So Sarah and I just finished three days of riding bikes with the Pedalling for Parkinson’s Spinning Wheels group. There are events in every province. Susan–our guest blogger and our family member, with Parkinson’s–rode in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario. But this post isn’t about Spinning Wheels or about Parkinson’s, though it’s connected.

Today I want to talk about pushing yourself, even when you don’t feel like doing it, and why staying fit is a mental effort as much as it is anything else.

Here’s five reflections on the theme:

😴 On Friday we rode into the University of Guelph and met with Dr. Phillip Millar, a professor who studies Parkinson’s and cycling. We chatted about a lot of connections between Parkinson’s and exercise, but one topic that piqued my interest was fatigue, a common symptom of Parkinson’s. He talked about bringing cyclists with Parkinson’s into his lab on days they perceived themselves as being fatigued and seeing that they performed just as well as on non-fatigue days. How much of fatigue is mental? Could you reframe the message fatigue is telling you maybe? (There’s of course lots of literature on this topic in sports science. For a fun geeky read, check out Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.)

🚲 I was so impressed with the riders with Parkinson’s–not so much the people who were already cyclists and who then got diagnosed with PD and kept riding, but more so with the people who took up cycling after a Parkinson’s diagnosis. They started this new challenging physical activity at the same time as they’re dealing with adjusting to Parkinson’s symptoms. For some of them, there wasn’t a good baseline for knowing what feelings are bike-related and what’s a Parkinson’s symptom. A younger woman asked us, should I feel this tired and hungry after riding my bike all morning? Yes!

🧓 When I got home, I was still thinking about the earlier fatigue conversation and how it fits with “listening to your body.” I started talking with my very active, energetic mother who says she thinks lots of what slows people down in old age is the thought that we should slow down, and that moving less and resting more is natural for seniors. She said that many of her friends often say, “Oh, I couldn’t do that at this age.” But mum thinks that we slow down more than we need to because we think that’s what seniors are supposed to do.

🏋️  I told her about one of my favourite blog posts from way back at the start of the blog. In Is Aging a Lifestyle Choice? I talked about Gretchen Reynolds’ book on exercise science, The First Twenty Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can: Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer. I liked her chapter on age and athletic performance.

From that early days blog post: “What exactly is the connection between exercise and aging? The old view was that muscle loss and a decline in aerobic  capacity were inevitable with old age. We slow down with age and become more frail, starting in our 40s, it seemed. But new research suggests the connections may run the other way. We become slower and more frail because we stop moving. Older athletes get slower and less strong, not because they’re older, but rather because they train less than younger athletes.” Lots of studies show that older athletes–runners and cyclists–slow down because they don’t train the way they did when they were younger, not because they’re older. Older athletes who do speed and endurance training get fitter and faster just like younger athletes, but they tend to stop doing that sort of training

💪 And this got me thinking about how rarely I push myself these days. I mean, yes, I move lots, but most of it is at an enjoyable pace. (One recent exception, racing back to the car before it got dark on my birthday.) I don’t really do any actual bike training and haven’t since before my knee surgery. It’s been a while since I’ve raced on Zwift. However, on the first day of the Spinning Wheels ride, from London to Stratford, we ended up leaving London late due to a media no-show. At various stages, riders were picked up by support vehicles, as we had a hard deadline for a fanfare and picnic in the park in Stratford. That left just Sarah and me on the road, and we had to cover a certain number of kilometres in an hour. It doesn’t matter really what the number was, but achieving it meant riding faster than our normal, comfy riding speed for more than an hour. Guess what? We did it. We worked together into the wind (mostly Sarah at the front) and made it in time. It felt good to know that we have that kind of speed and power in the tank for when it’s needed. It also reminded me of the feeling good on the bike that is Type 2 fun.

(That reminded of more old posts, on painful workouts and fun.)

I’ve been riding less and getting slower these past few years but this week reminded me that this is a choice. I don’t have to do that. I’m starting to think about pushing myself this fall and about getting back to longer, faster riding.

Susan and I have been talking about the stories we tell ourselves, whether it’s about Parkinsons or about aging.  You can tell the sad story of loss and diminishment, or you can tell a story of change and possibility. Either way,  she said, I still have Parkinson’s so to the extent that I can control the narrative,  I will.

Put differently, in my case I can tell myself a different story about cycling and aging. It needn’t be about growing old and doing less.  I’m still working out what that story will be.  Stay tuned!

Here’s video of our arrival into Stratford. Listen with sound on!

My summer began with my brain imploding when it encountered Miranda July’s All Fours, a smart and hilarious investigation of a woman’s midlife … what?  Crisis? Adventure? Exploration? I told anyone who would give me five minutes that it was an absolute MUST READ. Not every friend who read it was as impressed with the novel as I was, but I’ve made my claim and I’m sticking to it—this is required reading for all women, of any age.

The narrator’s decision to create a dance routine for her beloved and post it on Instagram requires her to get fit. She (we never learn her name) is “mind-rooted,” someone for whom exercise is, at best, optional: “Exercise-wise I’d never done more than buy ten yoga classes and take two of them. I was so weak that sometimes my arm got tired brushing my teeth.” She decides on a three-month regime and heads off to the gym, where trainers Scarlett and Brett put her to work: “In old sweatpants and a T-shirt I heaved black metal balls and barbells around, dumbly lifting and lowering however many times I was told to, my face bright pink with heat and embarrassment.” Eventually, she begins to notice changes, “Like carrying in the groceries—I could hold one bag in each arm, even if they had jars and bottles in them, and it was kind of pleasurable, the bags bounced.” And then she records her dance–the start, it turns out, of a new life, or at least a radical revisioning of her old one.

The summer task I set myself was to try something new and not mind rooted, something that would leave me pink with embarrassment, if not heat. That something turned out to be singing lessons. I had sung along to music in the car (quietly) and tried karaoke (once), but never had I ventured out on my own, just me, my voice, and I. (Before you wonder why I’m talking about singing in a fitness blog post, I invite you to try a few vocal exercises. Figuring out how to fill the belly with breath and then climb a scale is a demanding physical task!) The effort and embarrassment had me close to fainting on several occasions. It was unbearable, hearing song, squeaky and out of tune, come out of my mouth. Could I have run screaming from the room without appearing like a bad student, I would have.

This got me thinking about the Why. Why was I so self-conscious? Why was it so excruciating to make mistakes? What had I missed out on by not singing LOUD and WRONG, as my wonderful coach, Rachel, instructed me to do, all these years? Where was the harm in humming or singing to myself while walking down the street? What other forms of embodiment or creativity has my internalized cop censored?

So, here’s the Miranda July challenge: figure out a move, in your body, that you have not made before. Find out what you need to learn about making that move. Practice it, for at least a few weeks. And see what it has to tell you.