Get rid of the poles; you are relying on them way too much.
No-one I know of has every used poles to aid them walking.
Yes, well, I have ditched the poles now. They were only a temporary measure, largely because for the first
three weeks I only had a concrete car park to practice in, sprinkled with abrasive gravel, and I could only
practice for half an hour, once a week, in the evening, as it was getting dark. Needless to say, this increased
the danger And slowed me down. Now I've been training intensively at home, in my lounge, with a mattress and
lots of cushions, duvet, etc, on the floor, and the poles are in the way now.
The poles were to prop me up when I had no balance at all, and to stop me falling backwards.
Since I began practicing indoors, I have been able to push off from one wall and walk to the next, and also
to push off from one wall, walk over to the mattress, and fall over. I could not do either of these things
in that damn car park.
So far, I've fallen over around twenty times, none of them accidentally. I've got the knack of breaking my
fall with my face, and I'm trying to avoid that by punching the ground with both hand-heels first. Nonetheless,
my kneepads make first floorfall, and bending my knees as I go down doesn't seem to make any difference.
I thought there would be a sickening sensation of falling, then a very heavy impact, but there isn't: the fall itself
is too short to perceive in that way. -It's just a fall-position/lean, and then a splitsecond later I'm on the mattress.
Then there's an inertia effect of my lower legs flying up and crashing back down.
I've also got quite good and walking around, although not very far because the length of my lounge is taken up on
one end by the mattress and on the other by some large expensive ceiling-high glass doors, so I go back and forth between
the walls, forwards, backwards, sideways, and walking around in tight circles.
I've also found that I'm prone to slight dancing movement, which is very strange indeed because I can't dance out of bocks.
Until you can walk efficiently and are a lot more confident on your bocks, going to the gym is a bizarre idea...
The gym is just somewhere to practice that isn't a car park. I can't "just go outside", and other people are only around at specific times. That's life in a semirural area for you.
As for the pipe insulation back support, that isn’t needed either, all you need is... possibly a helmet if...
I admire the way you want to protect yourself but you seem to have gone to excess of the extreme.
... I really hope some of this is taken on board...
I'm going into this professionally, which means I will be making money out of it, and I will be doing it a lot.
If you took that attitude into work, you'd get yourself fired, and if you got injured at work, even
if it was somebody else's fault, you wouldn't get any compensation out of the employer. If you injured someone else
before you got fired, your employer would come after you for the money: It's called negligence.
I'm not intending to impact the helmet, and if I ever do, I'll have to replace it immediately.
The back
protector -only an invalid would need a back support- is just until I can afford body armour.
It's not secure enough to stay on outdoors on a windy day, and it'll end up being built into other equipment
later on, anyway.
Anyway, I can't wear it at the Cardiff event, because it'll obscure the artwork. Not ideal, but just a risk
I have to take. Attempts to fall backwards deliberately have failed so far, so I'll have to get a coach in a gym
to chock my hooves and push me backwards onto a crashmat in order to practice that.
I have to learn how to fall safely in a controlled (ie padded) environment, so when/if I fall on concrete / steps / spikes
etc outdoors, I'll protect myself instinctively: That's what training is all about.
by taking those small bits of equipment... it will all fit in a tiny rucksack.
A small rucksack will be too big; any size will obscure the artwork on the shirt. I've brought a bum bag
instead, which equipment will not fit into, so I'll either strap it to the 'risers (as recommended earlier), or
wear it.
On a different note, I've found that I'm exercise muscles I didn't know I had. My abdominals had muscle stiffness for the first two days, largely through lifting myself on the edge of a seat, then up from there. My arms were also sore for a bit: Until this week, I was getting more exercise carrying the damn things around, than from actually using them.
I've also found that the previous gym-finder link is no good. That just points to treadmill-rooms, not actual gymnasiums.
For proper gyms, (Southwest only) :
http://www.southwestgym.org.uk/
