Month: December 2018

Guest Post · racing · running

How I Came to Run (Guest post)

Sam B2 Comments


by Christine Dirks

In my early forties I worked from home and would go for a walk mid-day to clear my head. If I was puzzling over something by the time I was home I had an answer. Three years later the half hour walk was more than an hour. I’d been active before but a routine was something new and I loved it.  One day, while walking, I thought, “Run for a few blocks and see how it feels.” It felt good. 


The running increased. Within a year I was running the route six days a week. Sometimes my son, then in late grade school, would ride his bike alongside. Often I’d pick a spot a few blocks away and run as fast as I could telling myself, “Go. Go. Go.” One summer when my sister was visiting she asked how far my route was. I didn’t know. “I’m going to measure it” she said. I wrote down the route which she then drove. She returned smiling, “It’s 10k.”


In 1998 I returned to university to earn my Masters in Journalism and I kept running. In many ways running kept things together. It was the busiest year of my life. I was working part time and my son was in grade nine with lots of homework requiring many trips to the library. We shared the one computer. Running relieved stress, gave me time to think about assignments and tell myself, as often as I needed to hear it,  “You can do it”.  When I was wondering about applying to the Masters program, I told my sister I was concerned about how tough the year would be. “Yes” she said. “But in a year it’ll be over and you’ll have your degree.” She was right and in that year I learned I could manage a lot more than I’d thought possible.

 
I never considered doing a race until I watched the 2000 New York City Marathon on tv and saw the lead women in those final few miles racing hard to the finish line. Their effort was palpable. In the summer of 2001 I registered for the fall marathon in Niagara Falls and joined a running group. One morning while waiting for the group to gather I noticed a poster in the store window. It was the age group qualifying times for the Boston Marathon. Now I had a goal. I was determined to meet the qualifying time for my age group and run Boston the following spring.


The training runs with the group were fun and the longer the runs the more I liked it. Half way through the summer I stopped taking walk breaks telling myself, “You’re not going to walk in the marathon so don’t walk in the training runs”. I had planned on not doing a race before the marathon. Then a running friend said it would be good to do one as I’d know how to handle nerves and pacing. It was good advice. I ran a half marathon and a month later as I approached the finish line at the Niagara Falls marathon and saw the time on the big clock I yelled “YES!!”.  I’d qualified for Boston.

I’m 67. I’ve run 181 races. I look forward to more runs, races, fun times with the running group and new challenges. This September I ran a 50 mile event. Had someone told me when I was young and tearing about that sometime I would run 50 miles I would likely have laughed and said, “I don’t think so.” But as with many things in life, you never know until you try.


Christine Dirks is a writer and editor in London ON.  Early in her career she worked in the Toronto book publishing industry where she specialized in international marketing. Later she wrote two weekly columns and features for The London Free Press. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Canadian House & Home, Canadian Gardening, Azure and other publications. Christine currently provides research, writing and editing services for individuals and organizations. 

running

Defying the evidence: I DO remember the pain of my one and only marathon

Tracy I2 Comments

Yesterday Sam sent me an article that is re-circulating. It’s entitled, “The Science Behind Why You Don’t Remember the Pain of Running Marathon.”

The thing is, I actually do remember the pain of my marathon. So I’m some kind of anomaly in that respect. I think one reason I remember it is that I blogged about it. In serious, painful detail. You can read that post here. I also had this research presented to me shortly after the marathon. So I filed it away and have kept it near the surface of my mind.

Nevertheless, the research makes sense to me. In a nutshell, the findings say that endurance athletes (indeed pretty much all athletes) are used to experiencing some pain associated with pushing themselves. But they learn to distinguish that pain from the pain of injury. Not only that, athletes also tend to recall event highlights.

And finally, “Pleasant emotion—your sense of accomplishment, self-satisfaction, or pride—can blunt your memory of the tough stuff…” Maybe there is something specific about physical accomplishment because I don’t know that we do this in other areas of life.

When I talk to friends who didn’t enjoy graduate school, for example, they have a tendency to dwell on what was hard and awful. When I talk to friends about broken relationships, only those who have worked hard at it are able to get past the parts that made them angry or sad (that is, it’s rare that someone will forget the pain of a bad relationship).

So I wonder if the accomplishments associated with physical endurance–the sense of achievement, of hard training paying off–are a different order that enables them to create amnesia.

Sometimes. As I said, I remember. I also remember the Around the Bay 30K of 2015. At the time I doubted I would ever run the 30K again. But here I am, training for Around the Bay 30K on March 31, 2019.

It’s not that I don’t remember that it was difficult, especially the last few kilometres. According to my race report, with about 2K to go, “This is around the time that I started to ask myself what the heck I thought I was doing and why did I sign up for this race and is this supposed to be fun or what the hell?”

So I clearly didn’t love it the whole way through. But that would be an unrealistic expectation anyway. Does my willingness to do it again four years later mean I’ve forgotten how hard it was? Or does it mean I’m up for another challenge?

I don’t know for sure. But based on my half marathon experience, my half marathons these days are a lot more fun than my half marathons four years ago. Not that there aren’t any tough moments, but I’m a stronger runner. If that can translate into a longer distance, then it’s possible that Around the Bay will be a stronger race for me in 2019 than in 2015. I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, I agree that we should focus on the positive after a race. But I don’t think that necessarily means the pain is forgotten. It’s more than we decide that, in the end, it’s worth it.

What do you think? Do you need to forget the pain of a difficult endurance experience to sign up again, or is it something that you think of as part of what makes the experience feel like a true sense of accomplishment (perhaps worth doing again)?

#deanslife · death · monthly check in · motivation

Sam is Checking in for December, #monthlycheckin

Sam B4 Comments
A red and pink heart shaped rock, resting on fall leaves on the ground, sprinkled with snow. It’s hand painted and the black letters read “every day is a fresh start.”


You can read all my past monthly check-in posts here.  They all have a content warning for discussions of weight loss, including this one.

What’s up? (and down?):  I’m working out a fair bit. I’m going to easily make my goal of 218 workouts in 2018. I’m doing lots of different things and enjoying them. But something feels different now. It’s catch as catch can. I don’t mean that in a bad way but I’m not training. It’s not purposeful. It’s fun and it feels good but I’m learning that, for me, that’s not enough motivation. It’s got me thinking about life and plans and what makes me tick.

On the one hand I’m impressed that I’m managing to work out while dean-ing, but on the other, I want to achieve something. I need goals, people. Big goals. Like being the fittest by fifty! But not that. I’ve been there and done that and co-written the book. You can buy it here. 

I’m a type A goal achieving sort of person and I need that in my fitness if it’s going to be fun.

But there’s only so much Type A my life can take. And Dean-ing is a big job. I don’t mean that just in terms of hours. It’s also about scope of responsibility and making big plans. It’s no surprise that my big fitness burst took place during my break from academic admin roles. I was Chair of Philosophy at Western from 2002-2011 (with a year off for good behavior somewhere in the middle, hello Australia!). I started Dean-ing in 2018. The fittest by fifty challenge and this blog began in 2012. Tracy and I turned 50 in 2014.

So big ambitious jobs and big ambitious fitness goals aren’t fitting together very well for me. That might be just fine.  The one, modest but very important goal I do have concerns my knee. It’s a lot of work!  All of this damaged knee maintenance is wearing me down. Yes, I’m doing the thing. I’m losing weight. I’m doing physio. I’m so far successful at wearing the knee brace when I am doing long walks. 

And fitness is still fun but I’m also still sad about all the things I miss: No more running. (See sad bye bye running post.) Definitely no more soccer. I’ve  also said goodbye to Aikido, but not here on the blog. I’ve been too sad to even write about that loss. I’ve got a post in the drafts folder about how I miss throwing people around but I can’t finish it. 

I keep  thinking I should just stop blogging about fitness-y things, make it a less central part of who I am.  Blog about dean-ing? Or, sometimes I keep looking for big fitness goals I can do, like riding and lifting. Or continue to make progress with swimming. Or new things I want to try like horseback riding.

Basically, I’m a bit at sea with things, still struggling, and not sure how it will all turn out.  December is also a sad time. It’s the third anniversary of my father’s death. My uncle in England just died.  I still think this doesn’t get easier, losing people. See One of the hardest parts of getting older: Friends, family, illness, and death.

Oh and it’s dark, really dark. We’ve got the earliest sunsets right about now. And some days it doesn’t ever seem to get light at all.

On the bright side, I’m really loving my new job. I love the College and all the exciting work that’s being done here. I also love Guelph. You can come check it out in January at the Night at the Museum Event. Register here.


Obviously, I’m still thinking this all through. The one thing I do know is that I’ve got some big bike goals for 2019. I am reading about kicking my cycling goals into high gear.

And I might schedule knee surgery–partial knee replacement–for the future. If I could choose the date it’d be fall 2019.

Have you ever had “at sea” times? Big life changes? Tough stuff but I’m thinking it through!

I share lots of #sportsselfies but here’s a #deanselfie to balance it out!

fitness

Geeta Iyengar and her lasting impact on yoga

Tracy I

With the death of Geeta Iyengar, age 74, on December 16th, yoga lost another giant. Geeta was the daughter of renowned yoga guru BKS Iyengar, and co-director of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune, India.

My foundational yoga training took place under the instruction of Karen Major at Yoga Centre London, in London, Ontario.  Apart from the first class teaching, Karen regularly visited the Ramamani Institute as part of her ongoing teacher training as a certified instructor of Iyengar yoga. After her trips to India she always came back with stories of Iyengar himself, Geeta, her brother Prashant, and more recently  Geeta’s niece, Abhijata.

These family members dedicated themselves to extending Iyengar’s yoga legacy by practicing his methods and upholding his strict attention to the form and detail of the yoga asanas.

Indeed, Geeta was teaching classes and giving talks at Balewadi Stadium from December 3-14 as part of the celebrations surrounding the centary of her father’s birth.  One of the senior teachers attending the celebrations recounted a story in which someone asked Geeta what it was like to live in her father’s shadow. Geeta replied that she didn’t live in his shadow, she lived in his light.

In addition to being devoted to her father and his teachings, Geeta was a significant figure in bringing yoga to women and helping them develop their own practice. She wrote Yoga: A Gem for Women, as a guide for women, making specific practice suggestions for menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause.

Geeta’s death came as a shock to the yoga community and Pune and to the Iyengar yoga community more generally.  To read more about her lasting impact and her legacy, see The Times of India, “Geeta Iyengar, renowned yoga exponent, passes away at 74″ and The Hindu,
“Yoga exponent Geeta Iyengar, daughter of B.K.S. Iyengar, passes away.”

I will be forever grateful to B.K.S. Iyengar, Geeta Iyengar, Karen Major, and all the other fantastic Iyengar instructors whose wisdom has benefitted my practice since 2000 when I was first introduced to this style of yoga.




cycling · running

Strava and Gender: Also, beer, coffee, and cake

Sam B7 Comments

Strava’s 2018 Fascinating Year In Review Stats  makes for interesting reading. 

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The easiest gender stat to understand is that Strava is pretty male place. In one year there were 149 million total uploads by women and 636 million uploads by men. That means that  77% percent of the activity uploads were by men and just 23% by women.

According to the report, “the differences in speed, or duration aren’t actually that much different between men and women. Only 5-8 minutes shorter for rides, and slightly slower for runs.”

My fave stat in the report concerns preferred beverages. Cyclists drink more coffee and runners drink more beer. But everyone likes cake! Cake comes in third–just behind beer and coffee–as the food or beverage athletes prefer. I was thinking that ice cream would be up there. But that might be just me.

In order, runners prefer beer, coffee, cake, cookie, donut, pastry.

Cyclists like best coffee, beer, cake, cookie, donut, pastry.

No bananas. No bagels! 

Where’s the data come from? It’s not as Strava connected devices track beer and donuts after all. Instead, these numbers are all self-reported. But all self-reported in a particular way. Strava got the numbers from the titles of individual workouts. (If you don’t give your workout a title, it gets the default of time of day + activity. Morning run or afternoon ride, for example.

So really it means that runners are more likely than cyclists to put the word “beer” in the title of their workout. Ditto cyclists and “coffee.” Given how many “morning coffee rides” I’ve been on that’s no surprise. There might also be a gendered element. There are a lot of women running, and lots of them not on Strava. I suspect women runners would be less likely to give their run a beer-themed name.  But I’m just speculating. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
“BEER” in bright lights.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
fitness

Food rudeness during the holidays

marthafitat553 Comments

By MarthaFitAt55

I came across a hashtag on Instagram while seeking holiday baking inspiration. It annoyed me no end, and it also made me sad. Titled #MakeEveryoneElseFat, the photos feature treats of various kinds.

I don’t understand the hashtag. I don’t make treats to undermine anyone’s diet. I bake treats at Christmas because I enjoy it and I want people to enjoy a simple pleasure during the holidays.

This year I want to say to people I am not the food police. Eat or don’t eat. I do not need to know why you don’t want to partake in dessert or any other food for that matter, unless you are at risk of an unpleasant, life threatening allergic response.

I’m sure people feel they are being polite when they want to explain it’s not you, it’s them. But as I taught my child, just say “thank you, I’m full,” or “I’ve had plenty, thanks” or “I don’t really care for X but I will try Y.”

No one will give you a medal if you resist the call of the cookie, and no one will judge you if you don’t. At least not in my house. All I want is for you to have a good time, to chill, and not feel any guilt about anything.

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fitness · season transitions

Chronicles of December: same month, different attitude?

catherine w4 Comments

December provokes a lot of emotions for us.  It’s the beginning of real, bona fide, no-getting-around-it winter (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). It’s a time of frantic activity:

  • frantic finishing of semester for those of us students and teachers
  • frantic preparing for those of us celebrating Christmas
  • sometimes-frantic taking stock of the year and starting to make resolutions for the next one

I’ve been especially prone to the last type of frantic activity. I wrote a post  on Seasonal adaptation: slowing down and turning inward two years ago. In it I said that, despite the craziness of the season, 

In the midst of it, I feel– calm. A bit quieter than usual.  Slow and deliberate. The indirect light suits me.  The early dusk I find entrancing.  This is a new experience and completely unexpected.

Reading these words now, I wince a little. I think they were more aspirational than actual.  That is, I was shooting for this feeling:

Woman in white gauzy, flowing gown in the woods, viewed from the back.
Woman in white gauzy, flowing gown in the woods, viewed from the back.

When in fact, in December, I pretty much always have this feeling:

Woman's face covered with post-its with tasks and responsibilities like pets, work, house, cooking, etc. You get it.
Woman’s face covered with post-its with tasks and responsibilities like pets, work, house, cooking, etc. You get it.

This December, I admit that I’m way overburdened with work, physical therapy, lots of family strife around me, unmet writing obligations, and my usual body shame/dissatisfaction that accelerates during the holiday season. 

So I’m going with it. This is me, moving forward in super-messy fashion.  I’m:

  • doing a bunch of yoga, mostly in very small bits (7-15 mins, even)
  • walking more, with the accompanying soreness of the ankle with no brace now
  • sleeping 8 hours at least, because I have to in order to function
  • being present for my family, trying to maintain boundaries of some sort
  • accepting that my house will be super-messy and my writing obligations will have to wait and that my body is actually helping me do all these things so thank you body

Forget ethereal.  I’m going for pragmatic this season.  

What’s your word or attitude this December?  I’d love to hear from you.

fitness · winter

At home spinning with Sam

Sam B2 Comments

Streaking Sam style has meant setting up my bike on the trainer in my home office. I’m not good at doing this for very long but twenty minutes here and there is easy.

I think lots of people don’t do at home riding on a trainer because they think, like me, they couldn’t do it for very long. Still, I find that even twenty minutes, or one Netflix episode a few times a week, makes a difference.

What I don’t do, that I’d like to do, is virtually ride with other people using Zwift. To do that I’d need some way to measure power on my bike.

I’m hoping to set that up in the new year. Wish me luck!

cycling · winter · yoga

My goal for the week, 218 in 2018

Sam B

I’m at 214 workouts so far for the year 2018 and my goal for the year is 218. For sure, I’ll make it.

My goal for this week is to make it by Friday.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I’m riding my bike. That’ll be 215

Monday I have personal training, 216.

Tuesday is all about driving to see the Messiah so no exercise then.

Wednesday I’m back at the gym for bike yoga.

And Thursday/Friday I’m at a friend’s cottage where there’ll be walking in woods and maybe fireside yoga.

Wish me luck!

fitness

Prioritizing Recovery

fieldpoppy2 Comments

On Thursday evening, I had signed up for a spinning class, but as the afternoon wore on, I was suddenly blearily tired.  Half an hour before the class, I “late canceled.” (This means I don’t get my money back but they will free up a space for someone else if there’s a waitlist).  I also bailed on dinner with one of my best friends.

Instead, I laid on the couch in my spinning clothes for half an hour, one cat at my head and the other at my feet, and went to bed at 830.

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Lying on the couch in my spinning clothes with Emmylou instead of going to class
IMG_4771

My post yesterday was about the power and importance of re-engaging with the fundamentals of the things we think we’re good at, partly to really tune ourselves to what our bodies really need.  What I needed yesterday, clearly, was rest.  I was actually sick last week and took three days off life altogether.  I’d worked out a few times this week, including a spinning class that felt great, but apparently, I wasn’t quite ready to jump right back into full-bodied pace.

Like Sam, Catherine and a whole bunch of other people, I’m doing the “218 in 2018 workout challenge” again this year.  That spinning class would have actually been workout #282.  Last year I hit 221 in total — and this year, it’s been fascinating to me how easily I passed the 218 goal. This was partly by incorporating a lot more yoga, and partly by shifting from asking myself “can I fit in a work out today?” to assuming I was going to work out, and consciously deciding when I would take a day off.    (And when I posted that I was taking a rest day on the group, another guy high fived me and said he was too).

Deciding not to work out yesterday was an intentional, conscious decision to rest, to recover.  There is definitely a part of me that has a thrust to keep pelting forward — I’m so close to 300!  Isn’t that a powerful and impressive number!!!!???  But paradoxically, part of what I’ve learned by trying to move my body as many days as possible in 2018 is when to rest.  The part of me that has learned how to listen knew that yesterday, lying on my couch and going to bed early was what my body actually needed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about prioritizing rest and recovery this year, and I’m not alone. A few years ago, “FOMO” — fear of missing out — was a ubiquitous hashtagable phenomenon.. Over the past couple of years, it’s been  supplanted by FOGO (“fear of going out”) or — as the big sign in the reception area of my spinning studio say — “JOMO,”  the Joy of Missing Out.  I keep reading things about the joy of canceling plans and how to listen to your own instincts about managing social energy.  (There are even etiquette guides on how to flake on plans without ruining your relationships).  Wellness blogs all over the place tout sleep and rest as the single most significant aspects of health, and there are whole industries built around encouraging intentional or purposeful rest.  Just as I started to write this post, I got an email from one of my former yoga teachers who has started a new wellness practice over the past year or so, flogging a restorative yoga deck. You don’t even have to leave your house to do the yoga that will relieve your stress — and the tagline is “remember to rest.”

As I was writing this post, I paused to go to a yin yoga class, and the teacher started the class by talking about the “triad of nutrition, exercise and rest,” and how we are perpetually rest and sleep deprived.  She had us pick cards for inspiration, and I got one that emphasized “difficulties arise when we demand of ourselves things that don’t match our current vibration.”

Now, I’m not a very woo woo person.  But if I really believed in “messages from the universe,” these would be pretty vivid.  To be in balance, we need to rest.  I know it’s a privileged position to be able to just forfeit my spinning class fee, or to seek needed rest by paying someone $20 so I can lie on a bolster for 75 minutes in a series of set postures.  And I know it’s a different kind of privilege to know that your friends and social world will “always be there,” even when you suddenly realize your body and soul need quiet, not interaction.  But for me, right now, this is the stretching time of really learning how to be more choiceful about what and how I plan things, about what it really means to integrate movement and health into my life every day.  Between 2017 and 2018, I built a habit of moving almost every day.  Next year, I’m hoping that my moments of rest will be more intentional too.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who lives, works and lies on mats in Toronto.