A Facebook friend put out a call the other day for encouragement. Send me all your motivational memes, she said.
Here’s a sampling of our offerings.
They’re cute and all. In the right mood, they might even motivate me. But some days, bad days, they can just make me feel worse. It’s too much to ask. So here’s a motivational poster with more moderate aims. It’s more inclusive, especially for those of us with bad days. Positive affirmations for the rest of us.
Laying in bed and hiding from the world feels fantastic, but only for a very short while.
And eventually, staying under the covers and avoiding the real world moves from a pleasant avoidance to an extremely painful and uncomfortable restlessness that can only be soothed with action.
A couple of weeks ago a receptionist in London England was sent home for refusing to wear heels on the job. She asked if a man would be expected to do the same shift in heels and was laughed at.
Footwear Follies
In Canada there have been similar stories of women being told that wearing heels is a requirement of their work. Usually those stories are from restaurants and bars.
I asked my friend Karen about that high heels in bars and restaurants. Before she started her own graphic design company, Karen worked in the hospitality industry.
“It’s a liability”, Karen said.
Pure and simple, you’re liable as a business owner for any spillage and/or damage to your employee’s health if you insist your female employees wear high heels.
Tender Tootsies
What kind of damage does long term wearing high heels do to you? Besides the obvious foot damage (corns, bunions, swelling), high heels warp your ankles, knees, hips and your lower back. The Spine Institute in Florida has detailed blog on the damage heels due to your body here.
The damage makes it difficult to walk and run, even when not wearing heels. Hard to stay fit if you can’t do two of the most basic, accessible forms of exercise.
I get these walking statistics from my Microsoft Band. The average woman in my age range walks around 5,100 steps a day. I average close to 11,000 steps a day (or around 5 miles). I’m lucky I have my own business in technology where wearing running shoes at work is considered acceptable.
I wonder if that 5,100 step average is due to women having tender tootsies from high heeled shoes.
5,100 steps is not that much. I know I can do almost 3,000 steps just cleaning up my tiny apartment.
Well Heeled
So why force women to wear high heels at work? Physically it makes women’s legs look more slender and pushes out the buttocks and breasts. It’s sexual. And it’s in the workplace.
My feminist doctrine coupled with my Scots Presbyterian family background makes me go nuts over this. I just want to scream where is the difference between forcing women to wear high heels and Chinese foot binding?
Heel Thyself
My friend Karen likes wearing heels at work. She’s one of that group of women who enjoy wearing heels. Wearing high heels makes her feel powerful.
But it’s her choice. And she says she would never wear high heels at work if she felt compelled to do so.
Foot Fitting
Recently I got fitted for a new pair of orthotics (the curse of high arches). I asked the pedorthist (that’s what they call the foot fitting specialist) how’s business. She said they’d been getting a lot more business from folks who damaged their feet running in those flat, practically no sole shoes. Even running has its own stupid fashions.
I asked her why they don’t make dress shoes that are good for your feet? She thought the materials would be too heavy to make something elegant.
I’m not sure about that. I wonder what would happen if consumers, women, really pushed the shoe manufacturers for better shoes.
There is another possibility. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2015, one of the hits were 3D printed shoes. How long it will take to combine individual 3D orthotic scans with 3D printing to create custom shoes that fit and look good?
The technology for better shoes will probably outpace business attitudes about women’s footwear.
We have a brand new student who’s only been coming to classes for a couple of weeks, and at a class last week he did the warm-up and then stepped off the mat and joined me where I was sitting, watching class.
He asked me in halting English (he’s Korean) if aikido helped teach how to be calm.
Well.
Let me tell you, this has been a subject very much at the front of my mind for months – not only as I’ve been dealing with my cancer diagnosis and treatment, but also as I’ve been struggling with some huge ups and downs in my working life. And a couple of months ago, when I was going through a really rough few weeks with the latter, it was something I thought about almost every waking moment. How could I use my aikido training and practice to deal with emotional and psychological distress?
Last night I looked the new student in the eye and without missing a beat said, “Yes!”
The trouble was, I didn’t quite know how to explain it to him so that he would understand, because of the language barrier. In a flash, it came to me.
I pointed to my bald head, and said I’d had cancer, and many other problems.
Then I pointed to the mat. Sensei Therese was teaching second control – nikkajo – at that moment, and I pointed out the students who were applying the second control to the wrists of their attackers.
(In the photo at the beginning of this post, the people on the right side of each pair are applying the second control to the wrists of the people on the left, who’ve moments earlier just tried to hit them. A video describing the entire technique is below.)
I took the young man’s hand in mine just like the people on the mat, and explained that when we first learn second control, we usually grip our training partner’s hand very tightly. I made a grimace, and screwed up my face as if I were trying to do something very difficult, and gripped his hand as if my life depended on it.
Then I explained that the technique actually works better if our hands are relaxed. When we tense up, the attacker can feel it through our touch, and they tense up too, making it harder to move them. If our own hands are relaxed when we touch them, they don’t realize there’s a threat, and then at exactly the right moment we can apply quick pressure at the proper angle, and they’re controlled by us.
I changed my grip on his hand.
“Gentle,” I said, and moved his hand. I repeated the illustration one more time. Screwed my face and body up, and held his hand in a death grip. Then loosened up, “gentle,” and moved him.
And that’s when I had my aha! moment. It was the answer that I’d been looking for for months.
Relax your “grip” when you’re under attack – from someone else, or a situation, or even your own thoughts. Relax, and act from the relaxed place.
Sounds so simple.
It’s part of why I love aikido, though. Our training teaches us, through repetition, to respond a certain way to being attacked. And we repeat it over and over again until it becomes reflex, so that if we’re ever in a situation where we really need to defend ourselves, we act automatically.
When life is throwing all sorts of crap at you, ease up your mental grip. Go to your centre. Then act from that calmer place. Practice it even when life isn’t throwing crap at you, and it will become automatic.
I’m on a team. I took the survey. I’ve got the app. I’ve fired up the device and tested it out for the last few days. I’m all set for the start of the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) tomorrow.
What is the challenge? It’s a challenge designed to help employers encourage “a culture of health” among their employees. As the 100 day challenge proceeds, I will write more reflectively about the message, the rhetoric, the experience, and anything else that comes up as I get more familiar with it.
It’s new to me but it’s not new. I have no idea how long Western, my employer, has been doing it. But from the extent of participation campus-wide–with around 200 teams of 7 people each–I think it’s been going on for at least a few years. Globally, there are 333.284 teams.
The challenge starts tomorrow, May 25th, with step counting. As usual with step goals, 10,000 appears to the be the magic number. But it’s not simply a physical challenge. After a certain number of days they introduce a “balance” component for people who are seeking “simple ideas for busy minds.” Then later in July there is a GCC sleep component.
I filled out the “lifestyle score” survey and, I have to say, I was a bit shocked at my results. I’m not sure how it is even possible that I got a mere 25% on physical activity and 48% on nutrition. I won’t even tell you the low score I got on “mind,” I think because (1) I said I’m stressed out a lot of the time and (2) I got too philosophical about the meaning of happiness as I decided which box to check.
Anyway, at least with those low scores there’s a lot of room for improvement. And it’s a relief that my “heart age” is 51 years and 0 months, which is a bit younger than my actual age of 51 years and 8 months. I was worried it would turn out to be older based on my other low scores.
My team is made of colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. We are in the process of picking our team name, since FAH Team Four isn’t all that inspiring.
I’ve been experimenting with the little step counter device. It’s a very simple thing that does nothing other than count steps and sync with the phone app. It zeroes itself automatically every day at midnight.
It’s not waterproof, but you do get credit for swimming — amazingly generous credit: 1000 metres converts to 4750 steps. On swim days I’ll have my 10,000 before 8 a.m. You also get to add 300 steps per kilometre on the bike.
I wish it had started on Friday because I’ve had some amazing days this long weekend, including a 21 kilometre run this morning that got me to 27,000 steps on a day when, other than that, I sat in front of the laptop working on the blog book Sam and I are writing.
Count at the end of the day: 30,256. Granted, this will not be a typical day because I will not run a half marathon distance every day, not even once a week.
I’ve never done anything like this before and I’m always up for trying something new. I know my team members but haven’t ever worked with them on anything other than work before, so this will be an interesting experience in that respect as well. I think the challenge has a lot of good things going for it, so I’ll keep an open mind. But it’s not perfect (I’ve already seen some rhetoric in the “participant pledge” about moving away from “lazy options” and I hope that’s not a recurrent theme).
So here’s to some healthy fun, team-building, better sleep (fingers crossed), less stress (toes crosses), and a critical look at what a global effort in producing a “culture of health” looks like.
Here on the blog I’ve been calling them “unicorns” as in beautiful, rare, mythical creatures. And that’s caused some hurt feelings. I’m sorry. Here’s some background which may or may not help!
Colloquial; Synonym for hot bi babe or HBB, often derogatory, condescending, or ironic. A bisexual person, usually though not always female, who is willing to join an existing couple, often with the presumption that this person will date and become sexually involved with both members of that couple, and not demand anything or do anything which might cause problems or inconvenience to that couple.
So I start out with the thought that it’s a funny term and that it’s being funny doesn’t mean that such people don’t exist. They’re just rare.
Second, unicorns have two traits “mythical” and “rare.” People have thought I meant to be talking about them as mythical, saying people who lose weight and keep it off don’t exist. No. I meant to refer to them as “rare.” Within the mythology, unicorns are rare. Unicorns only exist in fantasy worlds but within the fantasy they’re also rare.
So, it’s true both that unicorns are mythical and that (within the mythology) they’re rare.
We’re getting into my home turf here, philosophy, and the issue that’s getting us into trouble is truth in fiction. Think about Santa Claus. It’s true that he lives at the North Pole and that he’s married to Mrs Claus. It’s also true that he doesn’t exist. Think about Sherlock Holmes, to use David Lewis’s example. It’s true that he lives on Baker Street. It’s also true that he’s a fictional character. So it’s in the sense of “true” that applies to Santa wearing a red suit, that it’s true that unicorns are rare.
We can all be bit touchy about narratives that deny our existence. As a fit and fat person, I know that feeling. Of course, there are people who lose a lot of weight and maintain that weight loss. Of course, there are. Calling those people “unicorns” denies their existence, some readers think. I meant it in a light-hearted way but some people to whom the term applies took offense. I’m sorry.
So here’s my explanation, via a discussion of truth in fiction, and my apology.
Better terms for rare creatures that actually exist? Albino penguins, maybe?
The longest I had run since my last marathon in October was 18km. So I knew, on Saturday, that the 25km I had signed up for was probably not going to happen. If it was sunny, I might not have switched to the 15km option (in other words, I might have been not-so-wise). However, a chilly wet day sealed the deal in favour of the smarter choice.
The race was the Seaton Soaker. It’s a trail race that has a slightly surreal overtone, for me, as it starts and finishes at my old high school. To say I wasn’t a runner back then would be an understatement: I loathed running. And yet, for the third year in a row now, I’ve come here to run around in the trails behind the school. A lot can change in 10+ years!
In any case, to set the stage, here is a rundown of race morning: Kevin and I woke at 6am with the intention of being on the road by 6:45. Kevin, who had been training more purposefully for the 25km, had an 8am start for his race, and we would have to do kit pickup before that. As readers will quickly learn, I am not particularly a morning person, and it will come as no surprise to those who know me that we were a little late in getting out (particularly as I forgot both my coffee and my water bottle and had to run back to the apartment twice to retrieve them). On the drive there, Kevin realized he had forgotten his GPS watch…oops!
When I made the decision to switch to the 15km distance, I briefly thought about trying to beat my previous time on the 15km course from 2014, but I realized that it was unlikely to happen that day. Not only was there was the rain and mud, I was also battling a pretty raging head cold. So, giving up on any particular time goal, I offered Kevin my GPS watch.
When we arrived, I was pleased to discover that switching distances was straightforward. We picked up our kits and Kevin hurried out to make his start. The 15km didn’t start until 8:30, so I had some time to hit the bathroom and have a wardrobe crisis. What do you wear when it’s 8C and raining and you’ll be running for around two hours? I was in shorts and a tee, but looking around at all the other runners in their tights and shells and long sleeves had me second-guessing. I did what I always do in these situations, and texted my dear friend Mandy, who was also signed up for the 15km. After texting not only about what to wear, but also informing her of how many poops I had taken that morning (hey! it’s important!), I made my way to the starting line.
I decided I would try to track the race with RunKeeper on my phone, as I’m not sure I’ve ever run a race that I didn’t track with GPS. But when I opened the app, it informed me that I was actually down by the waterfront… in Whitby… Well, there went that idea. I would truly be running this one tech-free.
A couple of minutes before the start, I saw Mandy, and ran over to give her a hug. Seaton is a special race for Mandy as well — it was her first ultramarathon! Now, not only is Mandy a badass ultra runner, but she recently did another pretty incredible thing and grew a little human inside of her, who she brought into the world six months ago. Since then she’s been getting out with the jogging stroller, and her goal was to run about half of the race and hike the rest when she needed to.
Mandy and I are frequent run partners. We even did 30km of my first marathon together! She’s been a constant presence as I’ve progressed in my running, but this was the first race that we had started together in a fair while. So when the race began, we just naturally fell into step, chatting as the pack set out.
The initial 2-3km of the course goes down a field, out by the side of a road, and then onto a narrow section of single track made narrower by the presence of a beaver dam this year. The going was fairly slow to start because of the lack of passing room and the muddy footing. That was fine by both of us, since I’d thrown my time goals out and Mandy just wanted to run as much as she was able. Pace wasn’t an issue. Still, when we got to one of the first hills, the track widened and we began passing people as we hiked up.
From then on it was mostly just the two of us, occasionally being passed, or encountering lead runners coming back in the other direction, but mostly remarkably quiet considering the number of participants out in the trails. We stopped for water at the aid stations and we walked/hiked up the larger hills. But mostly we just ran.
We ran and we talked and we marvelled at how much easier it all felt when we were running side by side. In no time we were at the halfway mark. I felt good. I checked in with Mandy – she felt good, too. We decided to keep going on together, as long as we felt good!
Steph being a goofball
Mandy being a goofball
On the way back, we turned a corner, and Mandy said, “I see flashes!” Considering the rain that had been off and on throughout the race, my immediate thought was, “lightning?” “No,” she said. “A photographer!” We have photos from the marathon that we ran together, looking like total goofballs. They’re some of both of our favourite race photos, because we just look like we’re having the best time, and we were. So we struck a couple of poses as we ran by!
And then, just like that, it was time for the river crossing. The water was lower than I expected, and although it was cold, it was fun! After the crossing, the finish is only about 2km away. We realized we were going to run the whole thing together, and I got a huge burst of tingly endorphins. I was bursting with happiness and pride for Mandy; she hadn’t expected to run the whole thing, yet here she was, doing just that, like a boss. And here I was, happy and thankful that this is a thing that I get to do, that this is a thing that my body can do, even if I’d filled an entire pocket pack of Kleenex with my snot (sorry if that sounds gross, but imagine how much grosser it felt!).
The 2km to the finish breezed by, although we were both getting a bit tired (I turned my foot on a root, and Mandy took a little tumble, but we’re both OK!). We crested the last hill before the field where the finish line stood. Together, we crossed the finish line smiling. Despite having run many races together, this was the first time that we crossed at the same time. Our amazing friend Emily was there to capture some truly fantastic photos of us (thanks, Emily!).
Kevin also had a remarkable race – he finished the 25km course in a blistering 2:08, shaving 20 minutes off his time from last year and placing 9th in his age group (if he’d run with that time last year, he’d have placed 2nd!). I guess he really did need that watch more than me! Hah!
And that’s it! Afterwards, Mandy told me that we ran a negative split – she had checked the time at the halfway point. I think that might have been another first for both of us!
I’m grateful to have friends like Mandy to run with. I’m proud of her for exceeding her expectations. She has never stopped being an inspiration to me, not even for a second. I’m also grateful to be able to go out and run for a couple hours on trails. And I’m surprised to find myself grateful to have run without my watch or RunKeeper, but completely letting go of the compulsion to track allowed me to revel in the pure joy of it all.
Stephanie is an astrophysicist, runner, photographer, drinker of craft beer, and sometime triathlete. This post was originally published at Sweaty & Hungry, where she and fellow athlete Megan blog about fitness and feelings.
This week I was at a very cool conference at the University of Texas at Dallas on social relevant philosophy of science and values in medicine, science and technology. If you’re interested, the program is here. Conferences are fun for me, but also sometimes a little stressful, and the level of stress tends to depend on how prepared I am when I arrive there. This time I had not finished preparing my talk, called “The case against the term ‘obesity'”, so was worrying a bit and trying to squeeze in some time to finish it. Part of why I hadn’t finished the talk is that I had spent the previous week at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Wellness at a workshop on mindfulness and eating. It was an intense experience that involved sharing (sometimes painful) stories with 18 other people about our stormy relationships with food and our bodies. I blogged about it here.
We all have to manage separate parts of our lives– work, family, friends, sports, etc.– while incorporating those parts into some semblance of a coherent whole person. (Reading that sentence, I can’t help but think: philosophers spend a lot of time taking ordinary experience and turning it into something very complicated; why do they do that? Yeah, well…)
This week for me, the forces of compartmentalizing/incorporating came into conflict. I have two roles that I commonly play: 1) academic obesity researcher; 2) fat woman struggling with food and body image issues. Last week at Kripalu I spent a bunch of time identifying with 2), something I’m not comfortable doing with others. But it was very powerful– I was seen and heard and supported and cared for.
But this week (even now– I’m finishing the blog post and then running into a conference session today), I’ve shifted back to 1). And I was supposed to give a talk arguing against the use of the term “obesity”. I’ll post about the details of my arguments another time, but I was using lots of data from medical and epidemiological studies, and slinging around terms like “hazard ratio”. In effect, I could hide my more vulnerable self behind graphs with U-shaped curves and big error bars.
At this conference, I was talking with a good friend about feminism and philosophy and the idea of framing arguments in a context. She was pointing out that knowing about the ways issues come about, who is involved, how arguments affect people and environments, and what other uses arguments are for enriches us. This information does not make us less rigorous, less professional, less smart. Au contraire– it makes our arguments useful, and keeps us intellectually and morally honest.
So I decided to give my talk with that in mind. I said (in front of people) that I’m a woman who is hurt by the ways that medicine categorizes me. I also expressed anger during the talk about the ways media and research information outlets present data in (what I argue are) skewed ways that stigmatize people based on their body size. There was a little yelling, a little mocking, a lot of laughter, and also warmth in the room. Wow.
Does anyone remember the Hair Club for Men ads from the 80s? Sy Sperling (its president), did these now-kitschy-seeming ads about hair replacement. You can see it here.
The punch line of the ad (go to :50 in the clip) is where Sy Sperling says, “I’m not only the president of the Hair Club for Men. I’m also a client.”
I am Sy Sperling.
What about you, readers? Do you ever merge (or pry apart) some of these separate parts of yourselves? Does revealing the more soft parts help? Hurt?
Even though we have been together for a year now, I still remember the day we met like it was yesterday. God, you were a pain in my ass. I could barely stand, having you around. Most new relationships sweep you off your feet, but no, you knocked me right off mine. Still, I couldn’t bear to part with you. I had been waiting so long for you to finally show up in my life that I just knew I had to make this work.
At first, everything was harder because of you, and the night we spent in the emergency room because we couldn’t get our morphine prescription refilled in time was pure hell. That night I learned you could cause me as much pain as my old hip. The difference was that I knew you would make things better eventually, once I got used to you.
It took months of hard work to get back on my feet after you showed up, but it was worth every goddamned fucking day of doddering around on crutches, risking my neck just going up and down steps or even getting in and out of the shower. It was completely worth five fucking weeks of sleeping propped up in bed because I had too much trouble keeping the pillow between my knees to safely sleep on my left side and sleeping on my right side made my leg feel like it was going to explode. It was worth every bloody moment of worry that I’d dislocate you just by rotating my ankle too much. Sometimes, however, I thought about doing it just to piss you off.
Maybe then you’d know how I felt.
Once we got more comfortable with each other things started working out. We started going for long walks around the block (long, mostly because they were kinda slow) and after a while the doctor lifted all restrictions on our … activities, and then we were off to the races. But not literally. The doctor said we probably shouldn’t do that. Ever.
We did other things though, we just didn’t tell the surgeon about them. We did much more walking and some biking and a bit of dancing and some Viking combat — you know, the usual sorts of things people do. And when we got through our six-month checkup together, I knew we’d make it.
So here’s to you, Bionic Hip. We’ve had an amazing year, and even though we both know I will eventually replace you with a younger model, I hope we can still enjoy many more years together. May our every anniversary be titanium.
Love,
Abby E. is a Toronto-based freelance editor who loves science, philosophy, and speculative fiction. She is not a crazy cat lady, just a crazy lady who has cats.
This hasn’t been the easiest year for me, as readers of the blog well know. Death, illness, and surgery have all taken time and emotional energy.
That’s been followed by a spring of catching up on missed work travel (rescheduled after all the bad things mentioned above.) So much work travel. California twice. Chicago. Austria. Next up: Sweden, Scotland, Calgary. (One of these things is not like the other, I know.)
But all this work travel combined with horrible weather means I haven’t had as much time as I like on my bike. I’ve missed my bike. As denizens of northeast North America know the weather hasn’t been great. So when I don’t have time flexibility and there’s one good day out of four, odds are it hasn’t been a day I can ride.
I didn’t go away on a winter cycling holiday (first world cyclist problem, I know) and I missed our spring training camp. I’m starting out the year slower than I was last year at this time with about a thousand fewer kilometers in the bank. That makes me grumpy and sad. Then there’s the bike rally coming up. I’m not worried about the distances or even about having fun but some of my riding has been sweeping training rides at a much slower pace than I usually ride. In my good training days I’m happy to ride at lots of different speeds. But this spring it feels like it’s been mostly recovery riding with little to recover from. Sweeping and helping out with training rides is a worthwhile task. I’m glad I’m doing it. I’m going to write an uplifting post about that soon. But let me continue to sulk about lost fitness a little longer. Indulge me please.
Oh, if you are feeling sorry for me and want to cheer me up. Please help with fundraising. Go sponsor me here. It’ll cheer me up.
So often when I travel for work and can’t ride, I run. But my knee has been bugging me, especially after long flights.
Then there’s Aikido. Needless to say I haven’t been the most regular attender. There’s a few professors there and we all struggle with how much we travel and the dojo testing rhythm. Today was the day that all the people who’d been training to test (not me) got their new belts. Usually I’m capable of being super happy for good things to happen to people I like. That’s especially true when they’ve worked hard and deserved it. Today though wasn’t one of those times. I know there is nothing I can do about this, other than making Aikido more of a priority in my life. I wish we were better at allowing people room to stay at the same belt level and just train but testing and training to test seems to take up a lot of our time and energy. Given my rolling difficulties and my work schedule, I might be a green belt forever. That’s okay but today I was sad and reminded of this song.
On the bright side, because really I am that kind of person, I’ve done some new things, like boxing and axe throwing. I’ve also kept up with weightlifting thanks to a constant reminder in the form of my athletic weightlifting kid.
