Week one is done. How did I do? Much better than anticipated, considering that I barely rode all winter, and the weather hasn’t been cooperating.
I missed April 1 because I didn’t even decide this might be a fun thing to do until at least April 2. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the entire month because my (delayed) surgery is scheduled for April 20.
I did get out for the next three days. Then I missed Easter Sunday with the legitimate excuse that I had to cook the family dinner and haul it 25 km to my Mom’s (and bring home all the dirty dishes).
I got back at it Tuesday but missed Wednesday because of the weather and general tiredness. I couldn’t figure out the right clothes to go to work when it was -10 with the wind chill, but go home at +7.
I could have ridden to the hockey game that night and brought my bike home on the bus (or even ridden home) if a) I had remembered to charge my lights or b) remembered that busing home with my bike was an option. Oops.
By yesterday, I had the full-on cycling itch so went for a ride around the neighbourhood just for fun. It was my longest ride since last October and it felt great to be out admiring other cyclists, the runners, walkers, babies, dogs and geese enjoying the spring air.
A peaceful little island on the Rideau River. My bike is leaning against one of three red Muskoka chairs where you can sit and enjoy the view. If you know where to look, you’ll see the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, and a common merganser swimming by.
I’ll probably only ride for another week this month, but I’m excited to feel brave enough to be out on two wheels again.
There was a time when I might miss a session or two at the gym, and I would feel relief and then dread. The time never got wasted—life demands have a way of filling calendar vacuums without issue—but the original purpose never got slotted in anywhere else, hence the later dread.
ID: a set of plates for powerlifting in blue, yellow and green are arranged on the floor. Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
These days, I miss the gym if I skip a week. I miss the chalk, the warm-up, the feeling of strength as I approach the bar. Powerlifting training days anchor my week. As an independent consultant, my schedule is my own; there’s no nine-to-five at an office to provide structure to the week.
The two mornings I spend in training offer space to focus on physical effort vs. mental effort. That isn’t to say there’s no thinking involved in training. There is; it’s the proportion that is different.
I love the freedom. Outside of work deadlines, I am free to complete work at whatever time of day I choose. I learned early in my career as a consultant to block time for specific purposes; otherwise, it was too easy to fill my days with work and leave little time for family, fitness, leisure, and rest.
If I have to miss a day’s training, I try to make it up. Weather is an occupational hazard where I live and it’s not unusual to have late winter (or early spring) storms force schedule changes. Vacation periods are different; I’m usually travelling and walking thousands of steps a day compensates reasonably well for the lack of time at the bar.
As I contemplate retirement in the next six months, I’ve been thinking about how I will structure my week. Will I take out a membership to carry out self-directed workouts? Will I add something else to maintain cardiac health? Is it time to rescue my bike from its exile in the garage?
Or will I end up like the Dowager Duchess in Downtown Abbey, asking, “What’s a weekend?”
A still from Downton Abbey with Maggie Smith as the Dowager Duchess asking, what is a weekend?
I know I will have more time to try different things, and I’m looking forward to reengaging with activities I love but don’t have enough time for right now, like swimming, biking, and practicing yoga.
How about you? Have your fitness goals changed with retirement? Or are you thinking about the opportunities and delights awaiting you as you think about this next stage of life? Let us know in the comments.
MarthaFitat55 is looking forward to still being Fitat65!
I was a little less nervous and spent fewer minutes clinging to the boards during our second skating lesson.
Time flew by!
We skated forward and backward. Worked on stopping in both directions. Did some tricky (for me) glides on one foot. Then at the end, we tried going very fast and then stopping.
I liked the going fast bit. The stopping, not so much.
I loved watching our instructor skate. He turned beautifully and stopped quickly. So much grace. I reminded myself that he’s likely spent very many hours on the ice.
And I also had to remind myself that I can take as long as I want. I love the skill development and it’s okay if it’s slow.
Anyway, fun times! And more stickers for my helmet!
That’s me, Sam, in a red toque and my Creative Arts and Humanities hoodie, after the class.
For a blog post about our first skating lesson, see here.
The swimming pool where I was hired as a lifeguard closed in June 2025 for renovations. Tuesday we opened for the first time.
It was a bit chaotic as our head guard couldn’t make it in, and our Aquafit instructor had sent an email saying they couldn’t come, but it was on the long weekend so no-one saw the message and arranged for a replacement. Kudos to my boss, who became head guard plus Aquafit instructor for two classes, on top of her day job. All the equipment that had been put away months ago needed to be set up again. But we made it.
Being back is wonderful. There were so many people joyfully catching up with each other. So many huge smiles, hugs and “welcome back!” greetings.
There were people I have seen at other pools where I work; they had been anxiously checking in on when we would reopen. There were people I had missed and wondered how they were doing. And there were people I had completely forgotten about until they walked through the door. It felt like a big family reunion.
Welcome back everyone! I’m so happy you’re here.
Me with a goofy grin, inside the lifeguard office.
Hello blog world! It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, but (with some prodding and gentle nagging) here’s a short post on coming back to playing volleyball as an adult.
In January, I joined a 7-week session of indoor beach volleyball, hosted by Forest City Sports and Social. Specifically, I registered for their Queer League, which features gender-free spaces for people to enjoy sports together in a fun and social environment.
My only previous experiences with volleyball were mandatory gym classes in school where I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it and it seemed no matter how I hit the ball it hurt my arm. To be fair, I wasn’t a big fan of team sports in high school in general. So why did I register? Three main reasons. First, I had played dodgeball previously in the queer league and found an amazing group of people. Turns out having good people around makes team sports better! Second, this was indoor beach volleyball in the middle of a long winter which meant a sport I could play in shorts, bare feet and sand. If you know me at all, you can see how that would appeal to me. Third, it fit very nicely into my extremely busy schedule and was something I could realistically commit to. Again, if you know me you know that my schedule is always super busy!
Reflections on the season:
🍇My team was fantastic! One of our members does graphic design and prints shirts so we made ourselves shirts after choosing a name. We were originally “Purple Team” but by the second week we were “Raisin Hell” or affectionately “the raisins”.
🍇It is fun to be part of a completely non-competitive team sport (although we sometimes got competitive anyway, just for fun!).
🍇There were only four teams in this league, so we got to know everybody, even those who weren’t on our team.
🍇Turns out I like beach volleyball. I have registered for another session, which goes until the end of May, and I have also registered for a rookie league to help me learn to play better. So now I have two hours each week (back-to-back) of beach volleyball!
The Raisins, in purple t-shirts, on the sand. That’s Mal, standing, on the far right.
Cognitive surrender is an essential new term that’s arisen to describe the abdication of our own reasoning to a machine that sounds fluent, confident, and authoritative. Studies are showing that when people interact with AI tools, they accept flawed reasoning at a startling level (almost 75% of the time). Not because they don’t have the capacity to reason better themselves. But because it is easier not to question. As a writer, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m leery of outsourcing. I worry about dulling not just my cognitive capacity, even more so my creativity.
And, yes, I have started working with AI tools, because I also think it’s important to understand what these machines are all about and how I might use them in an un-surrendered manner. I almost used the word collaborate in that last sentence, instead of use. I chose not to, because I’m not yet ready to acknowledge these machines as entities. That feels like surrender. This from someone who is more than willing to see trees as sentient beings well before reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
I am exploring the border between surrender and leveraging these cognitive machines to free my time for deeper engagement with the world. More akin to my vacuum cleaner than a friend.
I have been thinking a lot about surrender in my body, too. Every time I read an article about aging and activity, which tells me that I should move more gently, now that I’m on the verge of a new decade, a part of me growls protectively. Not yet.
This physical version of surrender can be seductive. Messaging that encourages the little voices that say: I’m older now. Intensity is harder. Recovery is harder. Maybe I should just… let these things be harder. Be gentle with myself. Slow down. Stop. Lie down. The End. Okay—those last four are the hyperbole kicking in.The reasoning (without exaggeration) arrives fluently, confidently, with authority. And, as with AI reasoning, if I’m not careful, I might accept these blandishments about aging without interrogating the particularities of my own case.
I see the parallel this way: an authoritative-seeming signal in the form of an AI answer or an aging body; the availability of a path of least resistance; the ways that acceptance is not neutral, reshaping what we expect of ourselves and ultimately what we are actually capable of.
What the cognitive surrender research captures is that the problem isn’t using external tools. We humans have been off-loading cognitive tasks for a while now. Thank you, calculators. The red flag is what happens when we stop verifying. When silken reasoning substitutes for truth. When we accept not because we’ve evaluated, but because it’s so frictionless (and pleasant) to not expend the effort.
In the physical realm, adjusting our expectations as we age is not always surrender. Of course not. Surrender is unexamined acceptance. Letting the message of limitation go unchallenged. Sliding past the effort of finding out just what we are still capable of.
I turn 60 this year. I’d like to say I feel easy, breezy about that. I don’t. I’m in search of the right balance of grace and grit. I have set myself the goal of running a half marathon (21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) every month. Twelve months, twelve runs (among all the other runs I will do). When I was younger, that distance was a regular sized effort. Last year, I did not run that distance even once. And my year culminated in foot surgery in late November (which I wrote about here).
The decision has an element of stubbornness, to be sure. I am a Taurus, after all. On New Year’s Day, I started the year running 21k with my brother on mountain trails. I had a genuine concern that I would not run the whole distance. It took a while. I got it done. I was inspired. And so, this challenge. As I write this, four 21k are done. Eight to go.
I hear the voices that tell me: You’re not built for this anymore. I’m checking their veracity. They might be right. I might not be up for the challenge. I want to be gentle with myself, if I’m not. This is not about punishment. It’s about exaltation. The joy of discovering, each month, that I still have the capacity.
When I was a child, my mother always made us take the stairs. I remember glancing longingly at elevators as we passed them by. Now I live on the eighth floor, and I take the stairs almost every time I leave or come home. Not always. I’m realistic, not rigid. Not because I’m proving something. Because the habit of not surrendering has become its own kind of instinct. My mother was training something in me: the reflex to push gently against the available convenience, to stay curious about what I might actually be capable of.
The AI researchers found that people with higher fluid IQ scores were more likely to maintain their own judgment under pressure. I do not claim any extra intelligence. I think gentle resistance is more about habit. The habit of fact checking.
This is what I want to hold onto as I run my way through this year, one half marathon at a time. Not the delusion that there no limits that come with age. I have plenty. Instead, I want to cultivate the discipline of inquiry, to distinguish real limits from the limits that are presented with confidence, waiting for me to accept them without scrutiny.
My body, like a large language model, will tell me what it thinks I want to hear in smooth and reasonable tones. Rest. Take the elevator. Watch Netflix.
Sometimes my body is right. And I will be dancing with surrender and resistance, until I find the choreography that leads to graceful, gritty acceptance.
I don’t know about how things are going for you but my brain has been rather uncooperative for the past few weeks.
It differs from day-to-day – sometimes I can do what I planned, sometimes it feels like my ADHD meds aren’t working at all, and sometimes I feel like I get up in the morning, get spun around for a few hours, and then I’m dumped into 9:30 at night without any sense of what kept me feeling busy all day.
Needless to say, this has not been a fun experience at all.
And I think I could just wait out the tiredness, the frustration, and the brain fog if my capacity wasn’t all over the place. The fact that I can do some things with ease (and speed) and other things (that are normally straightforward) feel so difficult and convoluted that I either can’t get started or I end up moving so slowly that I get on my own nerves.
The worst thing is that I know the things I need to do to feel better, I am just having such a hard time making myself do them.
Now this is the part where some people would be saying “You just gotta push yourself. Try harder! This is just resistance.”
I’m voting no on that.
Sure, maybe there is some resistance in the mix of my challenges right now but pushing myself or telling myself to “just” try harder* is not going to be the solution.
Instead, when things are tough like this, what I always need to do is to figure out a way to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to do what I can when I can, and to rest when I need to – all while being very kind to myself about the process.
I don’t need to push myself or to try harder, I need to pare things down as much as I can.
And if you are struggling in any way right now, I invite you to do the same.
If you aren’t up to a full yoga practice, spend a few minutes in Savasana on your mat.
If you can’t write in your journal, do a little voice dictation into your phone or do some drawing in your notebook.
If you can’t tackle that big project, is there a smaller section that feels doable right now? Is there someone who can help you with it? Can you do anything to adjust your own or other people’s expectations around this project at the moment?
If you have been waiting to respond to an email until you have composed the perfect message, can you send a ‘Here’s a quick answer but I’ll get back to you in a few days with the details.’ type of message?
If you are having trouble eating the way you would like to, is there a quicker solution that keeps you fed and isn’t taxing on your brain? (Someideas )
If you can’t stir yourself to go for a walk outside, can you walk in your living room?
If your strength training routine is beyond you at the moment, can you do some mobility exercises or leg lifts or some calisthenics instead?
You can see where I am going here, right?
When things are challenging but you know you will feel better if you take action, you don’t have to summon the energy to do the big version of something – you can do a smaller version. You can pare things down until that activity feels doable.
You can be kind to today-you and tomorrow-you at the same time by scaling your actions to match your current capacity.
And this applies at all times, not just when you are struggling. It’s ok – it’s ENCOURAGED – to meet yourself where you are rather than being annoyed with yourself for not being somewhere else.
So, Team, however today finds you, I wish you ease and I invite you to consider whether you need to reduce the pressure in any area of your life by paring things down.
And I’m offering you this gold star in celebration of your efforts to take good care of yourself.
Go Team Us!
Isn’t this a cheery star? I’m going to prop her up next to my computer. Image description: A small painting of a happy-faced gold star with lines in the bottom left that kind of make it look like she jumped into the middle of the white card she is drawn on. The card is propped up between the keys on my black computer keyboard.
*Christine shudders in neurodivergence. Never EVER tell someone with ADHD that they aren’t trying hard enough – you can’t see the effort they have to put in to focus their attention, corral their working memory, and try to get their executive functions to, you know, function. It’s exhausting and takes A LOT of effort – and that’s BEFORE they actually start the task.
Content warning: the following post includes personal thoughts about diet/body image.
“I work out 5 days a week. Eat enough protein, not too many carbs, good sleep and on HRT and I’m (not losing weight/still gaining weight). “
The above quote is a variation on similar ones that I see on various social media platforms. Some days, (in my head), when I see these comments, I think, “maybe that’s the size you are supposed to be after doing those things” (feeling annoyed and smug at the same time)
Then, the next morning on the scale after a good strength day (preceded by a run day) and a good sleep week. “Ugh, why does the scale keep going up.”
Menopausal me isn’t that different from 30 year old me, to be honest. I like to think I’ve moved past my early societal indoctrination into diet culture.
Around age 31, I started running, working out more regularly (quit smoking for good) and, may have even stopped weighing myself for awhile. Trying to silence the Gen X childhood, lookalike daughter to a woman people would joke to about her size. Yes, while she was in a larger body, people would call her “Slim” for “Simi”. She was always on a diet. Eating cottage cheese and pineapple (everything old is new again) and (stressfully, joyfully?) sneaking parts of Michele’s Baguette’s cheese buns on car rides home.
Simi wasn’t into fitness. She tried to get active, here and there (cycling with friends, only to tumble and injure herself, walking on the treadmill, on and off, for years). She became fitter than ever in her late 50s after her first angioplasty and becoming a star student in cardio rehab. So much so, there was a piece written about her in the local newspaper.
She became svelter over the years, sometimes from more walking. Sometimes from less sugar. Sometimes from medications to manage her Type II diabetes. She even switched to GLP-1 to replace Metformin and it made her svelter in her older years. More fitting to her nickname,”Slim”.
In her last couple years, she shrunk to nothing. As is not uncommon, when someone is in the palliative stage, she couldn’t keep weight on. I could still hear the happiness in her voice when she would hear the latest wee size. She had to weigh herself, everyday, so she would know how much Lasix to take, to keep down the fluids in her legs, the fluids weighing down her (giant) heart.
I would hear her exclaiming she was “112 pounds” or whatever. As much as I would give anything to have her stronger, healthier, stature back, the one she wanted more than anything to shrink, I would be happy for her.
I understood how, while her appetite wasn’t as big, as she needed energy to continue to LIVE, she was relishing her ability to eat a bit of ice cream, without guilt. To think about what she wanted to eat that day and, no matter the salt, oil, bread, content, just eat it.
I remember being in elementary school and other students joking about how, on meet the teacher nights, they had to move the desks apart so my Mom could fit through.
I wish my natural reaction was, “so what??!”
I wish my natural reaction had been, “do you know my Mom gives the BEST, “squishy”, hugs? The kind of hugs that I craved for the safe, pillowy-ness, they provided?”
I wish my natural reaction had been to not care, in the ’80s when I lost weight when I had pneumonia, and I beamed at the compliments, from family friends about how thin I had become, in such a short time.
I wish I had focussed on the amazing hugs (which I also liked to give to friends in the school yard when I was in grade 1) and not how I was “little Simi” at the same time that I wanted to be thin and beautiful like the supermodels in Glamour magazine.
I wish that I hadn’t internalized all the love for thin females and the power it seemed to invoke, by starting to diet when I was 11. Sure, I still discovered “double double coffee” around that time and running to the strip mall at lunch for golden fries, salty fries. But, I started counting those fries. I started calculating what I should and shouldn’t eat.
In all honesty, as much as I learned to appreciate what exercise does for my body, outside of weight management – as much as I worked for the last 20 years to try to silence diet culture and, “what I should look like”, I don’t think that ’80s dieter has ever completely gone away.
It seemed to get quieter for awhile. People seemed to talk about getting thin less. I went to gyms with other middle aged women who focus on the strength training and good vibes more than how many calories are being burned.
I’m not the first one to notice that diet culture and thinness are back with a vengeance. Add thousands of Gen X and older Millennials, going on about the wonders of the perfect mix of protein, cortisol reducing potions, exercise, HRT – and GLP-1 and the noise about thinness is bigger than ever.
I’m also noticing some coaches, ones who mean well, ones who will gladly espouse the dangers of diet culture, finding new ways to promote variations on diet culture. I can’t help but think that obsessing about how much protein I am eating every day, tracking food in any form, ultimately does nothing other than feed into the compulsions for orthorexia that are lying dormant. I also see these coaches talking about their past lessons and the reasons why they are promoting these new “ways” as the key to lasting peace with their bodies. With their serenity. When I see these coaches posting about their past struggles and their new findings (that they are selling, of course), I can’t help but liken it to certain religious groups who provide countdowns to the apocalypse, only to start the recount when that date comes and goes without frogs dropping from the sky.
At a time when women’s rights are at threat in grand old democracies. At a time when women have every right to be angry about a myriad of things most people feel helpless about, it seems, the old tug to try to control (probably foolishly) our bodies won’t go away. If not us, who else. If not now, when?
I don’t even feel OK providing advice, because, I am still working on myself. Hopefully, I’ll have the privilege, not afforded to all, for many decades, to continue working on myself. I feel kind of ashamed of that privilege, to be honest. To waste my precious resources on thinking about what size my body should be. At the end of the day, I hope I’ll be able to use this body, whatever shape it is in, for the greater good. For more important things.
Whatever happens, those important things won’t have anything to do with how much protein I eat (or failed to eat) on any given day.
Nicole P. is doing what she has done for years and trying to block out the menopausal “diet” cues.
After our winter weekend triathlon, Sarah and I returned to Guelph determined to improve our skating. I signed up for Skate Canada’s CanSkate program and the first class was Tuesday night, and Sarah decided to join me.
But first I had to buy a helmet (my first time wearing one, times have changed) and new skates (after the mice ate my old ones.) These are figure skates but they’re designed to be comfy and they’re black rather than the traditional white.
Fun times. Yes, a little bit terrifying. It took me a few minutes before I let go of the boards. But also lots and lots of fun.
We all warmed up together and then split into different groups based on our ability.
I enjoyed all the new Canadians on the ice in our very beginner group. .
I was also impressed by the people who’d advanced past beginner. They looked good! I took that as inspiration.
By the end, I was skating somewhat comfortably forward and not so comfortably backward. Stopping is a whole other matter. Lots of work to do there. I even got a sticker on my helmet for successfully completing my first lesson!
Reflecting on this, I was surpised by the reaction of friends and colleagues. There was a lot of “age is just a number”and “I guess it’s never too late.” I hadn’t really thought of this as age thing at all. I don’t get the idea that you stop doing new things as you get older. I hate the idea of doing less and less with age.
My own reaction? I love learning new things.
There’s a kind of excitement in being a complete beginner, found in the very early stages of doing a new thing. I hope I keep on finding new things. I mean, I accept that with age I’m not going to get better and better at some of the old things I’ve been doing my whole life, so the better and better energy I love has to come from new things.
Also, although you likely know this, it’s not a comparative better and better. It’s totally better and better for me.
I keep thinking EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND, like Rocky in Project Hail Mary and his AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE.
Sarah
As someone who thought skating is like riding a bike I was surprised by how much I wobbled around during our recent trip to the skating trail at Arrowhead Provincial Park. I was ok skating forward but struggled a lot with the whole manoeuvring thing.
When Sam tracked down adult learn-to-skate lessons I jumped at the opportunity to have a skills refresher. I really enjoyed our first lesson. It felt great to go back to basics and I was already feeling more stable by the end. I can’t wait to go back this week!
Last week we had a day with a high of 22 (feels like 24) and brilliant sunshine. I thought that the 30 days of riding in April was off to an excellent start.
And on the weekend, I had fun taking Sarah’s 12-year-old nephew out fat bike riding at the farm. That was its own kind of muddy fun.
This week begins with a high of 5 and a low of -7, with possible snow showers. I’m not really feeling the Monday Morning bike commute. Instead, I joined the Herd on Zwift for their Monday Morning Coffee Crew ride.
Here’s my morning playlist, thanks to Spotify, and apologies to family members who didn’t have to be up at 6 am.
Here’s my view of the screen from the bike.
That’s my avatar in the pink hat with the neon pink wheels on her bike. That’s my pocket Scotty-the-squirrel sticking out of my left jersey pocket, growing as my streak grows. And yes, my red socks don’t match exactly but they’re special flame socks.
Here’s Cheddar on the couch watching me ride. He looks like he’s been up all night studying, but the Chemistry notes are Gwen’s.
