Over the past year, this pandemic has shown me how quickly everything can change and not to take a day for granted. I’ve never been one for making New Year’s Resolutions, so for 2021, I decided to make a list of 21 things I want to do this year. Most of the items on this list are things I’ve been saying I wanted to try for a long time. Keeping in mind that tomorrow is not always guaranteed, I quickly got started on the first item on my list – trying aerial silks.Â
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I grew up taking dance classes and cheering competitively. I’ve always been mesmerized by watching gymnastics and Cirque du Soleil videos, so when I first saw a video of a girl on aerial silks, I thought it was so cool and I was dying to try it. Last year, I had a friend tell me about this place where his girlfriend was doing acrobatic open gyms since he knew I had competed on an acrobatics and tumbling team in college before transferring to OSU. I followed them on Instagram and forgot about it until I saw their post for their New Year’s sale – 4 classes for $40. It was time to stop making excuses and just go for it.Â
- First Class
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My first class was surprisingly hard. I went in feeling pretty confident that my flexibility and years of playing sports would help me not struggle too much. Since it was a Level 1 class, I was expecting everyone to be fairly similar beginners, but some of the others in the class had been there for at least a year. At first I was intimidated by everyone doing these incredibly hard skills, but then I realized how cool it was to see the progression of skills in people who had been there for different lengths of time.Â
We started off the class with a warm up that included lots of core work, pull ups, and silk climbs (basically a rope climb) and I realized just how weak my upper body was. During that first class, I could barely climb, but now I can get halfway up the silks. It’s amazing to see how quickly the body can adapt and get stronger.
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Thankfully, for the main portion of class, we focused on splits. This was one of the skills I was most excited to play around with, so I was glad we got to do split rolls for my first class.
- Week 2
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The second week, we worked more on flows – combining multiple positions to build up endurance. While in the air working through what was assigned, the instructor stopped me and asked, “you’re the really split-ty one from last week, right?” and had me modify the position by hooking my foot around the silk and switching from an arabesque to a deep split. I was so excited that she had remembered me from the last class and that what she remembered was having good splits. The over-achiever in me was also so proud that I was getting extra skills on only my second class and so many of the other people in the class stopped to watch what I was doing.
So, if there are things you’ve been saying you want to try but keep coming up with excuses not to, THIS IS YOUR SIGN – do it, you won’t regret having more experiences in this life.