#total self-indulgence

i just wanna gush about how much i love levels like this. Yes, it's simple; yes, it has a little wonkiness, like how you can brick the level right off the chump; yes, there are checkpoint issues; but it still manages to really catch that LBP1, First Steps to adventure feel. That covers up a lot of flaws, and i feel like it's rare to find a level that really manages that. i totally understand that's a ymmv kind of deal, but i still unreservedly recommend this one, and really look forward to seeing more in the series. Wanna know what the King and Queen are up to, also why the Princess seems so sinister. And that puppet? Chef's kiss.

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Found that folder wiv the non-text title cards. They really do look so much better.

So: for the past year and a half, I’ve had to deal with three femoral neck stress fractures and had a very slow healing time. (Kids: this is why eating disorders during your teen years are a very bad thing). I’m now healthy and back in the sport and here’s how it feels:

Running, in an uninjured body, is a pure thing, a clean vessel into which I can pour my effort.

It takes a long time to build something that can hold, to the brim, almost (but not quite) the whole of a person’s effortful will.

It’s taken many years to make it that way, so the parts all work together. My times are unspectacular; no Olympic dreams here. That’s fine. I do think  I have learned is to push myself to my own particular edge.

It’s a rare thing, the wedding of will and physical effort, the focus of self down to a fine single line of intent. 

It’s honest, too, and it helps teach me what honesty is: maintaining form and posture for as long as I can, the proper pace, the dance between anaerobic blowout and the hot racing burn of lactic acid (you can still keep going, quite awhile, through that. It’s just a feeling like pins and needles, an alternating ache and numbness, but the thing is: I describe these feelings and you have to understand, really understand, that these are feelings we runners who run on the red line continually choose for and inflict upon ourselves, run into the pain--if you really run your best, you will run with pain and know that you create it, that it’s your choice, and you’d rather feel it and be in it than stop).

It’s tremendous--to make pain a choice.

Not a self-destructive choice. The choice to practice pain with proper form. To accept that it is inevitably wedded to true effort.

People talk about the effortlessness of running quite a lot. I’ve never understood. Easy runs, a meditative state?  I don’t enjoy them. I like to race. I want the clarity of borders.