I remember the day I became a pole addict like it was yesterday, which is saying something as it was the night my girlfriend and I were high-impact partying in a small club in the suburbs.
We were pretty much regulars at that club back then, since it was a couple of blocks away from my girlfriend's house. It had a gorgeous 2.0 inch diameter solid brass pole that was about 10 feet high (they don't make them like that anymore). That beauty never really saw much action, until a tubby brunette girl decided to bravely get up and pull off a couple of moves. Now that I think back about it, nothing she did was that complicated - moves that I learned in my first couple of months of poling - but it did look much more impressive than the usual cheesy rubbing that ladies attempt in drunken stupor. The crowd cheered, and I was completely awestruck. While other girls at the venue echoed cries of "slut" and threw dirty looks around the room, all I could think of was "I have to learn how to do that".
Hungover the next morning, with YouTube on my laptop, I started researching what has now grown into an almost unhealthy obsession. Professional performances, amateur pole competitions, and online training videos whirled in front of my eyes and sucked me deeper into this new world of vertical acrobatics. I saw graceful displays of intricate and original choreography, a mixture of gymnastics and dance that was inspiring and super-human. And all this was done on a brass pole 10 feet in the air, with no mats, helmets, or nets - and usually in high heels. I was sold.
I was living with my parents at the time, so purchasing a pole and installing it in my home was out of the question. My parents wouldn't find out about my poling adventures until two years later. I did however get the brilliant idea of practicing the moves I learned off YouTube videos on an abandoned tether-ball post at a neighborhood elementary school; I did this in the early hours of the weekends, when the school was deserted. Nothing I practiced was outrageous or sexy, in fact it was a lot of falling and crashing into the pole as I had no idea what I was doing, but I was so determined to figure it out on my own that I resorted to that particular plan. By the way, practicing on a tether-ball post is not advised, as they are usually weathered and rough; within 20 minutes, the skin on my hands was blistering and ripping. (Stay tuned for a post about pain and poling.)
This went on for a couple of weeks until I convinced my boyfriend at the time to allow me to install a removable pole at his place. I got my first one from craigslist, which I quickly traded for a new one from a local vendor. Since neither of us knew how to install or use the thing properly, one day my practice ended in the pole falling smack in between the flat screen TV and the fish tank. Up on the top of the closet it went, to collect dust, while I surfed the web in search of local pole dancing studios that offered lessons.
I bravely made the one hour trek downtown to sign up with a studio run by a reputable name in the Canadian pole dancing world. I was confident in my abilities, as I was a seasoned track-and-field runner of ten years. I made my university varsity team coming out of high-school, and only 1.5 years later had to have knee surgery, which put me out of the sport for the rest of my life. So, pole seemed like an easy and exciting substitute. WRONG. No amount of grueling circuit training and brutal 800 m races could have prepared me for the next part of my pole dance adventure. But don't worry, everything turns out fine in the end.
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