Month: December 2014

Uncategorized

Nice weight neutral nurse, wow!

Sam B2 Comments

I had a mammogram the other day. That’s not really news. I’ve had lots in my lifetime. Scary family history will do that to you.

It’s not a big deal for me. Not particularly painful. Mostly inconvenient. And hey, they got rid of the pink robes. Now they even allow smart phones to be used while you wait. That place is getting better and better.

I liked the technician/nurse. She was also turning fifty this year and thinking about active vacation ideas. Lots to talk about there.

Then she started comparing my new images with my old ones from a year and a half ago.

“Whoa, you’ve lost a lot of weight.”

I tell her not that much really but I have swapped some fat for muscle.

I waited, expecting a pat on the back, some congratulations. None came.

Instead, she asked if it was intentional, if I was happy that I’ve lost weight. I explain about my big summer of riding. That’ll do it, she said.

It wasn’t until I was on my way of the hospital that I realized how unusual this encounter was. Neutral acknowledgement of weight loss. Nice.

You’ve lost weight isn’t a compliment, as Tracy noted awhile back. It’s just a fact.

athletes · sex · team sports · Uncategorized

Athletes Taking a Stand against Sexual Assault

Tracy I2 Comments
Yes means yes, no means no.
Yes means yes, no means no.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education talked of a new peer initiative springing up on campuses.  True, you can’t stop university students from drinking and you can’t stop them from having sex. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to make some inroads to protect intoxicated young women (who are most at risk) from sexual assault.

According to the article:

Hanging out, drinking, and hooking up are for many students just a part of life in college. They’re also a common backdrop for sexual assault. As many as four in five campus assaults involve drinking, studies have found. Plenty of those cases hinge on whether a woman was drunk or incapacitated, and therefore unable to give consent.

Messages about preventing sexual assault now come at students from many directions: campus and federal officials, the news media, their peers. And what students are hearing has started to influence their behavior. They’re paying more attention, and they’re looking out for one another.

The initiative is a response to Obama’s “It’s on us” campaign, asking people to look out for people in risky situations.  It’s taken an interesting form on campuses, and one reason it’s so interesting to me is that fraternities and athletes on school teams are two of the groups who are most active.

What are they doing to make a difference? At Union College, a campus initiative is training team members about how to intervene:

“I knew we had an opportunity with our hockey team,” says Jim McLaughlin, the athletic director. The team attended a half-day workshop in September on bystander intervention. Next in line are the women’s hockey team and the men’s and women’s basketball and swim teams.

“We are tough, bold women, and we would have the confidence to step into a bad situation,” says Christine Valente, captain of the women’s hockey team.

What’s great about this is that it’s opened up an important conversation about consent and also about masculinity:

Organizers are holding workshops with sports teams, fraternities, and sororities. But they don’t preach or try to give students all the answers. On a recent Thursday evening, the men’s lacrosse team packed into a dorm’s common area, where the group’s presenters, all women, tried to draw the athletes out. What does consent mean? How does sexual assault affect men? How do stereotypes of masculinity play into the problem?

“You should have consent before you go out and party and get drunk, instead of waking up the next day and regretting it,” one player said. “As a team, I want to win a national championship,” offered another. “I don’t want another player going out and touching a woman who doesn’t want to be touched and undermining our success.” Every time someone spoke up, the women tossed out packets of Sweet Tarts or Reese’s Pieces.

After such presentations, students sometimes approach members of the consent group, says Ms. Han, to say they’ve been applying its lessons. “I was having sex,” a student might report, “and I asked for consent!”

We’ve had our own conversation about consent here in Canada recently. I alluded to it briefly in my Mine all Mine post where I talked about how getting active gave me a new sense of being in my body.  There, I called it confident ownership.

That’s another reason why I think athletes are in a good position to have some influence in this area.  At Union, they’re involving not just the men’s teams, but also the women’s teams.  As the captain of the women’s hockey team said, they’re “tough, bold women” with confidence.

As Caitlin from Fit and Feminist said earlier this week in her post on confidence, her athletic achievements (her awesomeness really does know no bounds — she’s unstoppable!) has translated into something she never had before: she believes in herself.

So women who are athletes can play an important role in changing the culture of risk.  It’s a fine line, of course, between giving women tools that empower them, on the one hand, and blaming them when those tools fail them, on the other.  It’s realistic, of course, to want to protect ourselves.  At Union, the women

 they do two things to keep themselves and their friends safe from sexual assault. They never walk alone after dark, and they go to parties in groups. Some also bring their own alcohol—keeping their drinks covered and close at hand. Campus safety officers taught three self-defense classes this fall, and the Theta Delta Chi fraternity offered to buy women a new kind of nail polish that is supposed to change colors to detect the presence of common date-rape drugs.

It’s fantastic that these campus initiatives don’t stop there.  There’s a great “tipsheet” for preventing sexual assault that made the rounds a few years ago. It turns our usual suggestions about what women can do to keep themselves safe into suggestions for perpetrators instead. For example:

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

What these campus initiatives are getting right is that they are involving everyone.  That’s what’s required for a culture change.  Traditionally, sport (particularly men’s varsity sports) has been (and is) a sexist domain with a bad track record for treating women respectfully. It’s encouraging to see an initiative the takes advantage of the leadership potential of athletes on campuses and redefines the values we have come to associate with sports teams.

I hope to see more of this, including on my own campus where issues of date rape and sexual assault among the students need to be high on our list of priorities, and conversations about consent and respect need to stay on our radar even though our radio host scandal has fallen out of the news.

 

cycling

Do ghost bikes hurt cycling safety more than they help?

Sam B15 Comments

I’ve been wanting to blog about ghost bikes for awhile. In theory, I ought to love ghost bikes. I’m a cyclist, concerned about bike safety–see here and here–and I like community based bike activism.  It’s also true that the art project aspect of  ghost bikes fascinates me. I teach a course about death and roadside memorials of all sorts have a lot to tell us about our attitudes to death. But the fact is, it’s more complicated than that. I have mixed feelings about ghost bikes.

First, what’s a ghost bike?

Wikipedia tells us this: A ghost bike, ghostcycle or WhiteCycle is a bicycle set up as a roadside memorial in a place where a cyclist has been killed or severely injured (usually by a motor vehicle).[1][2] Apart from being a memorial, it is usually intended as a reminder to passing motorists to share the road. Ghost bikes are usually junk bicycles painted white, sometimes with a placard attached, and locked to a suitable object close to the scene of the accident.

A Flickr photoset of ghost bikes is here.

And then there’s http://ghostbikes.org/:

Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists’ right to safe travel.

Now there’s photo book in the works about ghost bikes.

GHOST BIKE: Photography Book by Genea Barnes

Photographer Genea Barnes is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to print an art book featuring her Ghost Bike art. Ghost Bikes are bicycles that have been painted white and placed near a location where a cyclist was killed. Barnes has traveled to over 50 cities photographing these bikes. The book will include the story of her travels searching for the Ghost Bikes and the art she has created.

Each year, the US sees more than 600 bicyclist fatalities, and more than 50,000 bicyclists report injuries. Ghost Bikes symbolize the need for drivers and cyclists to be more aware of their surroundings. Barnes lives Brooklyn, New York and is from San Francisco, CA. The Kickstarter has has two weeks left, ending December 22nd at 6pm EST. Money raised will cover printing costs of the book, the rewards promised, and shipping costs.

“I started photographing Ghost Bikes because you can pass a memorial hundreds of times and eventually forget what it represents,” said Barnes. In some pieces, she combines photos of Ghost Bikes with images of live people manipulated through Photoshop to look like ghosts. Over time, many Ghost Bikes have been removed. ”I hope this project and my book will help raise awareness, and have the memorials and their sentiment live on.”

In 2010, San Francisco Bay Guardian readers voted Barnes best emerging artist. She has been showing her work in world class art hubs like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Milan since 2005. Her current projects explore death, decay, and facets of what is left behind.

You can donate to her kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1004330446/ghost-bike-a-photographic-journey-by-genea-barnes

Here’s some from my city of London, Ontario. And there’s a story about them from the Free Press: Ghost bikes are placed in memory of those killed while cycling

Okay, I’m putting off the tough party of this post. According to my politics and lifestyle commitments I ought to love the idea of ghost bikes. They’re a haunting reminder of the real costs of cycling in urban environments designed for cars and in which most drivers seem to think bikes don’t belong on the road. Cyclists lose their lives and ghost bikes are a striking reminder of the need for drivers to be more careful.

So why I am not in love with the idea of ghost bikes?

It’s complicated. (Remember, I’m a philosopher. You ought to expect that.)

First, while it’s true that ghost bikes are haunting reminders, what they’re haunting reminders of will vary from person to person. Ghost bikes don’t have just one meaning. For many people ghost bikes are reminders that cycling is a dangerous activity. In a collision between a car and a bike, it’s the cyclist who will most likely lose. Ghost bikes can remind people that cycling is dangerous without saying anything about who is to blame.

Second, if cycling is a dangerous activity then it’s just for dare devils but the biggest factor that influences bike safety is the numbers of cyclists on the road. Numbers matter more than anything else. More than helmets even. But if people perceive bike riding as dangerous, they won’t ride. They won’t let their kids ride. Cycling remains a fringe activity.

Ghost bikes are a striking reminder of cyclists who were killed on the road but if that scares people off riding, that’s not a good thing. It’s not clear than they increase driver awareness. If the net effect is fewer people riding, then ghost bikes make things worse, not better.

Third, I worry too that they make cycling seem more dangerous than it actually is. Lots of pedestrians die each year, killed by cars, but are there any ghost people?

There are also lots of automobile deaths. While you see roadside memorials by the highway, you tend not to see them in the city. But there are a lot of car deaths. People don’t think driving is scary but they’re scared of riding a bike. Ghost bikes are a striking memorial. They’re haunting but I’m not sure they’re the best strategy politically. I recognize most of my cycling friends will disagree with me but I’m not a big fan of ghost bikes.

What do you think?

body image · diets · eating · Uncategorized

Keep your eyes on your own plate

Sam B2 Comments

Here’s a useful thought for the holidays as we get together with friends and family over food and drinks: other peoples’ food choices aren’t your business. Unless people ask your advice, keep your food judgements to yourself. I mean best yet, don’t make them, but if you make them, no need to share.

You just can’t assume you know what choices people are making or why they’re making them. It’s wrong to assume everyone is trying to “be good” over the holidays.

A parent I’m friends with on Facebook talked about teaching her children the “keep your eyes on your own plate” rule. That’s an important lesson for adults too.

Ragen Chastain has a broader principle, not just about food, but about other people’s life choices generally. She dubs it the “underpants rule.” You’re the boss of your own underpants and that includes what goes on your plate.

Here Pesky Chloe on Facebook illustrates the rule:

 

 

body image · Guest Post

Bodies are Weird (Guest Post)

natalieh (she/her)8 Comments

When I get home from a really good workout I strip down to my underoos and sports bra and strut my stuff. I’m waiting to stop sweating before my shower and I feel like an uber hard body kick arse super human. To be more accurate, I feel like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.

Her muscle definition in the movie set the bar at ripped and shredded and when I’m feeling like a boss I think of her.

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I do my panty parade and think “whoa, I do not look how I feel”. Bodies are weird. I know I refer to “the oatmeal” a lot but he seems to get my mindset about working out and how your body responds to working out. My thighs are large and lumpy, the skin on my belly folds over my cesarean scar to hang over my underoos, I look like a slowly deflating skin suit.

Yet, I feel like a kick ass ninja and my muscles are hard beneath the fat and skin. I don’t exercise to look a certain way, I exercise to do things and support my health but it would be nice to have a touch more congruity between how I feel and how I look. I feel guilty about this, like me dabbling in  mind/body dualism is making for shoddy feminism but I also do feel this way. I love my body…

AND it would be nice not to:

  • smell like an unwashed ferret after a workout
  • have really loud gas while working out
  • manage thigh and armpit chaffing
  • have a long term relationship with athlete’s foot
  • constantly imagine a workout bra that both supports my mammaries while allowing me to breathe.

Seriously, the breathing and boob management thing, we need to do something about this my engineering sisters!

And that is why I think bodies are weird.

aging · Aikido · athletes · body image · disability · injury · martial arts

Broken: How a serious sports injury damaged more than my body (Guest Post)

Michelle Lynne Goodfellow4 Comments

broken

 

It happened, as most accidents do, in an instant.

One moment I was aiming a punch at my aikido partner, preparing to take his subsequent throw, and the next moment, instead of executing a neat forward roll, I found myself falling shoulder-first into the mat.

The fall hurt a little, and I head a distinct crunch as I landed, but when I put a hand up to check the area things felt pretty good, so I was determined to keep practising. I’m tough. I can take a hit like a guy. I bounce back. An instinctive voice inside my head told me to STOP, however, and so I quietly moved to the sidelines to rest for a few minutes. I got an ice pack to put on the shoulder, and mentioned to a couple of people that I’d hurt it, but I figured it was just a sprain.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I decided to go to the Urgent Care Centre, where my shoulder was x-rayed and I was given the unexpected news: my collarbone was broken. Truthfully, I was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. My first response was, “Cool. Can I take a picture of the x-ray?” (That’s the photograph at the top of this story.)

Both my family doctor and my physiotherapist told me, when I visited them in the following days, that I must have an extremely high tolerance to pain, because not only had I broken the collarbone, I’d also dislocated the AC joint (where the collarbone joins the shoulder blade at the shoulder), and in many people those injuries are extremely painful.

I was given strict orders not to raise my arm, push doors, or lift heavy things, but I was also cautioned not to keep it immobile, or I would risk getting frozen shoulder (I’m the prime demographic for that immobilizing condition (women 40-60)). So I set aside the sling they’d given me at Urgent Care (I figured that since it was, in the words of the attending resident, “for the pain,” and I didn’t have much pain, I could manage without it), and forged ahead with my day-to-day life. I’m a strong and independent woman, and a little broken collarbone wasn’t going to slow me down. To be honest, I felt kind of badass to be a 47-year-old with a teenager’s injury. It was nice to see the shock (and respect?) on people’s faces when an overweight, middle-aged woman told them she’d broken a bone doing martial arts.

Thankfully I have a sedentary job where I sit at a computer or in meetings most of the day. And although the injury was to my right shoulder, I was still able to drive my standard transmission car. I was going to have to give up aikido for at least four weeks, as well as give up putting my hair in a sock bun and unpacking the rest of the boxes from a recent move, but that seemed a small price to pay. The biggest hardship was sleeping on my back every night. (I’m not a back sleeper.)

What I didn’t count on was a turn in the November weather, which left the sidewalks slick and slippery. I suddenly became terrified of falling – not because I didn’t know how to take a fall, but because I knew that if I fell, I could really mess up my shoulder and prolong my recovery by weeks or months. (To add insult to injury – or injury to injury, as the case may be – I’m also dealing with a serious tear in the meniscus of my right knee, which is itself vulnerable to further injury from falls.)

And then one morning during my first week of healing, I tripped going up some concrete stairs at my workplace. Since I couldn’t carry my heavy rolling briefcase in my right hand, I had it in my left, which meant that when I fell, my right hand was the one that instinctively reached out to break my fall. So much for not pushing things with my right arm.

When I got to my office I cried for about five minutes – not from pain (thankfully I hadn’t done any more damage to my shoulder), but from the feelings of helplessness and vulnerability that were now washing over me. I started wearing my heaviest Sorels (a brand of winter boots with lots of traction on the soles) whenever I had to go outside, and walked between my car and the indoors with a tentative, old-lady shuffle.

I also started seriously worrying about my return to aikido. I’m a big fan of Dr. Google, and I was doing all sorts of research into collarbone healing. I realized that, as an adult practising a high-contact sport, I was a) going to take a lot longer to completely heal than I had originally hoped, and b) going to be putting myself at increased risk of re-injury when I did start doing aikido again.

A few of my aikido colleagues came to me with stories of their own broken or dislocated collarbones. One older female black belt talked about being fearful when she had to start doing breakfalls again. Yeah, don’t remind me, okay?

My injury was five weeks ago, and at four-and-a-half weeks I had a follow-up appointment with my physiotherapist. He examined the collarbone and shoulder, gave me the okay to start moving the shoulder through its full range of motion, and sent me home with exercises to strengthen and stabilize the dislocated AC joint.

Aikido weapons movements feel like a great supplement to his exercises, since they involve large, circular slicing motions with a wooden sword called a bokken (think Fruit Ninja). And I was excited to start lifting mats again at my last aikido class (I’ve been going faithfully to classes since my injury, but sitting on the sidelines). Before my injury I would help set up and put away the 20-lb. mats four times a week, and I loved what months of this activity had done for my biceps, deltoids and traps.

I wasn’t prepared for how freaked-out everyone was to see me lifting mats again, though. It took a lot of reassurance on my part before they let me continue. I have to say it felt really good to lift again. It made me feel strong.

I’m going to be off the aikido mat for at least another six weeks and preferably eight, on the advice of my physiotherapist. Between now and then I’ll be faithfully doing my rehabilitation exercises and, if I know myself, probably a lot more than that.

I’m not as scared of falling as I was – I can handle a backwards fall now. The real danger is a bad forward fall. I have a feeling I may still be very nervous about aikido throws, pins and forward rolls when the time comes. I know that being nervous may itself lead to greater chance of injury, through not committing to a technique.

I don’t want to live in the fearful place, though. Three-and-a-half weeks there was enough (the time it took for the nauseating pain that I felt whenever I accidentally raised my arm after the injury to go away).

I’m still struggling with how to reconcile my self-image and my ability level, however. I don’t like feeling weak and vulnerable. But I’m not sure how to feel strong and capable when my body’s broken. I don’t want to live in a bubble. The body’s going to get broken again from time to time. Maybe there’s an aikido lesson still to be learned about diverting the fear…?

___

Michelle Lynne Goodfellow works in nonprofit and small business communications by day, and also enjoys writing, taking photographs, making art and doing aikido. You can find more of her work at michellelynnegoodfellow.com. Michelle has also written about her breast cancer journey on her blog, Kitchen Sink Wisdom.

Uncategorized

Happy return to the salad bowl (of death)

Sam B

image

I’m feeling much better about track cycling after a second visit to the Forest City Velodrome with Kim. Last time wasn’t such a success from my point of view. You can read about my mishaps here.

We had an experienced group there that morning and got a fair bit of riding in. It took me a little while to get my confidence up after falling twice a few weeks before but once I was happily rolling around again, it felt pretty good. Whee!

I got nervous a couple of times when our pace line slowed down…speed is your friend on the track…but mostly it felt pretty good to be back. I liked having a working bike computer. The photo below is my track bike outside the door of Mountain Equipment Co-op. When the computer stopped working that morning, I hoped it was just batteries. Luckily it was and MEC stocked them and replaced them. Thanks MEC bike mechanics.

I’m not sure yet how much I’ll ride at the track. On the plus side, I own a track bike. And I like track cycling. On the downside, riding with lots of strangers whose riding habits and styles you don’t know, makes me nervous. The tipping point is that the nighttime riding hours don’t really suit my schedule.

Decisions, decisions…

 

While searching for our post on the “salad bowl of death,” this turned up, The Wall of Death on Wikipedia.

The Wall of Death, motordrome, silodrome or Well of Death (aka “Maut ka Kuaa“, India) is a carnival sideshow featuring a silo- or barrel-shaped wooden cylinder, ranging from 20 to 36 feet (6.1 to 11.0 m) in diameter, inside of which motorcyclists, or the drivers of miniature automobiles, travel along the vertical wall and perform stunts, held in place by centripetal force…..

A similar act called the “Globe of Death” has the riders looping inside a wire mesh sphere rather than a drum. This form of motorcycle entertainment had a separate and distinct evolution from carnival motordromes and derived from bicycle acts or “cycle whirls” in the early 1900s.

Enjoy!

blogging

Why I Love Our Blog

Sam B5 Comments

I was chatting with a friend the other night, she’s also a guest blogger here, and I mentioned how well the blog was going. We’ve had loads of new followers lately. It took us more than two years to get to 2000 followers on WordPress and in the last two weeks we gained another 500. Readership is climbing steadily and that’s exciting.

She replied with a question: “I am curious about the blog generally and how you feel it benefits you. I know you are excited about the number of followers and it may seem self-evident as to why you are excited but. . .why are you excited?”

I sent back my powerpoint presentation about why academics blog and what’s so wonderful about it. I get asked to talk about blogging to other academics fairly often.

Here’s that pitch about the positive things blogging does:

  • Keeps me in touch with people all over the world
  • Makes our work accessible to the non-academic world
  • Helps to connect us with current events and things going on in the world
  • Academic writing often reaches very few people
  • Keeps you writing even when writing isn’t easy.
  • Helps you get over the perfectionist tendencies lots of academic writers have
  • Fun to publish so quickly when academic publishing is so slow
  • I’ve been invited to contribute to publications via my blogging and my blog posts are quoted in academic papers.
  • Terrific feedback: Like journal referees but without the rejection

“Professor Roger Pielke Jr from the University of Colorado pointed out in his speech to the Lowy Institute last week, blogging has had a directly beneficial impact on his research:  (Blogging) is a remarkably powerful tool for refining ideas, for collecting intelligence, for making contacts. I get routinely better feedback critique from ideas, arguments, I put out on my blog than I do in the peer review process….”

See also Why academics should blog by Sam Roggevee and Why minority academics cannot afford to be silent.

But I realized that this wasn’t exactly what she was asking. It was more about this blog. Why does this blog get me so worked up? Why does it make me so happy? What’s the excitement connected to?

And that got me thinking.

Here’s what I replied: “In the case of this blog I really do think it’s important to broaden the range of conversations about fitness to include feminist perspectives. Why? I guess I think there’s a strong connection between agency and embodiment and that physicality is something that’s been denied many women. I loved Tracy’s recent post about physical fitness and her response to the Jian Ghomeshi scandal. Lots of our academic writing is read by very few people. It floors us to have thousands of people read a post. We also get a lot of email from women thanking us for being feminist voices…so much fitness material is pretty awful. And yet, physical fitness matters.”

Okay, a bit blathery at the end but I hope you get my point. Fitness matters. Feminism matters too. And for me those thoughts are connected. Fit is a feminist issue and I love our blog!

Hope you like it too.

cycling · Guest Post

My first 70km bike ride (Guest Post)

natalieh (she/her)11 Comments

image

On Sunday Nov 30 the weather was warm for London, Ontario,  a balmy 10C and I had agreed to go on a longer ride with friends. We were supposed to do the Saturday but snow the night before had made things tricky in the morning. It turned out to be me, my beloved Michel and Sensible Dave (aka Randonneur  Dave who Sam sometimes writes about). The loop was a 60-70km loop to the nearby town of Belmont. I was very nervous on the ride down to meet Dave, my longest ride to date had been around 35km and in September my first group ride was 20km, a distance I had only done once at a sprint triathlon race.

So I had a panic attack. Great way to start the morning but WHATEVER I’m on my bike. Michel and I meet up with Dave and he is wearing few layers, Michel and I are way overdressed and so we slowly stripped as we biked south through town. Getting out of London is a bit of a pain and the traffic in the southern industrial area was more hostile as we had a truck honk at us in the oncoming lane, he was upset for the cars that were coming up behind us. It was 8:30am on a Sunday and the road wide and clear. I decide then and there I’m getting a jersey that reads “This is a slow moving vehicle, pass when safe”. I think I want the big tractor triangle too.

As we crossed the last major road on our way out of London Dave pointed to his computer and said we’d only done 11km/hr so we need to get going. I had been deliberately holding back, not really committing to giving it my all. I was braced for some challenges, especially after Tracy’s experience last November along the same route. So it was to be a pace ride for me and an exercise in patience for Michel and Dave. Off we went. The rolling hills at first felt intimidating, you can see them from way back and they do go on and on. These aren’t proper hills mind you but I was pretty used to flat. I dropped my gaze whenever I saw a hill, just the next few feet mattered, and I huffed along.

Belmont came faster than I expected and I was feeling tired but good. We discovered a buffet that opened just as we figured there was no place to eat. The food tasted amazing. It wasn’t about the food. Dave quipped we were ruining our calorie deficit and I could have cared less. nom nom nom.

Rolling out of Belmont we were on a narrow road with heavy trucks, no shoulder, it was nerve racking. Michel left it to me if we would deek 5km over to a side road, adding 10km to our trip, I voted for longer and safer. We turned into the wind.

I had a moment on that leg of the trip where I seriously doubted my motivation, ability and whether or not I was simply a masochist. It was an overcast day, it was grey and windy, it felt for a while like that depressing movie The Road.

I wasn’t making the giddy “WHEEEE” face very much, it was more the grim effort scowl that sat on my face. At the worst of that leg a peregrine falcon swooped up out of a corn field and landed on a post next to me. It decided to fly alongside me, stopped on a further post then swooped away. It was beautiful. If I had to pick an animal that means something special to me it is the peregrine falcon, the females are bigger than the males, they were nearly wiped out in the 70s from pesticides and I got to see them nesting in the Bay of Fundy as a kid. They bounced back from near extinction and are really happy living in cities on highrises like the parking garage next to my current home. So it was a pretty magical moment.

As we started crossing roads I recognized as the outskirts of London I perked up, I was totally doing this! Somewhere before that Dave noticed my bike frame is bent and my front tire is pulling to the left. SO that is partly why I’m so damn wobbly! kind of a relief. He also noted when we passed 45km and that I was doing a distance PB.

Then there was THE HORRIBLE HILL. It looks deceptively small, a blip really just in front of a golf course. The grade changes in weird ways and Dave warned me this was the last doozie and there is never shame in walking up a hill but especially this one at the end of a long ride. I was peddling and grunting then I stopped moving forward completely. WOW. With the heads up I got off and walked to the top without feeling defeated. Michel hadn’t been warned and he cussed the hill a bit. We all laughed.

When we were in London we took the bike path back to our favourite café and, on the last 4km I hit a wall, THE WALL. I blame the little blue distance dots on the trail that went from 5km to 4km back up to 5km….it’s supposed to tell you how far from downtown…how could it go up?????

We got to Adelaide St and I seriously thought “Screw the café I’m going home to cry and home is just over there”. But I followed Dave and Michel down around the bridge and towards our finish line. I broke down into wailing sobs just before Richmond Street. Like banshee howling sobs. Everything hurt. My legs were lead and all I could think was I couldn’t do this. My asthma kicked in and I couldn’t breathe without making this awful noise. I caught my breath just before catching Dave and Michel again. Later Michel said he didn’t hear me but I’m pretty sure the folks running the trail did and I knew them. Awesome couple but I was mortified. I was teary after that even eating a scone at the café and definitely cried the ride home. I wasn’t past a breaking point, I think I was just really tired. too tired to hold anything in or back. so the loop with Dave was 60km and change plus the getting there and home put me at 70km.

It was 4 hours on the bike plus the buffet and café time. I was sure I’d be in agony the next two days but I was only a bit sore at the top of my glutes and a bit tired.

It took until the Wednesday to feel like HOLY CRAP I DID THAT! This is despite the encouragement from Dave, Michel and lots of validation from my sister and friends like Sam and Tracy. It hadn’t felt real.

I’m totally ready for a nice new bike and getting ready for my first 100km ride. Heck ya, I DID IT!

 

aging · body image · Guest Post · health · motivation · training

On Athletic Teachers: Finding Your Coach(es) (Guest Post)

elan.paulson3 Comments

Anyone who has played ball as a kid knows what it means that I spent my first few years of softball in right field and batting at the bottom of the order. (For non-ball players, it means that I couldn’t field or hit. I was the weakest link.)

Our catcher, Karen, was one of the best players on the team, my secret hero, and the daughter of our coach. With Karen’s mom’s very patient coaching, over the years I slowly improved my skills and my confidence. And, as one of the team’s only “southpaws,” I eventually moved to first base, where I got to be part of the in-field action (and even got to play directly with Karen).

When you’re a kid, coaches are easy to recognize. You can pretty much rely on anyone taller than you to tell you what to do without having to ask them. When you’re a kid, the problem isn’t finding a coach. Rather, the problem is deciding whose directions to follow when multiple “coaches” (read: parents) are shouting at you all at once from the sidelines.

As our beloved coach, Karen’s mom taught us not only the rules of ball but also how to be part of the team, so I felt included even when I was standing alone in right field, completely frightened and praying that that ball wouldn’t be hit out to me.

I don’t remember ever thanking Karen’s mom for coaching me as a kid, but I’ve only recently come to fully appreciate Karen’s mom. Why? Because adults don’t get coaches.

More precisely, adults have to actively seek out folks who are willing to share their knowledge, time, and attention. From afar, you can follow every step of your idolized professional athlete. You can pay for a personal trainer. You can sneak peeks at other gym-goers, or read the how-to posters on the wall. But, generally, as soon as you are as tall as everyone else, you have to find a coach, then as her to tell you what to do.

Not everyone might feel that they need a coach, but I certainly do. Just as when I was little, I still feel a certain need to have someone not only to explain the basics but also to help bolster my confidence. As an adult, my body isn’t as resilient or resistant to injury as it used to be. (And neither is my pride, so I don’t want to screw up.) As I explain in my previous guest post on Athletic Learning, when it comes to exercise my M.O. is to research the rules and learn the techniques, rather than rely solely on inherent athletic skill (of which I have little). And in order to learn, I need someone to teach.

My first ever Zumba exercise class was last week. As I strained to keep up with the fancy salsa-esque footwork, I asked my co-worker, who was next to me, when the class instructor would begin actually teaching us the moves. “Usually they only do the steps, and the class just tries to follow along,” she informed me.

Just follows along? But I had questions! (Like, where did the weird name “Zumba” come from? Where do the moves come from? And why do Zumba-ers wear those bizarre tutus?) I needed some Socratic Zumba for this activity to be enjoyable.

Without taller people around who will automatically tell me what’s going on, I’ve had to look to more unconventional coaches. Here are some that I’ve found:


Coach #1: Mel, my physiotherapist – I don’t waste time chatting about my holidays or my newest hair colour with Mel. Instead, I pepper her with physical activity-related questions, trying to understand the mysteries of body mechanics, acupuncture, and glute-related pain. When I go to physio, I try to get more out of my visit than just stretching exercises and polite adult small talk.

Coaches #2: A bunch of 8 and 10 year old girls – The moms on my rec soccer team had the idea of bringing along their children (who are also awesome little soccer players) to our practice to help give us a lesson or two. Well, the girls LOVED coaching us adult soccer newbies. They broke us up into position-specific groups, ran drills, and even punished us with sprint lines when we failed to meet our objectives. In wonderful irony, everyone shorter was giving directions to everyone taller. Our practices alone have been more fun than any other athletic activity I’ve experienced in a long time.

Coach #3: This blog – When I feel there’s no one I can ask or I’m worried about looking silly, I do what millions of other people do: I go on the internet. This blog, in particular, is a valued “coach” for me in the way that it shapes my attitudes about athletics, body image, and health in positive and productive ways.
The best coaches don’t just explain the rules or show the steps. Instead, they strive to meet the player’s own unique goals and needs (whether they are physical, psychological, or both). The best coaches make fear and pain–and even failure–fun. And the best coaches improve not only your skill but also your attitudes towards your body and abilities.

So–maybe take a moment to think about who officially (or unofficially) coaches you, and thank them the next time you see them. As an adult (or at least a taller person), I find it humbling but also rewarding to reach out to all my unconventional “coaches,” who help me to enjoy athletic activities like a kid again.