When my kids were young I honestly felt lucky to get a long walk or some snow tubing in over the holidays. These days I have more time that’s my own during the holidays and thanks to the pandemic and Ontario’s “lockdown” or lockdown-lite, I’m not hosting any Christmas parties or socializing with friends at all. Instead, it’s just me and the Guelph based family at home for the holidays.
I miss everyone a lot, especially my adult kids who don’t live here.
But the one silver lining is that there’s been lots of time for movement. There hasn’t even been sense of squeezing it in. It makes me feel good and it’s the thing I want most to be doing. That’s been true for me throughout the pandemic. I’ve been moving more.
Here’s what my holiday fitness days have looked like:
Boxing Day
Leg Day + ab workout with my son who just moved home. Look at all the weights!ZHCC social ride, Saturday afternoon at 1:30 pm
“The ZHCC SUB 2.0 Ride is our regular Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday GROUP ride aimed at Zwifters looking for a ride experience at a more relaxed pace. We do not ride fast or race each other, the idea is to ride together and enjoy a group ride at an average sub 2.0 w/kg pace. As we climb up the hills we may exceed 2.0 w/kg but overall the ride will be an average of 2.0 w/kg or slightly less.”
Christmas Day
Xmas Smash Fest, 2:00 pm, a 30 km “no category” race. Given who was actually racing on Christmas Day–hi 20 something speedy young men!–I wasn’t surprised to come last. But I had good company riding with my TFC teammate Jim and another person we didn’t know. We took turns on the front and didn’t finish too far behind some others in the race even if we were more than 10 minutes behind the lead riders.
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve ride with The Herd. It was a very chatty tour of London with some actual IRL London cyclists.
Dog walk with kids
The London kids came over for a backyard visit, dog walk, and present swap. That’s Miles and me on the left, more than six feet apart from Mallory and Gavin. We had cookies and hot apple cider and opened the gifts on Zoom on Christmas morning. Oh, we opened the warm, fluffy, giant hoodies that day to stay warm outside.
And of course there was some Yoga with Adriene.
These were workouts number 394-399 of my 220 workouts in 2021. Want to count with us for the new year? Here’s my blog post on how to join us.
With 4 days left in the I’m certain I’ll make it to 400. I blogged earlier about not setting that as a goal and it’s still not. Weirdly if I make it, it’s because I wanted to workout. I enjoy it. It’s fun, even if sometimes it’s Type 2 fun.
I’ll keep counting because I also enjoy counting but I no longer need counting for motivation.
I just watched the new Wonder Woman movie: WW84. The following is NOT a spoiler, as the pictures are all over the internet. She’s got a new outfit:
Gal Godot as Wonder Woman, in gold armor, helmet and wings/more armor.
The next bit is also NOT a spoiler, but does refer to something in the plot: the notion of wishing plays a role in the film. Hope that didn’t ruin anyone’s day.
The idea of wishing seems timely for 2020. We all wish things were different– that there were no global pandemic, no losses of so many people and so much in our lives and the lives of everyone around the world. We also make wishes for the future– a speedy end to the pandemic via effective and universally distributed vaccines, everyone following public health guidelines in the meantime, and a resumption of our lives as we knew them (except that all work committee meetings should take place via zoom from now on, in my view).
With respect to fitness, I wish 2020 had gone very differently for me. But it didn’t and here I am, on Dec 26–me in my body in its current state. I can’t wish away 2020. But can I wish myself into a different state in 2021?
Yes. But. Not in the fairy-tale way.
Aladdin’s lamp: rub for wish.
Jiminy Cricket: sing to star for wish.
Or this comic-strip way (although give it a shot, by all means):
Snoopy writing the publisher about a rejection, asking for publication and $50K. Go hSnoopy!
I do have wishes for myself and physical activity in 2021, which I’ve voiced pretty often (or so it seems to me). I wish to bike more, walk more, move around in and on water more, keep yogaing, and enjoy physical activity with others and by myself more.
Okay, wishing done. Now what?
Planning is next. If I wish to do something, I then have to make a plan. This was one of my big problems in 2020– faced with what seemed like rafts of unscheduled time, I just floated around, unmoored by schedule or structure. Yes, I know I can make a schedule. Oh, I made schedules. Loads of them. But somehow I didn’t commit or adhere to or honor or pay attention to or even remember them at the appointed times. When I did remember them, I often felt pulled by something else or stressed by something else or just paralyzed. So planning is not enough.
Enter support. For me that means friends who invite me to meet them for a walk or ride or swim or some activity we do together. I’m lucky to have many such friends, and they did lots of inviting. I wish I had said yes more, had followed through more, had even taken the initiative myself more. But wishes aren’t for the past, but rather the future.
So, I’ve got lots of support in place. But I did this year, so how can 2021 be different?
The only thing remaining in this quartet of action is the doing.
Is it just me, or does this word “do-ing” look like the sound “doing!”
How exactly does the doing part happen? This is a very good question. Apparently lots of people wonder about this, according to Google.
Questions people ask google about how to do something.
Honestly, there’s no easy answer here. There’s no magic solution for behavior change. But we know that it does happen, to all of us. With help, a few things breaking our way, a bit of oomph and some planning and decision making, change happens.
I’m already wishing and planning for my 2022 sabbatical, which involves bike touring in many places in the US and Canada. That will also require scheduling, support, and lots of doing (in the form of training). 2021 seems like a good year to turn those wishes and plans into miles and hours and rides and destinations. I’ll be reporting on progress and setbacks and responses to those setbacks, and new plans along the way.
What are your wishes for activity in 2021? Are you planning yet? Do you have support lined up? What do you need to make your wishes come true next year? I’d love to hear from you.
I’ve collected all the posts in my wellness calendar for you to keep handy. Wellness and self care steps are not just useful for the holidays. The winter will be tough in many places as we go through our second, third, or even fourth waves of the pandemic. There will be other holidays, other sets of expectations to manage. Please remember though, you are enough. You are doing your best. You have value and worth. Be well, stay well.
Recommended Soundtrack: Free Your Mind by En Vogue
I don’t remember exactly when I realized I was at higher risk of COVID 19 complications than others my age. Sleep apnea, asthma, high blood pressure, and weight are all factors in folks outcomes. As a result I got quite risk averse in the summer and as it turned to fall the second wave started. I didn’t ride my bike outside. When restrictions loosened in my community I kept my own restrictions in place.
This awareness of my own vulnerability and that of people I know & love really impacted me. It shook free the last bits of invulnerability I had left.
That vulnerability feels at odd with how incredibly resilient you and I have been. If you told me last March I would work from home for a year and do it well I would have laughed. Not possible! Nope! Me? Arguably the most social person on the planet, working AT HOME ALONE? Unfathomable, yet that’s exactly what I’m doing.
We’ve experienced loss of loved ones, friends, and anticipate more loss. Economic impacts, the loss of social rituals, group activities…
And yet, there are so many things we’ve learned this year and changed. From hand washing and social distancing to the benefits/limits of technology to connect us.
I learned I can stick to an exercise routine and dial in my nutrition. Working at home and not going out with friends brought those two components into sharp focus.
I’ve learned I can walk more, stretch more, sleep better, and be more present in my life. That’s mighty powerful stuff.
The upheaval of the year and my responses to it have made me realize something profound about self imposed limits, especially around fitness.
By reflecting on all I learned and what I’ve changed, I realized it’s time to let those limits go. It’s humbling and scary to realize there are a great many things I can do when I need to.
Michel in the foreground and Natalie in the background, arms up in a celebratory pose at the end of a 5 km Christmas Day walk. It’s a snowstorm and Natalie is knee deep in snow.
So while I’m cleaning up from the holidays I’m packing up old ideas of constraints and limits. Yes. There’s risks and vulnerability and things I need to do to be safer during a global pandemic. There’s also a whole lot of potential to do radically different things. New scripts. New connections. New ways of moving through the world. Most importantly, new priorities.
I don’t know how this ruminating will impact how &. when I move my body but I’ll be sure to share where I’m at in January.
Head to toe shot of Natalie in a snow covered field. Her parka is open so she can show off her super cute orange knit sweater, the hem of a new merino wool camisole and new grey mukluks.
For now I’m feeling hopeful and confident in facing the coming weeks. After all, looking back over the year, I dealt with a lot and am the better for it.
I wish you all a happy day with loved ones, together or separately as the pandemic dictates. It’s hard to carry the weight of expectations, especially when socialized as women to look after everyone except yourself.
In the wellness calendar, I have offered some ideas you can try to take care of yourself. Back at the end of 2019, I wrote about setting priorities for fitness using the image of large, medium and small rocks.
As we move into 2021, we are all carrying heavy loads. Some we are just learning to carry and the burden of recent losses is painful and unsettling. Others we have adapted to their presence, and only occasionally they might poke at a tender spot to remind us what we have been grieving.
The new year will bring lots of changes, but growth is good. If we stayed in the same place doing the same thing without learning, changing, growing, we would be quite limited as humans. Sometimes people fear growth because it comes with change and experience. But the comfortable rut can become a cage.
Embrace growth for the positive change it is and let its light nurture you and support you the same way the strengthening sun will nurture new growth in the spring. Give yourself the gift of valuing yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup. Take a little time for yourself today and every day.
In these Pandemic Times, I have read about and listened to (because radio is my preferred medium) a lot of pieces about the molasses nature of time during all the variations of restriction we have had over these last 9 months. When every day is the same, we do tend to lose track of days and then, when looking back on time, they both extend and collapse all at once, both no time and forever time. In the beginning of it all, when it felt “different” it seemed for some to open a possibility of novel focus. Some people used it as an opportunity to learn new skills, refocus, work out more. When I look at the numbers in my 220 work outs in 2020 (the Fit Feminist Edition) group, most people who post regulatory, blew past 220 months ago. I am almost at that goal, and considering that last year, I only made it to 190 and also that I was depressed for most of April and didn’t do too much, I am on a hot streak of deliberate movement not seen in my 52 years thus far.
And yet, here I am, on a “vacation” from the every day, and I realize that I have not at all felt molasses time. In fact, I have been moving so fast, pushing so hard and clenched so tight, that I had lost my capacity to notice my body. I need to put on the breaks.
I wonder if anyone else can relate to this? My job has a sense of responsibility that is very weighty. In my basket of care, I have about 40 clients, 40 students of psychotherapy and some attendant administration for those students that can be crushing. Then I also have a family and a partner and pets. I have been doing my best to move through all of this gracefully, to let go of the things that are not vital, to care for myself at the same time and for the most part, I’m rocking it. Yet in these first 4 days of not working (as much) I have tripped over a reality that I was still hiding/ignoring, which is the 220 kmh feeling of swirl that sits in my guts. It’s the one that, when it starts to get out of control, lights my hair on fire (“How are you doing today?” “Hair on fire, you know, the usual.”) This is the place that I “clench” and keep going. It looks like grace sometimes, but if I’m real, it’s just enduring.
This kind of enduring, numbing, clenching is what happens when we acclimatize to our circumstance and the circumstance is an inflexible trap of obligation and survival. It makes me think about how this feeling is only a shadow of what so many more people feel all the time, in more parts of their bodies. I’m thinking about the essential workers, who are once again left alone in the face of the disease, not just because we need them but because this is how they survive. I’m thinking about living while Black, Indigenous and Brown in a world that makes you work even harder everywhere to get what you need. When I drop into this place of knowing, I feel shame, they have it worse, I should be grateful, but you know, this is also a trap. It doesn’t slow anything down at all for me to shamefully, gratefully cling to my privilege and watch the world spiral.
I’ve been back on the yoga mat these last number of days as one way I know I can slow down. I’m not looking to build up anything in these practices, neither strength, nor flexibility. I just need to slow down and unclench, or at least observe if that’s possible. I also need to be with the fact that too many people can’t do this, or if they can take 20 mins to pause, that is not enough to slow down the world so they can receive the care, relationship, reparation, restitution, belonging or love that they deserve as humans. On my mat, as I benefit from a borrowed wisdom, I’m not just going to slow myself down so my life can be more tolerable. I need to slow myself down, to rework and reconstitute what I am responsible for. Yes, all those clients and students and family. Yet in that work there has to be room to effect something else. I’m having some ideas that are close to home, in my teaching role specifically and that is what has been bubbling up into consciousness as I put on my breaks and come screeching into this latest pause.
I have said nothing about the fact that this post is on Christmas Day. Being a typical feminist pagan/Jew, my holidays of light are done for the year and Christmas usually feels like waiting to me, previously punctuated by Chinese food and a movie but not this year, not in the fun way. This year is just waiting. I’m waiting for the light, waiting for the vaccine, waiting to move into some more gracious, spacious place where there is room for everyone, EVERYONE, to slow down and rest a while, before we get back to righting the world.
A very spooky Black and White picture of an Hour Glass. All we have is time.
There’s an obsession in the fitness world with measuring and counting. Not just sets and reps and weight lifted, but also how many minutes, how many days, for how many years’ benefit.
And on the one hand, I sort of get it. I blogged 7 years ago (!) about being a data geek and it’s still true. I track heart rate and speed and distance ridden on my bike. I know my watts, watts per kilo, and number of metres I’ve climbed so far in 2020.
But, on the other hand, it feels like numbers have kind of taken over, not just in the area of sports performance (where I think they mostly belong) but in the realm of everyday exercise and health benefits. I understand the science side of this. The studies make sense to me. What makes less sense is the way the media shares these stories in a way that suggests a close tie between the study results and our behavior.
Readers, I’m guilty of this too. I share a lot of ‘health benefits of exercise’ stories over on our Facebook page and on Twitter.
But most of the time, for most us, even analytically minded me, I think simple messages are better.
I’d also like us to take broader lens. Not everything we care about is easily measured. We can count years lived and pounds lost but the mental health benefits of movement are harder to measure but no less important.
Get outside! Play! All movement is good! Find a way of moving that’s joyful for you! Bring friends along and build community!
I don’t care if abs are made in the kitchen and not the gym.
Now this, this is something I care about: Where are the smiles made?
Icelanders have a lovely tradition for Christmas Eve. Even if celebrating on Dec. 24 is not your tradition, perhaps you may like to adopt this one.
Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Unsplash Image shows a gray book wrapped in red ribbon with a candle and some greenery.
Called Jolabokaflod, the practice involves cracking open a new book and drinking hot chocolate, or nibbling on some chocolate treat. It started during the Second World War, when paper, unlike other commodities, was not rationed. This turned into Icelanders giving books as presents (and have turned the country into a reading culture as a result) and celebrating family and friendship on Dec. 24.
If someone hasn’t given you a book, present one to yourself. Pick your favourite reading spot, curl up with a mug of something nice and hot, preferably chocolate, and lose yourself in the power and beauty of words.
FIFI bloggers often post about their cycling adventures and I read them all with a sense of awe. To me, cycling is a purely utilitarian thing, a way to commute around the city. That attitude developed as a kid living in France and then Germany, where older folks wearing suits or dresses, riding their one-speed bicycles loaded down with groceries, passed me regularly. I don’t even feel a little bit bad about that; high school friends had hilarious stories about biking trips in the Swiss Alps, where they were barely able to move their fancy bikes uphill, only to have some old fellow on his farmer bike go sailing by.
I work relatively close to home, so my second-hand bicycle and flowing dresses are adequate; in fact, the dresses are deliberate camouflage to tell drivers on the busy streets that I am not one of “those speed-obsessed guys in spandex” that so many people blame for accidents. The blue floral child’s helmet adds to the faintly ridiculous look that I hope makes me look like less of a threat and keeps cars well away (the mixed blessing of having such a small head I can’t find an adult helmet that fits).
This is me at my one-and-only try a triathlon a decade ago on my retro commuter bike, complete with panniers.
Grimacing woman in shorts and a tank top, riding a bicycle with a canal in the background.
Clearly, I am not the target market for Zwift and the makers of fancy indoor trainers. However, with the arrival of COVID 19, I started to think about riding my bike indoors this winter, since some of my winter fitness options had disappeared. Someone in my neighbourhood posted a trainer for sale during the summer, so I jumped on it. A few weeks ago, I set it up, along with a television so I could watch something while pedaling.
Blue and white bicycle on a trainer, with a bookshelf in the background.
I’m pretty happy with how it works. I don’t do great distances or long times, though I couldn’t tell you how much I do accomplish as I haven’t gotten around to setting up the little computer thingy yet. I certainly don’t work up much of a sweat! But I am able to cycle for the length of a television show a few times a week. And I can do so without too much hamstring or quad discomfort, which means I will be much more likely to keep it up.
As my office is also in the basement, I particularly enjoy hopping on for 15 minutes between calls, to get some blood circulating when I am cold from sitting too long. From time to time, I will speed up just a little and pretend I’m in one of those Zwift races I read so much about, but mostly I imagine myself one the way home from the grocery store, with some veggies and a baguette in my basket. It fits well with my goal of staying fit so that I can be active and independent for many more years, just like those European cyclists from my youth.
Diane Harper works for the federal government in Ottawa. She loves to break the stereotype of the stodgy bureaucrat by trying new things and pushing limits as often as possible.
There’s nothing like a cup of scalding tea prepared to your taste to create a little oasis of calm in your day. Tea, or any soothing hot beverage, offers the opportunity to create a ritual.
Photo by ORNELLA BINNI on Unsplash Image shows a decorated tea cup with water and chamolile flowers steeping for tea.
The Japanese take making tea very seriously. The Japanese call it the way of tea and each step in service to hospitality adds to the experience. The English also take tea seriously, and it can range from a small snack to a full meal.
Whether you like your tea green or black, or you prefer hot water with mint and/or lemon, drinking something hot and thinking through the steps you take to prepare it are both excellent ways to create space in a busy day for you.
