Again I get to welcome back an "old friend" to my turning scene, only I'm not sure how excited I am about this one. The other day I noted that I was lucky enough to turn for two and a half hours straight because of a combination of fortunate events, one of which was a reduction in the temperature. So much for that.
The old friend I'm referring to today is heat. Though the NWS disagrees with me, the thermometer in my yard tells me that it was floating right around 95 (F -- 35C for my non-American readers) this evening when I got out on the circle to go right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby [sorry... it just popped into my head and had to be typed to keep it from getting stuck there!]. I was sweating rivers! Training in 90+ (32+) weather is tough. It's also a cold, hard reality (HA!) in this neck of the woods.
To make matters even more awesome, the temperature decrease on Friday night was actually due to an impending torrential downpour arriving Saturday morning. The extra moisture has had two wonderful effects: 1) raising our relative humidity to "won't evaporate sweat but will stifle and limit visibility," and 2) calling forth every mosquito that apparently ever lived. I turned for about twenty-four minutes last night, being bitten at least a dozen times in uncomfortable places like the middle of my back or on my kidney, and tonight's twenty minutes saw the same thing. Both times, my hanging it up from the turning was caused by being eaten by other creatures, which I declare (at least at my level) to be a justifiable cause for hanging it up. I will note that due to my soreness from the marathon on Friday night, I would have been pushing it to get forty good minutes either day today, but if forced I probably could have done an hour at least on one of them.
One interesting side-effect of all the turning, though, has presented itself via the annoying insects. When they bite, it's the same as for everyone else (I assume). In the last year or so, though, since my training, particularly my turning, has really been elevated, the bites don't seem to itch for very long, maybe an hour or two. Usually, in fact, within an hour and a half, I cannot even find the place where I had been bitten, the swelling having more or less subsided completely and the itching having been forgotten. I'd like to attribute that to qi, but I'm not so hasty. Still, reading rather heavily on the matter last week unveiled to me that the reaction to the mosquito's saliva that we experience as an irritating bite largely has to do with how the immune system responds to it. Initially, when we're quite young, apparently, we get little or no reaction, but as we experience increasing amounts of exposure to the compound, our reaction intensifies. This, I think, is typical in children who seem to be driven absolutely mad by the bites. Eventually, largish swollen areas replace the characteristic bumps of our youths, and this is known to be caused by a further increased sensitivity to the mosquito saliva, the immune system essentially overreacting to the stimulus. In a small percentage of adults, though, a phenomenon similar to what I'm experiencing now occurs, though no one's perfectly sure why, knowing only that it must have to do with immune function. If I'm not mistaken, the Chinese medicine approach to immunity has a lot to do with defensive energy, wei qi. Perhaps one of the side-effects of extended training in an art like baguazhang enhances that aspect of our energetic makeup, and perhaps it has some effect on the mosquito-bite phenomenon I experience now. In any case, I feel at least slightly justified in owing to my training at least a part of this small benefit to my life, though being bitten still sucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment