It’s my birthday week. Though my actual birthday was last week, we had a family celebration yesterday after my eldest adult child, Mallory, returned from a summer spent leading young people on backcountry canoe camping trips.
I don’t really need presents and everyone knows that, but my middle kid Gwen did find me something cute, two rubber ducks. They’re a fitness duck, for me, and an engineer duck for Sarah.
I love that I’m the fitness duck though likely it would be hard to find a dean duck or a philosophy duck.
Samantha the fitness duck and Sarah the engineer duck in front of the birthday cake
Why I’m interested: I’ve always been fascinated by the question of declining fitness with age and how much of it is in our control. I wrote Is Aging a Lifestyle Choice? way back in 2012. Yes, older people tend to be slower but older people also train less. Lots of research says older people get the same fitness gains from training as younger people. The problem is they/we don’t do it. We train less. We don’t push ourselves. My question: how much of this decline is psychological? Further question, even if the decline is our heads not the rest of our body, does that mean it’s any easier to change?
What the article is about: The role of the brain and novelty in physical decline. It’s not about speed, strength or training. Instead the focus is on the way we gradually limit our range of motion and stop doing novel physical things. As a result, we have less confidence and narrow the range of things we’ll try. It’s a vicious cycle. The idea is that subtle behavioural changes can lead to a loss of physical confidence and even greater physical withdrawal.
Quote from the article: “Physical Novelty Is Part of How You Stay Resilient
“Everyone reaches a point of physical limitations, but we reach it sooner if we shy away from physical tasks and don’t challenge our brain to regularly encounter unfamiliar motor patterns. If we stick to only a restricted set of movement patterns, our brain gets accustomed to firing our muscles only in a narrow range of ways. When we give ourselves new challenges, within reason, we adapt to them on a variety of mental and physical levels.”
This can be simple things like not climbing on ladders to get things off high shelves, or not putting on socks and shoes while standing up.
What are some examples from my life? I think of things like getting in the canoe without getting my feet wet. Since I’m in the bow, that means stepping through the boat with balance, and then sitting down. These days I tend to wear flip-flops and say, whatever, and step through the water instead.
Maybe I should challenge myself more often to do it the hard way.
Sarah does it the hard way but she also does the portages in hiking boots.
This fall marks my 58th year of back-to-school transitions from summer. I started out with elementary, middle and high school. Then on to university and graduate school. After that, work as a professor since 1993. My plans are to continue for the next five years and probably, maybe, possibly retire in 2031. But we will see how things go. I like my job and feel good, for which I feel very fortunate.
Also, I can’t imagine what life will be like when I don’t have to pull myself away from the slower, more indulgent routines of summer in order to begin a schedule of class prep, teaching, and seasonal increase in email and admin. As much as I love summer, it’s always deeply satisfying to return to the pleasures of new syllabi, new students, and well-worn and reliable work routines. It’s a little like pulling out fall clothing– I am happy to get reacquainted with favorite sweaters and jackets that I temporarily forgot about during warmer weather.
For me, fall transitions have meant arranging my physical activity around my work schedule and the seasonal light changes. This year feels different, though.
For a while now, I’ve been less active than in previous years. I struggle with an anxious brain even when life is general is fine, and it’s not been fine lately. My mother is declining, and helping her is difficult and complicated and extremely stressful. My sister and I are working together, but it’s hard.
This summer, I found that I needed quiet for than anything else. Quiet for meditation. Quiet for reading. Quiet for just being. My activities have been lower key– walking and yoga, a little easy cycling, a little swimming, often with friends or family. I went for a meditation retreat where quiet was explicitly on the agenda.
I thought, given how much quiet I needed and wanted and lived in this summer, that transition to the much louder days of fall would be hard. I’m happy to say that I’m really loving September so far. Here are some highlights:
Lily from my logic class loves plant cuttings, so I’m bring her some small jades this week. We talked for 20 minutes about our home plant communities, and I’m looking forward to more chat.
Already, I’ve got students following me out of the building and to my car, continuing discussions about philosophy. I find this so endearing and sweet and also nice for me.
I went to my friends Martin and Andrew’s 40th anniversary party in New York (I’m still here in the Big Apple, as it was last night). It was loud and fun and filled with friends and family and food and festiveness.
Today I’m walking around New York, through Greenwich Village, a place not known for sedate quietude. I’m looking forward to stimulation for all my senses, and hopefully not too many impulse purchases.
After Labor Day on Monday, I resume teaching on Tuesday, and start to settle into a fall routine. Which I actually love.
What does my activity look like for fall? Probably more of the same as I did in summer, although I’m looking forward to more cycling in cooler temperatures. I’ll go back to Friday night yoga classes with Norah and whoever else wants to come. Walks with friends and swimming (indoors, but that’s okay too) with friends and kids are always a pleasure. I’ll be traveling some to see my mother and helping her with what she needs and seeing my sister and kids and other family, too.
So life will be busy. And louder. And I’m glad.
Dear readers: what is your fall transition looking like? And how are you feeling about it? I’d love to hear from you.
My plan was to go swimming twice a week this summer at my local outdoor pool. It’s a short bike ride and with my new daytime availability I figured that was a very achievable plan. That would have given me 20 swims!
It started off strong with an evening swim with Michel on July 2 and I went the next day at lunch. It felt great to be back in the pool.
The next week I went twice and started finding my breath again. The strokes started feeling more natural. I still had to concentrate on breathing and form but I was struggling less.
My schedule got interrupted when I had a mole removed and I stayed out of the pool until the stitch was removed and the wound healed.
There were also missed days from the weather, lightening and smoke kept me away more than I had planned.
Nat sits against a brick wall in her swimsuit, smiling.
What struck me is how much my endurance and distance recovered over the summer, even with inconsistent effort. I had started the season covering about 500 meters and not being able to swim for 30 minutes. At the end of the outdoor swimming season I easily swam an hour covering 1,300 meters.
Same swimsuit, different day but this time I had my red swim cap on!
More importantly, I got into the meditative headspace where my attention no longer needed to be on my breath or technique and just stayed in the moment. Swimming is the one sport where time falls away for me.
I especially enjoyed outdoor swimming with the rippling sunlight dancing across the bottom of the pool.
Nat squints and smiles. It’s very sunny out!
This summer taught me that cycling to the pool is convenient and easy, especially with a bike rack inside the enclosure.
Next year I will keep an eye on the opening date, it was before Canada Day because the pool is heated, so I can get more workouts in.
I will also get a 3 month pass instead of a 10 visit pass. I think I can find time to go 3 or 4 times a week.
I really love swimming. I don’t have any goals other than getting a full body workout. I find that quite freeing.
There’s lots I could share about the impact the death of Gloria Steinem on September 2 has had on me, but today, I want to focus on two lessons I learned from following Steinem’s writing, advocacy and philosophy and how they are connected with the work we share on the Fit is a Feminist Issue blog.
ID: Two young women, one white and one Black, play football. Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash
The first was use your voice. Steinem wrote and spoke a lot about women’s agency, even if she didn’t use those words in the second wave of feminism. It’s hard to imagine but back in the 50s and 60s, women couldn’t get their own bank account, a credit card, or a loan without their husband’s signature. Steinem along with other feminists of her generation, spoke up and out about the egregious policies in existence that treated women like chattel.
Speaking up in the US led to the implementation of Title IX, in which sex discrimination could not be used to bar women and girls from physical education or access to federal funding for the same. There were women’s baseball teams during the war, and they all but disappeared after WWII when the men came back and real baseball could be played again. It wasn’t only women in tennis who got a boost when Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in 1973, it was the whole idea of sports-minded women getting their due on the playing fields and the locker rooms.
The second lesson I took from Steinem was to take up space. In sports, we see discrepancies regarding the prize money, sponsorships, and salaries for women athletes, who have not been kept pace with what men have enjoyed for the last 40-plus years, even though women’s hockey and football (soccer), to name two sports, have been taking off, with growing audiences, followers, and secondary school programming.
In 2021, the NCAA faced a media storm during March Madness, after men were given state-of-the-art training spaces complete with equipment, and women got a few yoga mats and a single dumbbell tree. In case you thought there were fewer women’s teams compared to men competing for the space, there were 64 teams each.
Using your voice and taking up space are often considered being too loud or too much. In the fitness world, it can mean seeking pay equity, and challenging sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia in sport policy and programming. It can mean taking apart the patriarchal beliefs that deny women full access to global playing fields. It can mean not letting things slide one more time because the system says no.
It can be seen as looking for more than we deserve. And yet, we have just as much right to be in the gyms, lifting those weights; in the pool, swimming those lengths; or on the court, landing those shots with tennis balls, soccer balls, or basketballs.
MarthaFitat55 still has her Why Not? poster from 1975 but lost all her copies of MS Magazine in a floodin 2001.
Gloria Steinem has died. I am much personally sadder than I would have thought I would be. She fought for and shaped so much for me and so many other women, and took so much shit for it with grace and courage.
If any young ‘uns want to understand why she was important, I suggest watching the excellent miniseries Mrs America, which is a brilliant portrait of the dynamics of second wave feminism and the roots of what became “women eating their own faces” family-values MAGA.
Those women were more than a generation ahead of me, but as a teenager with a lot of angst about my gender, sexuality and the shame brushed over women for violating the norms, I devoured Steinem, Friedan and other contemporaries. Their pre-intersectionality lenses (esp. Friedan’s) don’t stand up to scrutiny now, but we can’t miss how unbelievably radical they were.
I lived in a world where I was literally not given a school award because my principal thought it would be inappropriate to honour a kid being raised by a single mother because it would legitimize that situation. I lived in a world where my grandparents consistently tried to school me in how to be a “lady,” and where my mother navigated shame and castigation for my appearance six months after her wedding, and for her divorce. I lived in a world where, of course, there were no visible queer women.
Reading Gloria Steinem and discovering Ms magazine were the first lifeline into a different way to be for me as a 15 year old in 1980 windsor. Their words led me to the first wave french feminists, and to every book about women claiming their sexuality and desire and agency I could find (some better than others, lol), and to every piece of queer theory I ever read. I read Ms. fiercely for two decades, and a vintage mug from the magazine holds the pens on my desk now. That mug symbolizes the container that Steinem and her contemporaries created so I can use my voice the way I want to today.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in Mi’kma’ki, the unceded and ancestral land of the Mi’kmaq Nation.
It’s the weirdest thing, and I’m not even sure when it happened. Lately, no matter how tired I am, I feel compelled to move.
Once I’m moving, I sometimes feel energized for a while. Other times, I keep chugging away, even as my brain is telling me it’s okay to stop (and the rest of my body emphatically supports the brain).
I know that part of this is habit after years of commuting by bike to work, plus various dance classes and swim practice each week. The 22_ workouts in 202_ challenge has reinforced my tendency to want to move every single day. I see everyone else’s joyful pictures and activity reports and I want to do things too.
There is absolutely no logic to it. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people participate and post. Most post no more than a few times a week. I think Sam is the only one who consistently does at least one thing every day. But do I think that it’s okay to take a rest day? No! Because people (not the same people) are posting every day and therefore I must post.
So, I’m trying to take a page out of Christine’s habits: be kind to myself, and give myself a gold star when I sit back on the couch like Milo, even if I’m still playing with something (usually knitting, not a kitty toy like Milo).
Milo, a great and white cat who alternates between intense action and total chill, is flipped on his back on the couch, playing with one of his favourite toys.
How many posts? Thirty-one posts this month, through a stretch of open-water swims, cross-border cycling, and at least one summer that didn’t go the way anyone planned.
Who blogged? Sam, Christine, Diane, Nat, Catherine, Nicole, Martha, Mina, Tracy, Cate and guest blogger Winnie.
Bodies in the news: menopause and sport politics. Menopause had a real moment on the blog this month. Nicole asked what it means to be pitched as a “Menopause Ambassador”, and Catherine followed with a sharp look at the menopause “gold rush” — a telehealth boom for some, still a bust for most. On the sport-politics side, Diane asked what actually happens when we try to keep trans people out of sport, and Sam covered the Tour de France Femmes’ newest way of policing women’s bodies: “bra doping”.
I think most runners have this thought. I know I did back when I ran.
You look at the Boston qualifying times, for example, and think, wow, I’d have to be 75 to qualify. (That’s me. You might be much speedier.) But then you think of the upside. I don’t need to get faster. I just need to get older and stay the same speed.
I’m no longer a runner, but it’s finally happened.
This week, while riding my bike on the trainer, I got a notification from Garmin. Thanks to all of your hard work, your fitness age has just lowered. Your fitness age is now 62.
This week, thanks to the ticking of the clock, I actually turned 62.
Garmin suggests I aim for 56 as my fitness age. I know their metrics aren’t perfect–see the discussion of weight above–but I like the idea of getting younger fitness-wise, as I get older age-wise.
For the last few nights, I have been doing about 5 minutes of mobility exercises before bed and the practice feels really beneficial.
I didn’t start the exercises with a plan, I just did them one night while listening to the end of a podcast and I liked how I felt afterwards so I did them again the next night.
And since I often find myself feeling a bit twitchy and restless before bed – with an odd feeling or an ache in one place or another – but I haven’t had that feeling in the last few nights so it seems worth exploring if there is a connection between the exercises and the lack of twitchiness.
This may be a coincidence of course but that’s part of the experiment.
I’m referring to it as going in circles because I made myself laugh when I referred to the exercises that way on Sunday night.
And seeing as the routine includes rolling a ball under each foot and then doing ankle circles, knee circles, hip circles, upper body circles, arm circles, shoulder circles, and neck circles, it’s not wrong it just sounds a bit funny.
So here’s my experiment:
For September, I am going to go in circles for 5 minutes each night before bed and note whether or not I feel twitchy afterward and whether I feel more or less stiff each morning.
I’ll report on my experiment on October 1.
These imperfect circles were fun to make and they are a good representation of the imperfect circles in my practice. Image description: a drawing of 8 overlapping, painted circles in fall colours (shades of green, brown, red, orange) with a different pattern in black ink on each one (spirals, circles, grids, lines, triangles, squares) and each circle is outlined in black. The drawing has been cut out of a larger sheet of white paper in an irregular shape that resembles a cloud or a puddle. The outer edge of the paper is trimmed in black and there are gold dots between the black trim and the edges of the circles. At the bottom are the words ‘hello, September!’ written in black.
