It’s been a tough three weeks or so for me and until I thought about what to write for this post, I hadn’t realized what was going on.

Ever since I started exercising deliberately at the age of 35 or so, I have mostly experienced it as a journey toward good things. A journey toward strength, toward endurance, toward better health, toward confidence, toward community etc. I have come to view myself as fit, capable, powerful and more importantly, as a person who can continue to attain even more of the same as long as I’m trying. These assumptions I have made about my capacity to do more (and implicitly, to be more) have at least a few blind spots, however. One big one is my ability to hide from the reality that lurks inside, which is Rheumatoid Arthritis.

I was diagnosed with juvenile RA when I was around 13. At the time, treatment was limited to Aspirin, big doses. I remember, as a child who was clumsy and not used to much physical exercise anyway, that it was a relief to me that I now had a good excuse to get out of gym. That’s mostly what it was. Since I didn’t have much that I liked to do that required a lot of movement, the mild swelling in my knee and hands didn’t really mean much to me.

In my 20’s, I went completely without treatment. I can’t say exactly why. I was used to what my limits were and they weren’t huge. I was so freaking lucky that the progression wasn’t fast. My hands deformed slowly over time but that was about all. Sometimes my knee would swell or my wrist would hurt. Sometimes it was hard to hold a pen for a long time, but other than that, I just lived with it. All the while, I did not see myself as a fit or physical person.

Things all changed when I got pregnant. Pregnancy often puts RA into remission and I was amazed at the increased functionality of my hands. After I had my son, the disease came back with a vengeance and I decided to go back to see what could be done. Long story short, I got on some good drugs, got into remission and have stayed there for the most part ever since. I can see now that this remission has, in fact, enabled me to start my journey toward this new identity as a fit, strong person with perceived unlimited capacity to improve.

But three weeks ago, in the course of 24 hours, I went from fine to unable to shake hands with some people I was having dinner with. I couldn’t cut my food or carry the plate. My wrist and knee followed shortly after and I knew I was in trouble. This wasn’t the first time something like this happened and I knew what I had to do. I had been lowering the dose of my meds hoping the remission might be permanent. It wasn’t. I upped the dose again and within days things started to improve. But I’ll tell ya, it scared the heck out of me.

On top of that episode, last week while running 5 k at my top speed, I apparently did something to that same right knee and it swelled like a balloon. While I think that was an injury and not the RA, it fed my fear. What if I just can’t do these things any more? What if all that strength and capacity is taken from me by this disease? What if it kills me (it can, see here)?

One of the things I’m really asking here is “Who am I?” My fear breaks this into an either or scenario. Either I’m healthy, fit and have capacity or I’m sick and I’ll lose myself. So I spend a lot of time ignoring the mechanism under my surface that likes to eat at my connective tissue for fun. To top it all off, the thing I’m dealing with isn’t even a disease from the outside. It’s my own damn self hurting me. But unlike the first time it happened when I was 13, it isn’t a relief. Getting my body out of gym class is the last thing I want right now. I’m in rebellion with my self.

I know the answer. Take care of me and keep moving. I’ll adapt if I have to. That’s another benefit of capacity. But I don’t like feeling fragile and out of control, even if those qualities are actually fundamental truths of all our lives. We are fragile. We have such limited control of so many things that matter.

Now that I have said these things I am aware of something new. I’m glad my body reminded me of my fragility. I’m glad it reminded me to take care. I’m glad it reminded me to be grateful for what it can do. I’m glad it focused me back to the fact that I feel love for it and I’m frankly amazed at how far it has come. I’ll try to walk away from my fear and back to acceptance of all the things. My health and my illness, my capacity and my disability, foreground and background. . .all of them me.

 

 

One of my favourite recurring themes on the blog since Sam and I started at it in 2012 is about taking small steps. I was reminded of this again this week as my triathlon swim group started up again after a month off (well, a month for them, two months for me).

Instead of throwing us into the ring right away with a killer set (despite that she could have taken advantage of one of my lane mate’s 59th birthday), Gabbi our coach kept us busy with drills designed to remind us of (and improve our awareness of) our position in the water. Though we did in fact do these drills for almost 90 minutes, this approach falls into the category of starting small and doing less than you think you should — break it down, do the basics of kicking, arm and hand position, head position, body position, timing…focus on precision over speed.

In honor of starting small and doing less, I thought I’d gather together a bunch of our posts that riff on this lovely and manageable theme (definitely, as you will see from this list, I reaffirm my commitment to “doing less” often!):

On Doing Less (Tracy)

In Praise of Everyday Movement (Sam)

Teeny Tiny Habits, One at a Time (Tracy)

The Art of Small Steps (Guest Post by Jane S)

Loving the Little Things but Why Don’t We Celebrate Them More? (Sam)

To Resolve or Not to Resolve: On New Year’s Resolutions (Tracy)

Getting There with Marginal Gains (Tracy)

Let’s Be Realistic: It’s Okay to Scale Back (Tracy)

Fitness and the Pomodoro Technique (Tracy)

Three Cheers for Minimalism! It’s Good for Your Health (Tracy)

“My Whole Life Is Workout Time” (Sam)

 

 

I’m taking charge of autumn sadness by spending more time outdoors on my bike. In a few short months that will be harder too. But for now, I’m riding.

When this is your commute, life feels pretty good.

See you out there!

• It’s officially Autumn (in a few hours anyway) so here’s some fall riding photos….
• Reasons to start riding in the fall
• Fall and winter riding: Trying to psych myself up for it
• There’s a certain chill to the air that makes my thoughts turn to autumn road bike rides, hot tubs, and back to school

 

I  consider the effect of gender norms on men’s health and suggest that when it comes to health promotion, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.

“I’m the mother of two sons – teen and twenty-something sons. As I pack away tube after tube of unused sunscreen, I find myself thinking about gender norms. I check expiry dates. They’ll still be good next year. Maybe by then they’ll use sunscreen.

Generally speaking, though, boys and men don’t use sunscreen. They also pay the price for this. Boys and men between the ages of 15 and 39 are more than twice as likely to die of melanoma, than girls and women between these ages. According to the American Academy of Dermatology melanoma will kill 6,470 boys and men this year — and half as many girls and women.”

Read the rest over at Impact Ethics…

“Loneliness kills” is the headline  on a new crop of stories about the health impact of loneliness.

The New York Times calls it an epidemic.

Researchers have found mounting evidence linking loneliness to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline. As a predictor of early death, loneliness eclipses obesity.

“The profound effects of loneliness on health and independence are a critical public health problem,” said Dr. Carla M. Perissinotto, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. “It is no longer medically or ethically acceptable to ignore older adults who feel lonely and marginalized.”

In Britain and the United States, roughly one in three people older than 65 live alone, and in the United States, half of those older than 85 live alone. Studies in both countries show the prevalence of loneliness among people older than 60 ranging from 10 percent to 46 percent.

CBC’s White Coat, Black Art notes that the health impacts of loneliness can equal or surpass that of smoking a, pack of cigarettes a day.

This is not about people who enjoy solitude by choice — it’s about people who spend long periods without social contact.  The effects of that are tangible and they are growing. It’s no surprise that loneliness leads to increased rates of depression and alcohol use.  More surprising is the impact that social isolation has on your physical well-being. According to a study out of  Brigham Young University, loneliness is as damaging to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  It is even more damaging to your to body than obesity and diabetes.  Lonely people are at greater risk of heart attacks.  Loneliness can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 64 per cent.  And if the subject has cancer, then loneliness can increase the risk that the cancer spreads.

When Tracy and I were chatting yesterday about advice we’d to give to people who were just starting out, we wanted to tell people to find a fitness community.I was struck by how many people don’t have someone to exercise with when I read about the man who walks with people for a living.

The Guardian story about him is headlined ‘We need human interaction’: meet the LA man who walks people for a living

Chuck McCarthy recently auditioned as a homicidal biker for a TV show, but the actor is finding glimmers of fame, and possibly a business franchise, with another role: Los Angeles’s first people walker.

He walks humans for $7 a mile around the streets and park near his home, pioneering an alternative to dog walking that requires no leash, just an ability to walk, talk and, above all, listen.

I found the story about him to be intriguing. I’m supervising a PhD student working on questions about what should or shouldn’t be for sale (are there moral limits on the market?) and one of the question that interests me concerns the sale of intimate human relationships (sex is the obvious one, but also too friendship).

I don’t disapprove. He sounds perfectly charming and his rates aren’t even particularly steep.

But what can we do for non LA resident seniors in need of company? Because McCarthy is all about walking, I started thinking of walking clubs. Just show up at a set time each day, walk and talk, tea and coffee after. I’m also a  big fan of co-housing and experiments about cooperative living. Friends know well my fantasy alpaca farm/commune (you know for after the collapse of the universities) which survives of bicycle tourism.

And I’m charmed too by stories about university students taking up rooms in seniors homes. Or preschools and daycares located in seniors facilities.

Gretchen Rubin suggest these 7 strategies to combat loneliness.

But sticking for a moment to physical activity, what other ideas do you have to help older people combat loneliness and get moving?

 

An article,”Every Weekend Should be a 3-Day Weekend” came out over a year ago and I missed it. It’s dated September 4, 2015, so I probably missed in the blur that is September. Sam wrote about the September blur and its associated challenges yesterday.

Since like attracts like, I have surrounded myself with lots of high-achieving, busy people who cram a lot into every day, week, and month. Mostly it’s women, and we all feel the crunch.

Probably the most boring but repeated conversation I have with colleagues is about how busy we all are. I read somewhere (maybe in one of those Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff books that we used to keep in the bathroom) about a phenomenon called “corporate bragging.”

What’s that, you say? I’m going on memory here, but it’s something along these lines: going on an on about how busy you are. We wear it as a  badge of honor. Hence the “bragging” label. The tone is complaining, but in the end it makes us sound important, even indispensable.

With all this work to do, it’s hard to imagine trying to cram it into a 4-day work week. I mean, when I ran into a colleague the other day as both of us were rushing from one on-campus commitment to the next, she asked me “what do you think we can do about September?”  My first two answers: 1. make it longer, 2. increase the number of hours in a day in September. Only my third answer started to get to the point: 3. Try to fit less into it.

A shorter work week with longer weekends would force us to do that. And it would be good for our health. Here’s what the research says, according to the article:

The bulk of the research in medicine, sleep, cognitive science, and organizational psychology overwhelmingly suggests that a shorter workweek should be the norm rather than the holiday-weekend exception.

People who work too much are more likely to have strokes, suffer heart disease, or contract type-2 diabetes.

But that’s not all. One of the biggest complaints I’ve had lately is about insufficient sleep. If three-day weekends were a regular thing, people would sleep more. People who work over 55 hours a week sleep a lot less than people who work fewer than 40 hours per week. The reason, researchers suspect is not just that they have more time to sleep, but also that have more time to “chill.” If you work long hours with very little space in your schedule for downtime, you miss out on relaxation, which is kind of like prep for a good sleep.

And finally, though I hate that so many arguments for anything good these days revolve around how it would increase productivity, the fact is that working fewer hours does increase productivity:

In one … experiments, [Harvard business school] researchers forced employees at a consulting firm in Boston to take a day off — totally off, no email check-ins allowed — in the middle of the workweek. After five months of this routine, the firm’s clients reported an improvement in service from the teams who took time off, as compared to the clients of the teams who worked their usual 50-plus hours per week.

We have a three-day weekend coming up for Canadian Thanksgiving, and I’m excited! One difficulty I have is that because these are not the norm, I find myself thinking about what all I can cram into it.

But the real benefit of regular three-day weekends, as far as I’m concerned, is to create some space in an otherwise over-scheduled life. The very idea seems decadent in a world where corporate bragging is a way of life.

So instead of letting my three-day weekend become a three-day chore-fest, I’m scheduling in a day of unscheduled time on Saturday: no plans, no email, no work.

And moving on from that: I’ve made a firm commitment to reduce my participation in the culture corporate bragging. Living to work is nothing to boast about. Finding space in life for unscheduled time is more of an achievement. A regular calendar of three-day weekends would help with that. And I don’t just mean for the privileged few. I mean for all income brackets and with no reduction in pay.

Do you ever find yourself caught in a negative cycle of corporate bragging with colleagues and friends? Would you welcome a shorter work-week even if it didn’t mean you were more productive?

 

It’s not been an easy month. For a professor, September never is. For me, it’s been extra tough. Exciting and good in some ways, but tough in others.

I moved departments, from Philosophy to Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, which is great but I’m teaching two brand new classes. One class is about feminism and fashion and it’s got 120 students in it. The other, feminism and death, is a 3rd year class with a more reasonable 25.

Two of my kids also moved out and on to new adventures. One’s at college not too far away but the other is on the other coast. Very far away. (Luckily we did get to ride bikes together recently!)

So in addition to making five trips between my home and the not too far away town where my son has settled, to look for apartments, sign a lease, and move stuff, I’ve also had three big work trips three weekends in a row. That’s been a bit of a theme around here. Sandi, Catherine, Tracy, and me have all been on the move and blogging about it.

Ditto my blogging and cycling and knitting friend the yarn harlot. Hi Stephanie! I keep thinking we’ll meet in a departure lounge somewhere sometime.

The good news? Really exciting, stimulating stuff. I’ve learned a lot. The most recent workshop looked at arguments against mass incarceration and alternatives to prison as punishment. My paper was on the cost to children and families when a parent goes to jail. When we examine costs and benefits of different methods of punishment, children tend to get left out. Looks like I’ve also secured my Air Canada Altitude status for next year with this recent round of travel. And I’ve been to fun places, New Orleans, Vancouver, New York, and Boston.

The bad news? Yawn. Jet lag doesn’t much bother me and I sleep well on planes (see Sleep is my superpower!) but there’s all the extra life stuff that needs to get done when I come home. Academic conferences tend to be on weekends but it’s not like there are days off when we get back. Also, rush, rush, rush. I’m behind with everything. Teaching, grading, taxes, you name it, I haven’t done it. Especially exercise.

I didn’t get to choose my hotel for any of these trips and there weren’t really gyms to speak of. Just small rooms with three or four treadmills and a handful of dumbbells. I could have done it Arnold style but I was also just too tired. These were some very long days.

September is often a struggle when it comes to exercise. I’ve written about it here, On back to school and starting as you mean to continue, and here, Real life fitness, or why I’m dog jogging. And I know that getting more of it–spending time moving, in the outdoors–is one of the things guaranteed to boost my mood.

But there’s something deeper in my dislike of autumn, connecting it thoughts of death and how short life really is. Blink and you miss it.  Summer and life, alike. Of course it doesn’t help that I pretty much forgot to take vacation this summer, just the bike rally (not really holiday) and a couple of weekends of canoe camping. Fall’s changing leaves serve as reminders of mortality. I teach courses on death. Thinking about it come term time is an occupational hazard. There also have been more deaths in my life recently. Old friends and family both.

The other day I shared this quote on Facebook.

 

I also reread this piece The Summer That Never Was which also connects end of summer melancholy with thoughts of mortality.

I suspect that the way I feel now, at summer’s end, is about how I’ll feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough to reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out, regretful about all the things I didn’t get around to, clutching the handful of friends and funny stories I’ve amassed, and wondering where it all went. And I’ll probably still be evading the same truth I’m evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose. And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.

How about you? Do you struggle with the switch from summer to fall? Is fall a happy time of year or a sad time of year for you? 

From time to time I need to travel for work. When I choose my hotel I always try to get a place with a full restaurant for breakfast and a decent gym. I have a few hotels that are my standard go-to chains that are guaranteed to work, but don’t always have that luxury as I’m not always in big cities that even have multiple hotels. My plan when I can’t use a gym is to just do some kind of hotel workout, sometimes it’s pushups and body weight squats, sometimes I’ll more closely follow the hotel workout posted a few years ago at Nerd Fitness . When there are weights, I’ll use them, when there are not, I’ll do cardio.

This week I was at a conference in Vegas, in a hotel with a couple of fitness centers that were quite exceptional. Day 1 I was pretty tired, so decided just to do cardio so I wouldn’t have to think too hard about choices. The gym was sparse as it often is with just a few of the types you’d expect to see, the dedicated runners who spend hours on the treadmill and a few bodybuilders in the weights corner. I did 40 minutes of fast walking on the treadmill, testing my feet on a short run to see how my toes would hold up. All was well.

Monday I hit the gym in the late afternoon and expected the same, but was surprised to see several people in the gym who didn’t meet the stereotypes that I expected to see in Vegas gyms. There was the runner on the treadmill beside me, who looked the part, there was a very attractive, thin blond woman on a bike, wearing her sports bra and with her hair perfectly coifed. There were a few older gentlemen who were doing some light medicine ball and treadmill work, focused primarily on the blond and a couple of men spending time around the weight machines.

40 minutes on the treadmill to warm up, working in intervals to start increasing my running time, then I moved to the weights. The blond had a circuit that she was following: very slowly biking for 5 minutes, holding 5 lb weights on her shoulders for a minute at a time, chatting with the older gentlemen, then walking out of the gym to chat on her phone. She completed this full circuit a few times. The experienced runner left, the older gentlemen left and it was just me, the blond and the vague workout routine guys (VWRG) that were left.

I started on the weights with bicep curls and triceps exercises, with 15lb dumbbells. Normally, I’ll increase by 5 lbs at a time, but when I reached for the 20lb weights, VWRG#1 rushed to the rack, picked up the 20s and carried them to the spot where he stored his cell phone, and set them down. He then moved to a machine to do other work. Clearly he’s never been schooled on gym etiquette. So, I skipped to 25s and carried on.

Because this gym had EVERYTHING, I went to the rack and decided to do some deadlifts. Normally I do partials at home, so wasn’t sure where to start with the full lifts. I started at 75lbs and started to increase pretty quickly from there. I didn’t have my weight belt so was careful to not overdo it. I ended at 225lbs x 3 (which was better than I expected) and when I looked up in the mirror, I saw VWRG#2 staring at me with his jaw dropped. He then put away his 12lb weights. I finished off with 30 x 30lb kettlebell swings, stretched out, then did some sit ups. When I was done, I was drenched. (Pretty blond was still beautifully coifed and not even glowing from exertion.) I grabbed my towel, lifted my shirt and wiped off my boob sweat. I looked up and VWRG#1 had stopped in front of me and was staring, slack jawed. Seriously dude…boob sweat…it’s a thing.

It’s weird working out in a space where other people are just going through some vague motions. Makes me really glad for my training partners who have helped me get into a routine, practice good technique and make me lift hard every week.