Ouch

It took a bit longer than anticipated for my knee to recover from last week's workshop. Missing dancing is bad enough, but not being able to cycle either made it worse - it doesn't take long for lack of exercise to make me feel like an irritable slug. To my relief it was just about OK by the time Sunday's private lesson came around. Even though neither of us was at our liveliest it was very useful, and I finally cracked a move I'd half-learnt a couple of weeks earlier. It's remarkable how small adjustments can make a huge difference to how smoothly a move works. And I learnt how to do bachata so that the step doesn't look like "a dog against a lamp post" (thanks, Abby).

A couple of hours off and then back for round 2, the advanced workshop. This was very entertaining, the most amusing bit being when both women and men had to do solo cross-body lead turns from one side of the dance studio to the other, and then go back doing sombrero turns. Finally we had to do it the length of the dance studio, which is where people's ability to spot really came into question. One woman (a brilliant dancer) showed how effortless it could be, after which everything ended up as a series of races with people shouting encouragement to the leaders. One dancer (who I won't name to save her embarrassment) was just about to win the final lap but fell over a metre from the line...

The partner work started by revising the move from the previous week, looking in detail at positioning, how to lead the move and how to 'anchor' the end of the turn. Finally Andy looked at fitting the moves to the music, identifying the stronger and weaker measures. Very worthwhile and a completely different emphasis from most salsa classes, with their emphasis on long sequences of elaborate moves strung together with no relationship to the music.

And I felt so much better after some dancing.

I tried out some of the new moves in O'Neills last night and a couple of them worked on someone who didn't know they were coming, which is the real test. Need a bit more practice to get them working every time, though. I'm thinking of trying to get a few people together to hire a dance studio for practising as those mirrors are really useful.

No salsa in O'Neills next week (St Patrick's Day) but as a bonus it's open on Easter Monday.