I’m running. My shoulders are hot with the sun, and the road is busy and the pavement is uneven and I don’t know where I’m going.

I’m running slowly, quite gently.  My toes are blistered for some inexplicable reason. My feet probably swelled on the flight, and I haven’t had enough water, and we walked to a fish fry last night through the hot dark night in the wrong shoes. Jessica wanted to show me a house for sale on the water, and I just couldn’t bear to walk another 200 metres.

I’m running in Barbados, the miracle of a 5 hour cramped flight on a rickety plane from Toronto, being decanted here on the swirl of turquoise sea. Jessica has been doing workshops here with local women, and her partner is here with their tiny twins, and I’ve joined them for a few days. A few bonus vacation days sliced right out of the middle of an incredibly busy time.

I’m running after a 12 hour sleep, because my body and mind have been tuckered out from an intense work season, and I need to find my soul. My body is slow, and my feet hurt, and I’m hot, and I needed to use my inhaler this morning. Getting up and out of the air bnb place — not fancy (“it’s like we’re rich students,” says J), but right on the white sand aqua sea beach — was an effort. It would be easy to sit in the sand and let the lassitude take over.

I’m running because it’s one of the ways I explore a new place, and it makes me feel grateful in every cell. Grateful for my body that works, even if it’s more of an effort than ever before and I woke with a sore knee.  Plus the blisters. Grateful for a life where I have enough privilege, time, resources, support to take a few days off without much fanfare. (Trying to ignore the emails that are reminding me of what’s not done). Grateful for a life where I get to put my self into so many new corners of the world, find them.

I’m running because it’s the only way I would see these streets with just the tiniest hint of how someone who lives here might. Narrow sidewalks, having to veer constantly into the traffic when someone has pushed the boundaries of their property right to the edge of the road. The heat of midday, where a man is sleeping in a bus shelter, his fancy running shoes on the ground beside him.

I’m running never more than 100m from the ocean on this road, but I only see it in tiny glimpses, the wall of hotels and big houses sealing off the view. Down one idyllic lane, I see the ocean gesturing…. and a man is efficiently peeing against a wall. I notice the proliferation of Canadian banks, and global fast food places, and the number of places that have the same style signage as the place we’re staying. One local sign maker, I guess.

I’m running, looking for the boardwalk I was told was down here, and I see it behind a KFC. I’ve been running five km already, and I was planning on 7 — and I finally find true paradise, wide big waves, finally out of the traffic, my water bottle empty, my body aching with the heat. At the end of the boardwalk, I know I’m courting sunstroke, so I walk up a few steps to the pool deck of a fancy hotel and ask a server if I can please have some water. She brings an iced pitcher.  I express my gratitude, conscious of the privilege of looking like a white tourist, knowing that the guy selling bracelets on the beach can’t truck up here, wild-eyed and sweaty, and be greeted with ice water and encouragement.

I’m running, the last kilometre or so, counting up the places I’ve been lucky enough to run. All over Canada and the US, in the desert and in cool ominous mountains. Iceland, Norway, Prague, Rome, the Philippines, Uganda. Cornered by wild dogs in the ancient plains of Bagan in Myanmar. The incredible panorama of the ocean in Capetown where I had to beg a stranger for sunblock, the long dirt road in the Pantanal in Brazil where caimans — a kind of alligator — crowded close to the edge of the road, looking at me. The uneven streets of Kigali, Rwanda, where I tripped and hurt my knee. Getting lost my first day in Auckland, befuddled with jet lag. Laos, Vietnam, Germany. All of the places, windy and hot and frozen and drizzly, all new, trotted through on foot, absorbed and felt and explored. Every one of those runs suffused with recognition of how lucky I am to have the life I do.

]I’m running, not fast, and there is a lot of aching. I’m 52, and I’ve slowed down. I ate way too much last night at the fish fry and my blood was thick with the sweetness of a couple of rum and cokes. But when I stop, and get on the bus filled with locals to head back, apologizing for my sweatiness, bare shoulders, I feel I found something I can’t find bobbing in that glorious ocean, sitting on the beach.

Back at the place we are staying, I play with Ivan, one of the twins. He rolled completely over by himself for the first time this morning. He’s frustrated, wanting more from his body than his body is delivering right now.  We eat beans and rice and salted fish, and dip in the ocean.  Later there will be ice cream.

I’m traveling for work again and spending time in hotel gyms.

Here’s what I did the other day for my hotel gym workout: 20 min run/walk on the treadmill for warm up. Then LifeFitness machines for lat pulldown (4 sets of 10 at 80), shoulder press (4 sets of 10 at 30) and chest press (4 sets of 10 at 40).

Then dumb bell chest flies with the 15s, rows with the 30s, farmers carries with the 30s, and reverse flies with the 10s (3 sets of 10 each.)

I’ve blogged before about the utter boredom of running on treadmills in hotel gyms and how I make it sort of fun and challenging. See Finding my inner Arnold in Peterborough.

I love Arnold on hotel gyms and workouts. “Someone on Reddit asked what it was like for me to train in hotel gyms or other unfamiliar gyms on the road,” Schwarzenegger posted. “The answer is: just like it is for you. There is no waiting to train until you have perfect circumstances. I improvise with whatever is available.”I walk in and my only rule is to keep moving, for a pump and cardio at the same time. Rest as little as possible. After an hour, you will feel fantastic and your muscles won’t know what hit them.”

There’s lots of resources out there. See this routine which is dumbbells only, which is often what you’ve got to work with, a treadmill and various dumbbells.

I’ve got a whole other thing, body weight exercises for in the room, for when there isn’t a gym at all.

How about you? What’s your go to thing to do when you’ve got a pretty basic hotel gym to work with?

In Forget the Velominati’s Rules, you’re not doing it wrong Peter Flax tells the story of coming to hate “the rules” of cycling.

He writes, “The outermost layer of the problem is that many of the rules are empirically stupid. Telling everyone to stuff tubes and tools in jersey pockets sounds really clever until a group ride grinds to a halt because no one has a chain tool. Urging the masses to remain in the big ring and slam their stems and ditch frame pumps is neither smart nor droll. (But telling a demographic of hobbyists that spends thousands of dollars to buy bicycles that reduce road chatter to “Harden the fuck up” — now that’s funny.)”

What are the rules, anyway? Here’s the list, The Velominati’s Rules.

About “the rules” The human cyclist writes,

Velominati’s The Rules are to be admired for their verve, chuckled at for their humour, but never to be followed. A mixture of the serious, the chest beating, the polite and the traditional along with a healthy dose of tongue in cheek humour, The Rules make a good read and will lead all cyclists to shake and nod their head at the words before them.

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules”
Banksy

The Rules come in for much criticism, perhaps because the most (in)famous of which is Rule Number 5. Harden the Fuck Up. Very macho. That said, the only criticism I have is not of The Rules themselves but anybody who takes them seriously. Or quotes them at every given opportunity.

You’ll often hear folk out on rides or see commentators quoting numbers and referring to The Rules on cycling forums, mostly in jest but sometimes not. This blog post then is The Rules Rewritten, an antidote to the chest beating inner-chimp behaviour that exists within a certain type of cyclist, mostly but not exclusively of the male variety.

Here’s his version of the rules, rewritten.

On Facebook my friend, colleague, and fellow cyclist Tim Kenyon has written about his own version of cycling’s rules and I blogged about them here.

Recently Tim talked about his bad experience with the macho cycling culture associated with “the rules.”

Tim wrote,

So last week as I rode between Bamberg and St Agatha, I passed another cyclist traveling the other direction. While I have never endangered any land speed records while cycling, it’s fair to say that I was at least not dawdling at the time. I smiled and nodded my head at him, in a reasonably normal show of cycling solidarity and neighbourliness.

“COME ON, WUSSY BOY, PICK IT UP!!!” he screamed as he went past.

Naturally I found this a bit puzzling. What sort of relationship did he imagine that he and I had, that could make this a non-pathological form of interaction? Did he read on one of those sad “The Rules” internet pages that this was the way to prove one’s status as a *hard man*? Or was this somehow imagined to be a bit of beneficence — a piece of pro bono personal life coaching from an expert who would normally charge big bucks to scream insults at elite athletes?

These questions occupied me only for a few minutes, though, and I can say I had quite forgotten the incident before yesterday, when, riding up the last hill into Kitchener from Petersburg, I recognized him coming the other way, down the hill. My friend and I were at the end of a long ride, and my friend was hurting just a bit. So he was spinning his way up the hill a minute or two behind me. I was getting a last good anaerobic push in before the end of the ride, so was standing up and doing my best to shatter myself on the climb. By the time I’d recognized the roving screamer, he was speeding down the hill past me.

“PICK IT UP, PICK IT UP!!!!” he screamed at me.

*Now, that really is just plain weird*, I thought to myself. When my friend caught me after the crest of the hill, I asked him whether anyone had screamed at him on his way up the hill.

“Yeah,” he panted, clearly very puzzled. “Some guy yelled that I was, uh, a wussy boy.”

So now I am left to wonder: Who is this sunglassed crusader? Does he ride the streets, day and night, since wussy boyitude never sleeps and hence neither can fighters of wussy boyitude? Was he called a wussy boy in his formative cycling days, and does he now reenact this tragic memory when encountering strangers? Is this a kind of verbal tic, and if so, is it limited to cycling situations? What if we met in the Superstore, each pushing our shopping carts laden with espresso beans, agave nectar, and Clif Bars? If I met him walking on the sidewalk, or on the ice playing hockey, would he still be neurologically compelled to scream “WUSSY BOY” at me?

I cannot say. It is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, dusted with freakshow, encased in Lycra, and perched atop carbon.

I confess that I’ve liked “the rules” in the past as a cycling in-joke, a way of making fun of how seriously we take it all.  I especially like the “badass” rule.

I’ve written about riding in bad weather here.

But insofar as they seem to be taken seriously, not as cycling culture poking fun at itself, and they seem so macho as to exclude those who won’t play by the rules, I think the joke might have just run its course.

We don’t need gatekeepers to tell us who the real cyclists are. As is the case with my academic discipline, philosophy those who want rules are interested usually in keeping certain kinds of people out. We don’t need that, not in cycling, not in philosophy.

Bye bye rules!

Just ride your bike!

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you know one thing about this blog, we are not keen on diets. Our main reason for being down on diets is that they simply don’t work. Yes, you can lose a few pounds. And guess what? If you’re like most people you’ll gain them back. And possibly more.

We get grief when we say that over and over. But it’s true.

What’s worse than a regular weight loss diet? A celebrity weight loss diet. Just because Oprah or Gwyneth or (back in the day) Suzanne endorses it or says it’s the diet they embrace doesn’t make it any more likely to work. And the celebrity endorsement, to me, just makes it more egregious.

I could relate big time to Jean Fain’s commentary, “The big problem with Oprah and other celebs who tout diets.” Fain is a psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorders. She says:

From where I sit, clean eating, lifestyle plans, weight management programs, juice cleanses, support systems… they’re all diets, and they’re all bound to fail. But with their intoxicating blend of impossible expectations, misguided authority and restrictive guidelines, celebrity diets are predestined to fail spectacularly.

Why are they predestined to fail spectacularly? Three main reasons:

1. Celebrities don’t look like they do because of their diets. Remember, she says: Oprah has a team of trainers, personal chefs, and medical experts. And she still struggles. Gwyneth is genetically gifted. Both are rich enough to employ an army of people working to help them look amazing.
2. Diets don’t work. We’ve reviewed this many times. Body adapts. Metabolism slows down, sometimes permanently. Famine response. Set points.
3. Celebrity diets are even less likely to work.

Celebrity diets backfire big-time for all the same reasons and more. Diets of the rich and famous tend to be expensive, costing dieters time and money they don’t necessarily have. Some go to wacky extremes, eliminating such an idiosyncratic list of foods that social occasions become stressful events. What’s a restaurant-goer to order on Gwyneth’s 10-day detox, which excludes gluten, soy, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, red meat, white rice, shellfish, raw fish, peanuts, tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries, corn… ?

Celebrity diets are beyond doomed because of the toxic mix of negative comparisons, shame and self-criticism they inspire. As inspiring as it might be to watch your favorite celebrities diet down to size, the airbrushed photos of celebrity dieters looking like they’re doing better than you tend to make you feel worse and exacerbate the very eating issues their diets are meant to alleviate.

What does Fain recommend instead of the latest celebrity diet? Self-compassion. Not just paying lip service to it, like saying you’re compassionate to yourself and then spending your evenings counting calories or points. But actually giving yourself a break and letting go of the delusional thinking associated with diets, even celebrity diets.

Are you more or less likely to feel the allure of a diet that’s got a celebrity endorsement behind it?

A new fave Instagram person to follow, here.

It’s bodyposipanda.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BROUWHSBvoV/?taken-by=bodyposipanda&hl=en

A message to anyone who’s ever been afraid to sit down and show the world how their stomach folds. Anyone who’s been afraid that their thighs expanding on a seat might make someone see them differently. Anyone who’s said they’re not hungry when they are so that they don’t have to eat in front of others. Anyone who’s worn shapewear that makes them sweat and chafe or bras that leave red welts on your skin but make you look ‘better’ to the outside world: You are never required to make yourself uncomfortable for the comfort of others. Stop sacrificing your needs. Stop putting yourself last. Stop forcing your body to be something it’s not to be more visually pleasing to others- you are not here for them. You don’t need to apologise for your body in any way, not with your words or your actions, your clothes or your food choices. Let your body be, let yourself live in it, and never be afraid of those belly rolls, they are beautiful. 💜💙💚🌈🌞 Photography by @gracehillphotoMermaiding by @runawaydays ✨

See the BBC story, “One woman’s journey from anorexia to body positivity,” here.