image description: coffee cup with a latte with foam in the image of a lion, saucer, and teaspoon

I used to drink no coffee. For many years I even avoided caffeinated tea. I had to keep an eye on my caffeine intake because if I overdid it, I got all jittery and stressed out, and it affected my sleep patterns.

Then, back when I was training for triathlon for our Fittest by Fifty Challenge (Sam and I turned 50 in 2014), I read somewhere (I don’t know where), that caffeine was a good little kickstart for race day. I tried it before one of my events that summer and I guess I determined that it helped.

Still and all, I only drank coffee for events, and I only had four events that summer. So that’s not a whole lot of coffee in the scheme of things.

I’m thinking about coffee today because of that study that just came out about how “Science” has shown that even people who drank up to 25 (!!) cups of coffee a day “were no more likely to experience stiffening of the arteries than someone drinking less than a cup a day.”

Another reason I’m thinking about it is that my coffee use has taken on much larger proportions than it had five years ago, slowly becoming a daily habit, complete with headaches if I don’t have at least one cup in the morning.  After the triathlon stint, I started to use coffee a little bit on long solo road trips. Not a lot, but a cup here and there so I wouldn’t get tired.

Again, long road trips were few and far between, so it hadn’t yet become a daily habit. Then came a few far away trips where I needed coffee in the mornings to help me adjust to the time change. By then, I was starting to enjoy coffee and seek out good coffee. I think that once we start going out of our way for good coffee, we’re kind of hooked.

Towards the end of last summer I was drinking coffee most days but didn’t really notice that I was until one day, on a weekend, I started to get a headache sometime Saturday afternoon. After some time it dawned on me that I hadn’t had a coffee yet. Uh oh.

I’m not a big fan of dependency. When I realized that I was experiencing physical withdrawal, I decided that I would quit coffee again. That was on the Sunday.

Monday I went to work. We had just moved into a newly renovated space and my office now had a really nice kitchen. Literally on the day I was going to quit, I walked into the kitchen where my colleague proudly pointed out that he had purchased a really good espresso machine for our new kitchen. That means really good coffee. How could I say no.

I start every work day with an Americano with soy milk. And I really enjoy it. So when Christmas rolled around I decided it was time to treat myself to my very own machine. And now I have a soy latte most mornings at home before work, plus my at-work Americano.

And when I was in Rwanda the past couple of weeks I had a morning breakfast routine of coffee first, then a strong tea after that. I sometimes even drank coffee in the middle of the afternoon because otherwise I wouldn’t have made it. And now I’m nine time zones away from Kigali, in Vancouver at the Canadian Philosophical Association conference, and I wouldn’t be making it with my morning Americano.

But I’m nowhere near 25 cups a day.

Do you “use” caffeine?

This year’s “Everest Season” was deadly, with at least 11 deaths. Reports say that nine of those 11 were the direct result of long waits to get to the summit. People line up for all sorts of things–concert tickets, sales, general admission events, tables in restaurants, movies.

But to line up to get the summit of Everest has a huge physical risk associated with it because time is of the essence. Weather can change. People need not just to get there, but–importantly–to get back to the base camp too. And this all before their oxygen runs out.

It’s become a tourist opportunity for those who can pay, with very little monitoring of the experience level of the people who sign up. According to the New York Times article, “‘It was like a zoo’: death on an unruly , overcrowded Everest,” this means crowds that cause dangerous delays: “According to Sherpas and climbers, some of the deaths this year were caused by people getting held up in the long lines on the last 1,000 feet or so of the climb, unable to get up and down fast enough to replenish their oxygen supply. Others were simply not fit enough to be on the mountain in the first place.”

There are multiple factors that contribute to the Everest “problem.” I call it a problem because there are people dying there every season. Yes, it’s a risky undertaking anyway. But when the deaths are the result of overcrowding and inexperience, there is a problem. Not only inexperienced climbers die — but they are more at risk and they create issues for all.

I have a strange fascination with Everest, not because I ever wish to climb it, but because I cannot imagine wanting to do so. As a result, I’ve read lots about it — about how it’s a garbage can of discarded oxygen tanks and human waste, an inhumane graveyard where the corpses of climbers who didn’t make it lie frozen because they cannot be retrieved, a place where empathy for those in need is replaced by a survivalist attitude of everyone for themself, about how people’s judgment falters at such a high altitude and they feel driven to make the summit even when deteriorating conditions on the mountain make it every likely that they will die trying.

I’ve seen shocking pictures of line-ups on Everest in the past, but this year’s show traffic jams as I’ve never seen before. I’m having technical difficulties uploading photos (which are probably copyright protected anyway), so I’ll just refer you to the New York Times piece referenced earlier. This article about a Canadian climber who almost died but in the end made it to the summit and back also shows the crowd of climbers lining up for their turn.

Now, I get the idea of liking a challenge. But I don’t understand what the appeal of this particular challenge is anymore. When a sacred mountain has become a tourist site for people who can pay (most Everest tours are in the neighborhood of $50,000) for a chance to climb the world’s highest mountain but may die in the process, the nature of the challenge has taken a turn. It’s not just “me against the mountain.” Add to that the environmental damage (see “How much trash is on Everest”) and you just have to wonder.

There have to be other ways to respect the mountain than to conquer it.

Do you understand the desire to climb Mount Everest (taking all considerations into account)?

It’s been the worst May on record for outdoor fitness things. It’s been cold and rainy and mostly miserable. Sarah and I completed just one boro of the five boro bike tour due to cold, hard rain. Ugh.

Also, my knee really really hurts. The only good thing is that I broke down and bought a Brompton for work travel and for riding around campus.

I rode it to Bike to Work Day.

Here’s hoping for a better June.

I’ve been raving — here and elsewhere — about how much I love the feminist cross-fit studio I’ve been going to for a few months now, Move.

In my previous post I wrote about how I love the mission of founder Kelly Taphouse and her team to focus on women’s strength and confidence, and how the team of coaches is focused on form, encouragement, safety, and figuring out your own goals.  There’s no talk of weight, or body shape, or “bikini bodies” or food.

It’s a safe, empowering, fun zone, and I’ve made it to 2 or 3 classes a week since February — which is unheard of for me.  (I’m still doing some spinning, running and yoga as well, but less intensely).

I never thought I would like working out in a group, and I never thought I’d want to learn the basics of Olympic weightlifting.  But here I am, 54 years old, (still menstruating regularly, btw, for those who were wondering, lol), still (sorta) running, still cycling and still spinning, still a yogi — and now, learning a whole new zone of movement.

The honeymoon phase of “whee this is fun!” is over a little bit, and now it’s just a Thing I Do. Last week, I made the commitment to buying six months worth of classes (a WHACK of cash) so I thought it would be a good time to reflect a little on why this seems to be sticking.

1.  It reinforces my identity as a fit, committed person. 

I became a runner 24 years ago, which was my first time ever thinking of myself as an athletic type person.  Over those two and a half decades, the intensity of my relationship with movement has ebbed and flowed (I wrote about the notion that we get a number of different “fitness lives” here), but they all have their own flavour.

I think crossfit at Move has poked me into a new fitness identity — a kind of unwavering commitment I’ve only ever had before when I’ve been training for something.  But even when I was a hardcore marathoner, I almost NEVER got up early to run.  And this week, I did this workout over there on the left on Wednesday at 7 am.  I don’t think I was the brightest light for the person I was working with, but I did it — with a little involuntary moaning when I was warming up.  (I am not really a morning person).

Thursday at noon, I found myself running down the street with a medball on my shoulder (see photo above — I’ll spare you the video), as well as trying really hard to really get the motion of “hanging cleans”, a lift that involves flipping arms and elbows upside down as you bring the weights up to your shoulder.

That bar is “only” 45 lbs for those lifts — but it’s HARD.  I like being the kind of person who is trying to figure this out, who is trying to train my body to do something new.  I like being a person who is trying to get stronger.  It feels badass, and — reason #2 — it’s a counterpoint I need right now to a completely overloaded work life.

I do a lot of different things in my work.  I coach leaders, teach leadership, and design and lead large strategic change processes in healthcare and academic systems.  It’s very tough times in those worlds in Ontario right now, and my clients are under a lot of pressure.  Most have multiple jobs, huge demands and not enough resources — combined with a strong sense of mission.

My job is to help these folks find clarity, feel more grounded, feel energized to move forward — when they are feeling burnt out and undervalued.

I start out a lot of my days facing a group of people I’ve never met before who greet me and our processes with skepticism (and sometimes, honestly, lashing out).  I have to turn that skepticism around to help them find some sense of energy and — dare I say it, joy — about their work. Mostly I love my work and I’m pretty good at it, but it can be draining. Sometimes, it exhausts me.

Paradoxically, when I take that emotional exhaustion to Move, and push my body further, I get restored.  I feel stronger, less tangled, and supported by the community in the same way I have to support my clients.  I feel cared for — by myself and by the people and space around me.

Which brings me to #3 — learning something new in my body at 54 unleashes incredible optimism.  I’ve never been super great at translating verbal instruction into physical response.  That’s why I never took up team sports or anything that involved things you hit — I never knew what people meant when they told me to “choke up” on the bat or swing a golf club from the hips.  I seem to be able to do it with things I can figure out intuitively — yoga seems to follow that, with light touches from good teachers — but not so much with Things I Swing or Throw.  But the coaches at Move are such good teachers that I am slowly learning to translate instructions like “drop under the weight” into a little hop in my body.  I still have a hard time putting complicated sequences together — like the 7 steps of the “turkish kettlebell get up” — but I am discovering new, smaller muscles in my body — especially in my back and shoulders — that I’m recruiting into action for the first time in my life.

And that feels good to middle aged me.  My body still has new frontiers of strength to discover — it’s not all just new accommodations for my slower, thicker, hormonally different reality.  How magical is that?

My body is still middle-aged.  I’ve gained strength, but it’s muscle in the thicker, more sluggish body that seems to be mine now.  Since I started doing cross-fit, I’ actually a bit bigger, and some of my clothes fit *less* well.  (I seem to have abandoned jeans altogether). But — it’s a kind of bigger that is unleashing a sense of power.  I can stand on my hands and take my feet off the wall for 5 seconds.  I can lift 65 lbs above my head comfortably.   I can do 20 tuck jumps.  I am inching toward a full pullup.

Feeling strong, finding new parts of my body and being part of a supportive, kind community?  Sign me up.

**

I wrote this post and scheduled it, then went to a class this morning. One of the exercises was banded planks, where you plank and your partner pulls on elastic bands to try to test you. After the class, someone I see all the time but haven’t spoken to before came up to me and said “you were so strong on your planks! It was so inspiring!” Then we got into a conversation about why she likes her 8 year old daughter to come for child-minding so she sees so many women of all shapes and sizes working hard to be strong.

That’s why I love this place.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who lives and lifts things in Toronto, and who writes here twice am month.