnyness for a large part. We had a wonderful time with them and their three children. They have also lived all over: in Delft, in Leuven, in Canada, back in Mexico, and now here in the US - so we have this international experience in common. It was a joy to compare notes on cultural differences between South Africa/the US/Europe and Mexico.
The other milk tart came out even better after a lengthy return to the oven at a low temperature here at home, so that seems to be the answer: cook them for a long time at a low temperature until the eggs can work their magic.
I'm signing off now - I'm playing in the band at church tonight, and my sore shoulders have to carry my cello up the hill ;-)
