For 3 months this year I was on a wild samba ride. I signed up to The Ballarat Foundation’s ‘Dancing With Our Stars’ event at the start of the year when I had just gotten off crutches from breaking my foot. They called, asked if my foot would be healed and asked me to take part. I was so excited to take part fundraising for such an amazing cause.
Each ‘star’ is put on a dance team with a professional/experienced/competitive dancer. I was partnered with Adrian who you may recall if you’ve been following my blog for a long time. He was in my second ever outfit blog post way back here. We were allocated our dance: the samba.
At first, I was terrified. I’ve never had to seriously fundraise for anything. I had no idea what I was doing. Every team was given a goal of $10,000. I thought I wouldn’t even be able to raise $1,000. For the first 9 weeks, that’s how it was. Then we hit $1,000 and I was so excited. We crept up to $1,600 and then stayed there until the last week of fundraising when BOOM, we spiked up to $6,441. This was thanks to some amazing supports. We got some large donations from my incredible accountant (Sharp Accounting), and from a special collaboration with Holcombe Hill Farm and Koonara Wines, then we had a massive amount of support from Adrian’s brother in law and his business Hearty Homes. Finally, we also had a large amount of support from Clinic-lase who not only made two large donations AND bought tickets to come and see us, they also gave donors to our team the chance to win one of their incredible treatments as an incentive to donate. In total the fundraiser goal for all the teams was $100,000. Thanks to some incredible work from some of the dancers we ended up raising $112,000. It was an incredible thing to be part of.
Learning the dances was incredible. Just before we started learning I was diagnosed with a form of arthritis that runs in my family. I had begun taking medication for it and was learning to adjust to a medicated body. I struggled with spins and when sharing stories about it on my social media I had one of my followers get in touch and tell me that she treats the dizzyness that I was experiencing. It's connected to motion sickness and is totally something that you can treat. For me, my motion sickness is so bad that even with spotting (turning your head only when necessary and keep eyes on an exact point in the room) I would still be completely overwhelmed by the turns. Yvette (from Movement and Learning connection) spent a couple of hours with me assessing me. She can help people develop in everything from coordination and balance to learning difficulties and reading problems. Check out the range of development she works on here. She gave me some specific 'exercises' to work on to help with my motion sickness and my coordination and I did see an improvement even with the small amount of work I was able to do in the short time we had before the event (I'll be going back to see her later in the year for more).
Intense motion sickness was just one of many amazing challenges. The samba is a ridiculously technical dance that requires the sort of three-dimensional coordination I've only seen the likes of with high-level martial arts forms work. While my shoulders went left to right, my hips had to be the exact opposite with one directly in front and the other behind. Kind of like making a plus sign with my shoulders and hips. My weight all had to be on the front foot with the kneed bent. The back leg had to be straight and the hip had to be raised as high as possible. If you're picturing this right you should be seeing my back hip looking like it's trying to touch the spine in the centre of my back. And that is ONE STEP. JUST ONE. I had to then learn all of that weird movement on the other side as well. The first lesson I practised 'back, together, forward'. That's the first step of the dance. One hour. Back, together, forward. The moment I was not completely overwhelmed in a lesson, a new thing would be added. It was complex, it was brain breaking and it was ridiculously advanced. I was learning moves that most people aren't even introduced to until they have been dancing for a few years.
It wasn't all smooth sailing. On top of working on the motion sickness stuff, I got the flu twice AND came down with shingles throughout the rehearsal process, missing lessons. Towards the end of rehearsals, my arthritis got really bad in my right hip. It was so bad that the muscles spasmed and for two days I couldn't stand up or sit down without a walking cane. Because I'd missed so many lessons from being sick, I couldn't miss another one with my arthritis so I showed up anyway with the cane, put on heels and got on the dance floor. The instructor was so kind on the days my health was bad. We reduced cardio on the days I was coughing so badly from the flu. Samba is a dance difficult to do slowly so we did the best we could without pushing me too hard. In the end, I'm so proud of everything we put in to do the performance that we did and that all the work ended up with us getting second place in the dancing for the event.
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