Month: January 2025

advice · goals · habits · motivation

Go Team 2025: Include Rest

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team,

Have you included rest in your plans (or your planning plans) for your life-enhancing activities this year?

Yeah, yeah, I know that you will rest in there somewhere but I’m not talking about rest that arises from time to time.** The rest I am referring to is a deliberate choice, something you include in your plans because you recognize (or try to recognize!) that resting is a vital part of any process of growth or change.

I mean, our bodies and brains need rest no matter what.

We aren’t robots or machines (and even robots and machines have downtime and time for maintenance) and just like anything and everything in the natural world, rest is necessary for us to function.

And no amount of optimizing, scheduling, time management, biohacking, or whatever is going to change our need for rest.***

So, rather than trying to function without rest or rather than waiting until the need for rest overwhelms us, wouldn’t it make more sense to include rest in our plans?

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to pay attention to our own rhythms and routines whenever we can and add rest when it would serve us best?

If we wait until we ‘get a chance’ to rest, it is likely that our rest time will get filled with other tasks and projects.

BUT if we make rest part of the plan, part of our practice, then it feels like a more natural part of our schedule and it is more likely to actually happen.

And, for the record, anything you do to refresh and recharge and give yourself a break counts as a rest, up to and including a full body flop out on your bed to let your mind wander or to take a nap.

So, Team, today I invite you to consider your practices in terms of a cycle or a rhythm and see at what point in that process it would make sense to include more rest.

Since rest is vital for growth and for change, it definitely counts as part of your practice and you get to decide what that looks like for you.

And here, as always is your gold star for your efforts today. Whether today is a rest day, a small practice day, or an all-out exuberance of effort, it all counts!

A painting of a cartoonish gold star
Yes, today’s star is a bit wonky. I suspect she forgot to include rest in her schedule. Or possibly I was messing around with paints and things didn’t turn out as planned. It’s one or the other. Image description: A small cartoonish painting of a gold star with a happy expression against a black background with green polka dots and green trim. The painting is resting on a worn wooden surface.

*I will be writing other Go Team posts throughout the year but not on a regular schedule.

**Nor am I talking about the kind of rest that our bodies or brains seem to suddenly demand ‘out of nowhere’ – you know, the kind that usually means we didn’t hear the earlier requests for one reason or another. It’s ridiculous how hard it has become to hear and acknowledge those earlier nudges, isn’t it?

***In fact, the effort to do all those things would actually wear me out and I would need even more rest.

Sam is thinking about setting goals and being reasonable
fitness

Sam is thinking about setting goals and being reasonable

Sam B
4985.7 km to go says Strava. No biggie.

Alison’s recent blog post has got me thinking about goals and their pupose. In Once More Round the Sun: on resetting year-end goals, motivation, and delight Alison talks about how it can be motivational to adjust your goals in light of challenges and circumstanced. You’ve still got a goal and that still pushes you and serves a purpose even if it’s not the goal you originally set.

In past years I’ve done that with various fitness challenges.  Remember the burpee challenge? Here’s Tracy on why scaling back can work.  Or our various running streaks?

Thinking about this made me realize that it’s time for me to have some real cycling goals.  For the past few years,  it’s all been about rehab from knee replacement surgery.  My main focus has been getting stronger.

My current distance goals are the same ones I’ve had for years and they’re currently not serving a purpose. If they have an effect,  it’s making me sad.  They’re not motivational. 

My annual distance goal is 5000 km a year and 100 km a week. I easily met that when I was doing weekday training rides (not just bike commuting), doing organized long rides on the weekend,  and doing significant distance cycling holidays or charity riding events.

On the plus side,  I’ve now got a bike trainer and Zwift so I can ride in all kinds of weather.  In the old days,  I met the 5000 km goal while not riding much at all November through March.

A more reasonable goal for me I think is 50 km a week when I’m in Zwift mode and say 75 km a week in the summer months. Let’s say summer is 12 weeks,  so that’s 900 km. The other 40 weeks,  I’ll aim for 50 km, and that’s 2000 km. If I add and then round up,  it’s 3000 km.

If it looks like I’ll meet that too easily I’ll make some summer adjustments but from where I sit now it’s both a stretch from where I’ve been but also doable.

What else is on my cycling plate this spring and summer?

🚲 Definitely bike packing.

🚲 Definitely some Pedaling for Parkinsons charity bike riding.

🚲 The bike rally if we can figure out which chunk  to do.

🚲 And I would like one stretch distance goal,  either a metric century about 160 km or 200 km.

How about you? Do you scale your goals to your life and circumstances? Any examples to share.

Roads and clouds
fitness

Needlessly gendered food, the NZ version

Sam B

I’m in New Zealand,  on the south island,  for research leave. I’m reading and writing,  but also riding bikes and hiking.

And shopping for food in the grocery store which is one of my favorite things to do when I’m in a new place.

I love the dry sense of humor here.

Sick of brown sugar maple syrup flavored oak milk? Want some regular oat milk? You can find it on the shelf as Boring Oat Milk.

I’m less enamored of the gendered food labeling.  The last time I was here on sabbatical I wrote about gendered yogurt.

I loved the yogurt that advertised itself as “manly.” It came in large servings,  full of fat,  and full of extra good stuff. Yum. I’ll have to see if they still sell it.

This time it’s protein shakes, the man shake and the lady shake.  Really though it’s all about portion size.

I mean,  I think women’s specific anything is likely a bad idea. Often what it means is code for smaller but some women are bigger and some men are smaller. Why not just say “large” and “small”?

Women’s bike shoess are just narrower than men’s.  Maybe just call them wide and narrow.

Women’s bike frames are made for people with a shorter torso and longer legs but why not just say that.

And it seems extra weird when it comes to food.

What’s your favorite oddly gendered product?

Go Team 2025: Adjust as Needed
ADHD · advice · fitness · goals · habits · motivation · self care

Go Team 2025: Adjust as Needed

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team,

Today, I would l like to remind us all that it is ok to adjust plans our plans as we go along.

When you first create a plan to enhance or expand some part of your life, you are working with limited information.

Perhaps you know exactly where you want to go and kind of how to get there but the details are fuzzy.

Or maybe you aren’t sure where you want to end up but you have some practices you want to incorporate into your day to day.

You may have a plan for a destination and a set of practices but maybe you aren’t sure whether you will like them or how you will fit them into your schedule.

Either way, we generally start with some things that are very clear and others that are a bit blurry.

And that’s totally fine, that’s the nature of planning things for the future.

The challenges arise when we forget that as we gain more experience, as we learn more about the process, as we actually try out some of our ideas, we are actually gathering useful information about our practices AND that it is a good idea to use that information to adjust our practices to serve us well.

We are not always stuck with the decisions that we made at the beginning of this process.*

It’s ok to change things to simplify or streamline your process.

It’s ok to change the order of your activities.

It’s ok to decide to drop something you hate and find another way to accomplish the same thing. (Or to just drop it and not replace it.)

It’s ok to do a shorter version of your activities on busy days (or on that day of the week when the traffic is always worse for some reason.)

It’s ok to change how you organize your activities.

It’s ok to change your plan entirely and seek out a completely different life-expanding activity.

(Sidenote: this principle applies far beyond fitness and wellness activities.)

If you are working towards something and some aspect of it is not serving you well, you are free to adjust any and all parts of the process to make it work for you.

After all, your practices are not about the practices or about the results, they are about you and the things you want in your life.

The practices and the results are the external representations of the way you want to feel, the things you want to experience, and you can find other ways to feel or experience those specific things.

So, Team, today I am inviting you to adjust any part of your practice that is getting on your nerves, causing you distress, or just not working the way you wanted it to.

And here are some gold stars for your efforts, no matter what those efforts are and no matter how you decide to adjust them, and no matter if they are the same as yesterday or something completely different.

Go Team Us!

A small painting of gold stars against a background of rectangles painted in different colours
A small painting of a bunch of small gold stars against a background of different sized rectangles of different colours (orange and green at the top with smaller rectangles of red, yellow, and pink at the bottom left and blue in the bottom right corner) that are all outlined in black.

A note about today’s stars:

This little painting is a good example of the process I am talking about in this post.

I started with the idea of painting a bunch of rectangles with one big gold star in the middle but after I painted them, I realized that a big gold star would cover up the yellow rectangle entirely and I didn’t want that.

I decided on a bunch of small stars instead but they looked kind of weird on the rectangles. So I trimmed the rectangles in black but then I realized that the edges of the rectangles looked weird because they weren’t close enough to line up but they weren’t far enough away to be offset. So I made the lines thicker in some places to make it more interesting. Then I decided to add outlines to the gold stars to help them stand out but I was a bit messy with the edges and things went a bit awry. So I decided to add some black dots to make the messiness less blatant.

Basically, I had an idea where I was going with this painting and every time something turned out a little different, I made an adjustment and carried on. It’s far from perfect but it works just fine for what we need today and making adjustments as I went along helped me to stay on track with the project.

*Yes, I know that, in some circumstances, we have made commitments to a certain length of time or a certain set of activities but, in general, we do not have to stick with things because they seemed like a good idea at the beginning. And even things we committed to may have some wiggle room in them if we decide to look for it.

fitness · research

Science-y headlines we can safely ignore

catherine w2 Comments

I love checking out the newest scientific research on human functioning for a bunch of reasons. First, it shows how complex we are as organic beings– our systems interact in detailed ways that result in eating, digestion, break dancing, poetry creation, and doing laundry. I mean, wow.

Second, it shows human creativity in the hypotheses that scientists come up with to try to explain how some of our everyday processes work. Here’s an example: a research group studied African plains zebras (who are very social animals) to examine how their food foraging habits during drought affected their social bonds. Good news: they managed to get enough food without sacrificing their position in the herd! Go plains zebras! And the researchers concluded on this positive note:

These findings illustrate how social roles and differential responses to acute environmental stress within stable social groups may contribute to species resilience, and how communication flexibly responds to facilitate both survival and sociality under harsh environmental conditions.

Love it, with a red heart and pink packground.
Love it!

And third, sometimes scientists go a bit far afield, in fact so much that they may have lost a bit of perspective. The Ig Nobel awards, held every year at MIT, recognize such breathtaking myopia for projects like one undertaken by some Brazilian scientists for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions. Yes, we can all can sort of relate. But I don’t think we really want to talk about it, much less record it for the annals of science. Well, it’s knowledge now…

Or is it? We see all sorts of splashy messaging around new scientific results, and it’s unclear what to do about them. I’ve written a whole tome of posts about the “eggs good/eggs bad” controversy.

However, in my opinion, some science headlines can be safely ignored. Here are a couple:

Yes, you read that right: Mouse Study Suggests Surprising Link Between Alzheimer’s And Nose-Picking (IN MICE)

I guess they weren’t able to capture one of the mice participants picking their nose, so they recruited this child instead.

Okay, what’s the deal here? The upshot is this: Some perfectly reasonable scientists were interested in a particular bacterium that a) can cause pneumonia in humans; and b) is found in the a lot of human brains affected by late-onset dementia. Where it gets more arcane is that they studied what happens when there’s damage to nasal tissues (where this bacterium lives). What happened was that the mouse brains deposited more of the amyloid-beta protein – a protein which is released in response to infections. Plaques (or clumps) of this protein are also found in significant concentrations in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

However: 1) it’s not clear that the effects will be the same in humans; and 2) it’s not even clear that amyloid-beta plaques are a cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

So in the grand scheme of things, this is not something to worry about. Nothing to see here…

Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

If I may, I’d like to offer one more example of a science headline we don’t need to worry about right now.

A salon hair wash can be a serious health threat, research says.This woman apparently didn’t get the memo, which seems like a good thing.

Okay, I’m gonna lay it all out for you now.

We are all familiar with the awkward-at-first but hopefully delicious-and-calming sensations of sitting back into a hair-washing basin at a salon. Turns out there have been a few (twelve, according to the Lancet) cases in which people had a stoke after being in that awkward head and neck position at a salon.

But what are we to do?

This article makes helpful suggestions.

The speed at which the hair is washed, how long it takes and any force or jerking movement to the head and neck while washing all contribute to the risk. Request a gentle wash, try not to stay in position at the backwash longer than you have to and inform your hairdresser if you experience any discomfort during washing.

So, no jerking around of the head and neck, no speed-washing, no extended periods in the basin. Check, check, check. I think we can all breathe a little easier now, armed with this advice.

Life can be tough. And life right now, for lots of us on the planet, is extra-tough. We’ve all got enough on our plates without adding hair-washing-induced stroke or nose-picking-induced Alzheimers to our list of worries.

So don’t worry. About these things, at least.

Have a lovely week! I’ll be back on Thursday with more… 🙂

Be back Soon!
disability · fitness · inclusiveness · swimming

Spirit Orcas Masters Swim Team

Diane Harper

My friend Susan Simmons in British Columbia has a passion for marathon open water swimming and for coaching swimmers with disabilities.

She and her swimmers have done some amazing things over the years, but today marks a new step.

The Spirit Orcas, Canada’s only inclusive Masters “para” swim club, is competing at a Masters Swim Association of British Columbia (MSABC) swim meet in Nanaimo today. Five adult swimmers with intellectual and physical disabilities are set to compete amongst neurotypical and able-bodied swimmers in several events.

The Spirit Orcas, many of whom have their roots in Special Olympics, formed a swim club last year when British Columbia’s only para swim club halted its program. To promote inclusion in sport, the club members opted to take the bold step of registering as a Masters rather than para or “disabled”.

The Spirit Orcas have become well known for their open water achievements, including their relay swims in the Great Bear Rainforest and an 80km staged around Victoria’s peninsula. The swim meet in Nanaimo, however, is their first official competition outside the disability community.

As Susan says “It is only when we compete in the same spaces with each other that we have achieved inclusion”.

Maria, Drew, Melisa and Dixon, all members of the Spirit Orcas, prepare for a relay

Good luck to everyone! I hope you have a great time.

advice · fitness · goals · habits · motivation · self care

Go Team 2025: Managing Your Expectations (again?)

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team,

This is one of those topics that I have returned to over and over again in Go Team posts throughout the years but since I often need another reminder, I thought you might need one, too.

So here goes:

Please make sure that you match your expectations to your capacity.

No matter where you are in the process of developing practices to expand and enhance your life, matching your expectations (your results) to your capacity (how much effort you can put into the project) is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself.

As we all know, there are hundreds of ways to get stronger, get fit, decrease stress, learn new things, or develop new practices and different approaches will work for different people.

And those different approaches include different intensities, different time lines, and different activities, and they will all help people move towards the lives they want to live.

BUT the speed at which each person is moving, changing, and learning will be different.

AND each person is living a different life with different pressures, different schedules, and different abilities.

SO it only makes sense for each person to take ALL of those things into account when they are developing their expectations of themselves, their progress, and their results.

To clarify, let’s consider an extreme example:

Let’s imagine that a big movie star gets a role in an action film that requires a lot of extra muscle. She can generally hire a trainer to design a targeted program, she can spend hours in the gym every day with someone else tracking every aspect of her workout and telling her what adjustments to make, she can have her staff shop, prepare, and serve very specific foods and she probably has other staff to take care of her house, her car, her kids, and any other details of life admin that may spring up.

Her JOB for the next while is to prepare physically and mentally for that role. She will have to work hard and she will have to juggle SOME other priorities but she has the capacity to put in the time and the energy for those lengthy and challenging workouts and she will see results very quickly.

In contrast, your job is probably separate from your plans to build extra muscle. You probably have time for a few sessions at the gym each week. You may have a trainer but you probably don’t spend hours a day with them. You probably have to shop for your own groceries and prepare your own meals and clean your own house and you probably don’t have the same support for your life admin,

Your capacity for the task of building muscle is VERY different than the movie star’s capacity.

It would be unfair for you to expect yourself to get the same results that she gets in the same period of time.

The kind thing to do would be to be realistic about the results your efforts can generate in the time you have available.

A person who can run several times a week will see certain results sooner than the person who can only run once per week. That doesn’t mean that either person is ‘better’, they are both doing the best they can with the resources they have. The person who only has one opportunity to run each week needs a different set of expectations for themselves than the person who can run more often.

Being realistic about your capacity and about what you can expect from the efforts you are able to make at this point in your life is much better for your brain than berating yourself for falling short of disconnected expectations.

So, Team, today I invite you to take a look at what you are expecting from yourself right now.

Do you have the capacity to do the work that would be required to meet those expectations?

If not, how can you adjust your expectations to match your efforts?

After all, it makes more sense to celebrate what you *can* do and what you have achieved than to be hard on yourself for things that are beyond your capacity right now.

And, as always, here is your gold star for your efforts today, no matter what size and shape they are.

Be kind to yourself, pretty please.

Go Team Us!

A drawing of a gold star with black lines in the background
A photo of a small drawing of a gold star with a background of black horizontal lines that look a bit like a Venetian blind. The drawing is trimmed in black with black triangles in the corners.
Sat with Nat

Nat thinks we need to share our mammogram stories

natalieh (she/her)8 Comments

Shortly after my fiftieth birthday I went for my first mammogram.

Recently the Ontario Breast Cancer Screening Program expanded the criteria for self referrals to ages 40-74.

Risks vary for breast cancer so some folks are referred by their healthcare provider at earlier ages.

You can get great information from your local public health or cancer society about breast cancer screening.

Canadian Cancer Society Get Screened for Breast Cancer

I’m very fortunate to live in a city with imaging services throughout. I was able to get an appointment within 1 week just 1 kilometer from my home and work.

I was nervous. I had heard stories of cold metal plates, awful squeezing and even bruising or blistering.

My experience could not have been more opposite of that. The clinic was small and specialized in mammograms. The technician collected me from the waiting room at exactly my appointment time. I was given clear instructions on what to remove and how to put the gown on.

Once in the imaging room, the technician reviewed my medical history. They explained the screening program and ensured I understood and consented to participating.

The imaging itself took maybe 5 minutes. The technician gave clear instructions and helped position each breast.

The machine was warm, the edges beveled and comfortable to be against. The compression was mild.

I have fairly large, wide breasts. They look like the ones on goddess statues, flat and pointed down. These are fifty year old boobs that nursed babies a long time ago. They have seen things.

The famous Venus von Willendorf statue is clay and palm sized. In this photo she is warmly lit on her pedestal facing left. Her thin arms rest on top of her pendulous breasts that drape around her generous belly that rests on thick thighs. It’s wild to me that something so ancient could capture my body shape so accurately.

I was out the door 10 minutes after my appointment started. Easy! I spoke with two other friends who recently had their first mammograms. They had similar experiences. We decided that mammograms need a positive PR campaign.

“Come get your boobs imaged! It’s not so bad!”

And. Who knows? Maybe my privilege of being in a well served community is a positive bias.

I hope, if you are of an age where your public health department recommends getting a mammogram, that you go. It’s important.

Yes, it is scary to think you might have breast cancer, especially if you have close relatives and friends who have gotten a breast cancer diagnosis. Honestly, early detection is coined as “prevention” as it can avoid more serious interventions but it’s still cancer.

So connect with your supports. Friends, primary health care providers and anyone else so that you can go and get screened. I hope this helps it feel a little less scary.

advice · fitness · goals · motivation · self care

Go Team 2025: If all else fails, activate spite.

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team,

I know that we are all trying develop more internal motivation and that we generally want to work toward something positive instead of trying to avoid something negative.

BUT

I also know how stubborn *ahem* determined I am and how a little bit of spite can sometimes give me a little extra boost of perseverance just when I needed it.

Now, perhaps you are more enlightened than I am and you have never been fuelled by the determination to show that you *can* do the thing that someone said you couldn’t. If that’s the case, this post may not resonate with you and that’s totally cool – forge ahead with your own plan.

But if, like me, you can recall a handful of times when spite helped you finish a task, dig up some motivation, or tap into some reserved energy, then let’s carry on.

So, here’s the thing, you are adding these practices to your day so you can benefit, right?

You want to enhance or expand your life, you want to be stronger, you want to be calmer, you want to be more reflective, you want to be able to have more fun.

Those are are great reasons to put in the work to make change and, most of the time, those whys will pull you forward.

But, there are other times when you are feeling a bit sluggish or maybe you have temporarily drained that well of motivation.

That’s when you can turn to spite.

That’s the time when you can bring possible detractors to mind, tell them to shut up, and do your practices just to prove them wrong.

The person who rolled their eyes when you mentioned your plans? Do your practice to spite that jerk.

That Instagram ad that brought up bad feelings? Do your practice to spite those marketers.

That gym teacher in grade 7 who told you would never be strong? Do your reps to spite them.

All of the people who insist that there is only one way to be fit or healthy or calm? Do your practice your way in your own time in sheer defiance of their ridiculousness.

Ok, so the actual people in this list will probably never see your practices or fee your spite but that doesn’t matter a bit.

This energy-building, practice-fuelling spite isn’t really about them (we don’t actually need to care what they think!)

It’s about the space they take up in your head, about the doubts, questions, or frustrations their words or actions generated in our minds and how our determination, our spite, can push back against all of that nonsense and let us get on with the things we want to do.

So, it’s not really about proving them wrong, it’s about using spite to turn their negativity into fuel for something that will actually serve us well – our practices.

When all else, activate spite is not about ‘I’ll show them!’ it’s about reclaiming that mental space and filling it with determination to keeping moving toward (and in) the life we want to live.

So, Team, today, I invite you to add spite to your determination toolbox so you have yet another route to keep returning to the practices that you know will lead you where you want to go.

And here are some gold stars for your efforts. Big or small, spite-fuelled or habitual, they all count.

Go Team Us!

A small drawing of 5 gold stars
A photo of a small drawing of 5 slightly wonky gold stars against a background of small black dots. The edge of the drawing is framed in black.
celebration · feminism · fitness

Honouring Pioneers of Women’s Sport – Abby Hoffman

Diane Harper

The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) has been doing an amazing job of fan engagement but on of the things I have enjoyed most is how they make time at every game (at least in Ottawa) to highlight the contributions of women who have helped make space for women and girls to play sports.

At a recent game, it was Abby Hoffmann. Abby started playing hockey on a boy’s team in the 1950s in Toronto. She was kicked off the team when I was discovered she was a girl; her case went all the way to the Ontario Supreme Court and got international media coverage. Sadly, she lost.

Image of Abby Hoffman as a young hockey player, from Library and Archives Canada.

That didn’t stop her though. She took up competitive swimming and then became a world-class middle distance runner. I remember watching her at her fourth Olympics (Montreal, 1976), where she was the flag-bearer.

After her athletic career ended, she turned to public service, becoming the first woman Director General of Sport Canada, the first Canadian woman elected as an executive of the Canadian Olympic Committee, and a supporter of the Canadian women’s national hockey championship, which ran from 1982 to 2007. Its prize was Abbey Hoffman Cup, now house in the Hockey Hall of Fame. She is a member of both the Order of Canada and has been inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.

Abby Hoffman running in 1972. Photo by Boris Spremo for the Toronto Star.

It was a thrill to see Abby in person at a game, after following her career for so many years.