Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
I listened to a great episode of DNTO (Definitely Not the Opera) Saturday while driving to Stratford to meet a friend and fellow founding editor of a new journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.
The show’s theme was Learning to Embrace the Cold. There were lots of great interviews and you should go listen to the whole thing. But the bit that stuck with me was the interview with “Dr Popsicle.”
Winnipeg’s Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Dr. Popsicle) isn’t afraid of a little cold. Actually, he’s not afraid of a lot of cold. His experiments push the boundaries of the human body and Dr. Giesbrecht has become an internationally looked-to expert on hypothermia. His most common guinea pig? Himself.
A few things stood out from the interview.
First, his lifesaving memory aid about what happens when you fall into extremely cold water. He dubs it the “1-10-1” rule. You have 1 minute to get your breathing under control, after that you have 10 minutes of meaningful movement, and then1 hour of life.
Second, it reminded me of all the fuss about rowing in spring and fall. There’s a reason to wear a safety whistle and to keep the coach boat nearby.
Third, I enjoyed listening to him chat about who volunteers for his cold water studies. No one likes it. It’s incredibly painful. But some kinds of people enjoy the challenge. They are proud of their ability to endure tough things. While he denied that they’re masochists, he said they think differently than lots of us about suffering. He gets lots of cyclists.
You can also watch Dr Popsicle on the Rick Mercer Report:
It’s serious winter and Tracy and I are both spending lots of time on our bike trainers. It’s new to both us. Yes, I’ve done lots of winter things before–see Seven winter cycling options–but until this year I’ve never regularly used a trainer.
You can read our posts about time on the trainer: Orange is the new bike and Cold snowy nights and hot yoga and sweaty trainer sessions and Winter’s Here: My 2015 Basement Cycling Tour. Obviously it’s been on both of our minds. I’m hoping for a much better spring and a much faster start to the cycling season now I’ve been using the trainer. Here’s hoping it’s worth it.
I also have rollers. And I’ve been taking the odd spin class too. I’ve also been getting emails from friends and new cyclists– Hi Susan!–about the advantages and disadvantages of each way of staying bike-fit over the winter. Here’s a quick run down on what I love and don’t love about each activity.
Spin classes
Love: The music, the energy, time flies, very sweaty, feels great, and the studio is one block from my house. See more advantages, Boost Your Fitness with Spin Classes.
Don’t love: Lots of the people aren’t cyclists, lots of the moves actually aren’t that relevant to bike performance (not your classes, Cheryl), the seats (ouch!)
Cost: $15/class but with a discount for multi-visit passes, cheaper at a regular gym with classes than at a special spin studio
Rollers
Love: You work on cadence, balance, smooth pedal strokes. Requires a lot of concentration and effort. Never boring.
Don’t love: It’s not meant for big interval efforts or pedaling in big gears. Also there’s a steep learning curve in terms of stopping and starting and getting on and getting off. Scares my dog!
Cost: Your bike + $300 (approx). Here’s mine.
Here’s my favourite how to video:
Trainer
Love: It’s my bike. I like riding with some of the same friends on the trainer as I ride with outside in the nicer months. Love the intensity of the interval efforts. I’m really working on high cadence (which is something I’m not great at). Like being able to track my workouts on the Garmin.
Don’t love: It’s really tough to do on my own.
Cost: I bought a fluid trainer, the Qubo Fluid Elite. Mine came from ebay for about $300 but MEC sells them for $400. I also pay for trainer classes with a cycling coach a couple of times a week.
Trainer or rollers?
“If you want to work on spinning technique and base fitness, go for rollers. If you want variable resistance workouts that require lots of power, go for a trainer.”
Which is best trainer versus rollers, read more here.
Trainer versus spin classes?
On the trainer versus spin classes: See http://www.womenscycling.ca/blog/ask-a-pro/is-it-better-to-take-a-spinning-class-or-to-cycle-at-home-on-my-trainer/
“The second advantage to riding your own bike on a trainer is that you can get a better workout. Spinning bikes operate on a large front fly-wheel that keeps the pedals going around. When you stop pedalling, the fly-wheel continues to turn, providing a coasting effect that you don’t get on your trainer. When you ride your bike on a trainer as soon as you stop pedalling, the bike stops, the power stops and the cadence stops. There’s no “coasting,” which makes the workout harder.”
Indoors or outdoors?
For me, there’s no question. As soon as it’s warm enough you’ll find me outside. But there are training advantages to indoor riding that I try to remind myself about during our cold and snowy winters.
Here’s Want to get faster? Ride Indoors
“Even if you live in a completely flat area, when you’re riding outside you inevitably have the opportunity to coast every now and again to give yourself a bit of a break. That doesn’t happen during indoor rides. While some high-end trainers have motors that allow you to simulate downhills, most trainers will force you to work throughout the ride. The consistent effort is one of the factors that makes indoor training more efficient. Like running on a track or riding in a velodrome, the conditions are also very consistent, allowing you the opportunity to do test sets and gauge your progress. (A time trial ride outside, for example, might be affected on some days by wind conditions. A trainer workout won’t be as susceptible to that.)
There are also fewer distractions when you’re training inside. Heading out for a long ride and chatting with a buddy or group of friends can take a lot of time, but you might not be getting as much out of the workout as you could. Putting your head down and hammering for an hour on the trainer might give you more bang for your buck.
The most famous proponent of that strategy is American IRONMAN champ Andy Potts. For Potts, riding on a trainer promotes high-quality training. He doesn’t have to deal with stop lights, traffic or other riders—he can focus completely on the workout at hand and get the most out of his time on the bike. Since he finds his indoor training works so well, he only rides outside during races.
Surprisingly, he’s hardly alone on the pro front when it comes to almost-exclusive indoor training. Meredith Kessler is another multiple-IRONMAN champion who rarely rides outside—typically once every couple of weeks unless she’s racing or at a training camp. Much of Kessler’s training is done while teaching indoor classes at a bike studio in San Francisco.”
In the end the indoor training that’s best is the one you actually do. What’s your strategy for staying bike-fit over the winter?
I confess I do love the pretty pictures my Garmin gives me of my indoor rides. Spot the sprinting drills and the perfectly times efforts. See how speed and cadence and heart rate all match up! Outdoors, it’s never that neat and tidy.
Sam sent me this wonderful interview with our friend, Fit and Feminist blogger Caitlin Constantine, not just because we both like Caitlin so much, but also because she knew lots of Caitlin’s story would resonate with me.
Sam was right. It’s kind of odd, really, because I always think of Caitlin as a natural athlete–young, energetic and full of vitality. Me, not so much.
But she actually wasn’t always into sports. If anything, discovering endurance sports helped her work through some tough life stuff. As she says in the interview, that’s how she found her strength.
I can relate to that part of the story. I’m not quite the endurance athlete that Caitlin has turned out to be, but I don’t really think that’s the point. The point is that:
Endurance sports have forever changed her relationship with her body. “I’m strong, I’m capable and I’m powerful. And more than anything, I know my body belongs to me, and it’s not a tool for someone else to abuse.”
I blogged recently about how getting into triathlon has changed my relationship with my body, given me a sense of what I like to call “confident ownership.” See Mine All Mine.
I could also relate to the part about self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. That is definitely a dark part of my own personal history. I now live a life that is completely drug and alcohol free, but it wasn’t always that way.
Getting into physical activity in a way that challenges me has given me far more satisfaction than any kind of mood-altering substances ever could.
And of course, I can relate to the fit feminist. Feminism and sport both require community in order to thrive. I love that there is a growing community of feminists who approach sport and physical activity as passions to enjoy rather than as obligations to endure–required to achieve a certain body ideal.
Caitlin started her blog to “help others see fitness from a feminist or a more inclusive perspective. It’s less of being an authority on the subject and more of starting a conversation.”
One of the things Sam and I love the most about our blog is that it’s brought us into conversation with like-minded women. When this all started, we were going to blog for two years and then stop (remember that, Sam?) as soon as we turned 50.
But by the time that day came, we were committed to continuing the conversation and deeply attached to the warm and wonderful community that has sprung up around it.
Caitlin has a long way to go before she’s 50, but I sure hope she has no plans to stop blogging then, or anytime before that day comes.
We’re a fitness blog but some of our most popular posts are about body image.
Sometimes even I wonder, why do we care so much about body image?
Can’t we just set body image aside and focus on sports performance and fitness more generally?
And then a story like this one crosses my newsfeed and I remember.
Women are less likely than men to become active because of body image and competency fears, according to Sport England research.
The research revealed there was a significant gender gap, with two million fewer women than men in the 14-40 age range regularly participating in sport.
“One of the strongest themes was a fear of judgement. Worries about being judged for being the wrong size, not fit enough and not skilled enough came up time and again.
Body image is connected to fitness in a variety of ways.It’s both the motivation for lots of women to pursue physical activity. I’ll solve my body image issues by improving my body!
Body image anxiety is also the reason lots of women don’t exercise. I can’t go to the gym. I’m too fat!
Both of these sets of motivations are problematic.
I worry about women who miss out on the health benefits and the joy that comes from physical activity either because they mistakenly think they’re thin and don’t need to exercise, or they think they are too fat to be seen out in public, or they start, and don’t lose weight, and so quit because they think getting thin is the sole point of exercise.
So while I’d like to separate out body image and self esteem from athletic performance and joyful movement, our culture makes that nearly impossible.
Great news in the media last week for midlife cyclists. (That’s us!)
Ageing does not have to bring poor health and frailty, scientists have claimed, after discovering that the most active people in their 70s are as fit as those in their 50s.
A study of older cyclists found that there was little physical difference between people aged 79 and those aged 55 if they maintained similar levels of exercise.
Researchers at King’s College London say the findings debunk the common assumption that ageing automatically makes people doddery and infirm.
The team picked super-fit amateur cyclists between 55 and 79 and tested a wide range of physical functions commonly associated with ageing such as aerobic fitness, resting heart rate, skeletal mass, breathing ability and muscle density.
A few friends raised the following worry: Cycling after 60 may have a selection effect. That is, it might be the case that the folks who get “old and doddery” quit riding. Maybe it’s a special group of seniors who keep on pushing the pace into old age.
And there is that. But at least this shows that decline isn’t necessary. That for some people at least, staying active wards off some of the health issues associated with aging.
The 84 male and 41 female cyclists picked for the study had to be able to cycle 100km in under 6.5 hours and 60km in 5.5 hours, respectively, to be included in the study.
Of course there was also the “glass is half empty” friend, 55 years old, who said, “So basically, you’re telling me I’m already 79.” Got to love academics
The New York Times also had a great article of aging, “The Liberation of Growing Old.”
Age resistance is a futile kind of life resistance: We can’t live outside time, we begin to age the moment we’re born. But the emerging age-acceptance movement neither decries nor denies the aging process. It recognizes that one can remain vital and present, engaged and curious, indeed continue to grow, until one’s dying breath. Then we need only echo the wish of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott: “May I be alive when I die.”
More thoughts from me on aging:
I just got back from guest lecturing in a Women’s Studies class called “The Body,” taught by our friend and colleague, Wendy Pearson. Here’s the course description:
How we understand the body, whether through scientific investigation or through its representation in media, literature or art, has material effects on how people’s lives and experiences are shaped. We will examine social and scientific constructions of the body, including concepts of beauty, health, fitness, sexuality, and questions of representation.
The course will also consider how our relationship – both personal and cultural — to our bodies shapes our sense of self and both prescribes and proscribes certain possibilities for how we may live our lives. We will look, for example, at the way in which only certain very fit bodies qualify as athletic or at the ways in which the relationship between musculature and class identity has changed since the early 20th century. We will examine particular social problems, such as our society’s difficulty with understanding the disabled body as sexual, the current cultural obsession with children’s body size, and the psychiatric and medical response to people who feel that their bodily sex does not match their gender. We will consider changing definitions of beauty and how that affects the ways in which different people understand themselves. We may also look at questions of representation, the various ways in which bodies and body parts are represented in the media and the issue of why some forms of representation of the nude body count as art while others are considered pornographic.
Sam and I shared the three-hour class tonight. She took the first half to talk about “Obesity Panics” and the trouble with framing obesity as an illness and its prevalence as an “epidemic.”
When I arrived shortly before the break, the packed room of 180 keen students was challenging her claim that there is something wrong with obesity being considered a disease. I got there just in time to hear Sam say that unlike cancer, obesity isn’t something you “get.” It’s something that the charts say you “are.”
After the break, it way my turn. My topic: “Fitness and Normative Bodies.” By the time Sam was done with them, they were afraid to say that there was a relationship between fitness and fatness. So hesitant were they to draw any connection that when I asked them about what measures or indicators they might use to judge whether they were physically fit or whether they’d made any progress, not a single person said anything about body weight or even about body composition.
We had a lively discussion about the impact of subtle forms of exclusion in fitness media and representations of fitness culture, in which only a narrow demographic of youthful, lean, toned, nondisabled, people, mostly men and mostly white are depicted. When women do appear in fitness media, there is a very narrow range of acceptable body types that pass muster.
I saw heads nodding (not nodding off!) when I said that engaging in physical activities that challenge us can be a real source of confidence and empowerment.
It took some convincing, but after hearing both of us I think the majority of the class was at least willing to entertain the idea that there is a pernicious form of exclusion going on in fitness culture. Though sometimes subtle, it makes it very difficult for people who do not fit the normative ideal body type to feel as if they belong.
This then becomes an equality issue, given that health, well-being, confidence, and a sense of your own power are all desirable social goods that can benefit everyone.
I ended by talking a bit about Olga Kotelko, who took up track and field at the age of 77 and had over 750 gold medals to her name by the time she turned 95 (at which age she died).
The upshot: a more inclusive fitness culture that doesn’t preoccupy itself with the narrow demographic who occupies “the normative body” would have enormous social and political benefits that extend way beyond physical fitness.
Thanks, Wendy, for an opportunity to talk to your class. What a fabulous idea for a course and what fun it was to be there!
1. Rebecca Harrington, I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting
You can read about it here: http://flavorwire.com/497767/ill-have-what-shes-having-author-rebecca-harrington-on-our-fascination-with-what-celebrities-eat
Listen to her read from the book here.
2. Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash
You can read about it here: http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2015/01/08/timothy_caulfield_debunks_celebrity_health_trends_from_glutenfree_diets_to_colon_cleanses.html
Listen to Caulfield interviewed on the CBC here.
And we reviewed Caulfield’s previous book here.
It’s the winter. For many of us summertime shavers, the season of more body hair. Bye bye bathing suits and hello tights and leggings.
I still shave my legs though since I bare my legs in hot yoga, on the trainer in bike shorts, and in the hot tub at home. I confess though that I’m less fastidious about it all. I have dry skin that’s no big fan of the cold weather and so I certainly shave less often than I do in the summer months.
Serious cyclists, male and female, shave legs for a variety of reasons. See some debate and discussion here.
Now if wind tunnel tests prove to be right, we ought to be shaving our arms as well. Read Specialized say that hair-free arms will save you time on the bike
How much faster? On their test volunteer, the result suggested a time saving of 19secs over 40km (25 miles) in their test conditions.
Specialized have their own wind tunnel, called the Win Tunnel, at their HQ in Morgan Hill, California, and they have run several experiments lately to measure the aero impact of different factors such as clothing, disc brakes (compared with rim brakes), beards (no, really!), and hairy versus shaved legs.
Also in body hair news (that’s a category I’ve just made up) various media outlets have declared a new pubic hair fashion trend for women, the full bush Brazilian. Think the 70s in the front and the 90s underneath. It’s a more traditional look without giving up any of the costly and painful grooming practices to which we’ve grown accustomed.
I’ve been waiting for the return of the full bush and it’s here. See this article and check out these mannequins. Why did I think it was bound to come back? A preference in the media at least for the bodies of young women. Yes, as feminists have pointed out, girls have no pubic hair and maybe the hairless bodies in pornography resemble them. But they also resemble older bodies. Indeed, the very first real adult women I saw–outside of porn–with no public hair were elderly women changing at the gym. With age women lose hair there and often it too greys. If we all remove it, we all look alike. No markers of visible youth and in a youth oriented culture we can’t have that! So the full bush is back. If you’ve had it all permanently removed and you care about looking dated maybe it’s time for a merkin! (Here’s a NSFW gallery of famous merkins.) I confess I hadn’t heard of the term until this song. Worth watching just for lego merkin.
My favourite new body hair trend is one I definitely won’t be trying. It’s brightly dyed armpit hair. Even when I don’t shave I don’t think I have enough to colour. For a how to guide, see here.
And for the usual feminist line on body hair (we have it, stop making such a big deal about it) see here and here.
See Kim’s guest post: On getting “chicked” and Tracy’s Women Unite! Take Back the Bike..
