Way back in 2013, I did my first Bring on the Bay (BOTB) swim, a 3 km swim in the Ottawa River to raise funds for Easter Seals.
In 2016 BOTB started to offer a swim angel program. It’s the largest program of its kind in Canada, and it’s an important contribution to making the event more accessible. I think is that’s very appropriate for an event raising funds for people with disabilities.
Coincidentally, 2016 was the year I had bunion surgery. I was very nervous about swimming that distance as I hadn’t done much training and was afraid I would get a massive foot cramp. My friend Nadine was friends with the guy who had dreamed it up after supporting one of his friends to do the swim the previous year. She offered to be my angel. She swam beside me and it gave me the confidence to keep going (but was prepared to get me help should I need it).
I couldn’t find a picture of us from BOTB that year, but here we are swimming at Meech Lake on a foggy day.
Fast forward a few more years and I was bored of swimming for myself, but thought it would be fun to pay it forward by being an angel. My swim team mate Sarah was interested in doing the race but was nervous because she had no open water experience. I volunteered to be her angel. She did great!
Sarah and I after our swim
The next year, Sarah convinced her mom to try. Irene did the 1.5 km route all in breaststroke. She now comes to Ottawa from Hamilton every year to do the swim.
Irene and I before starting our swim
Last year, I was paired with Penny, who it turns out I knew slightly as she often swam at the pool where I lifeguard. We did the 1.5 km race last year and this year she did the 3 km. Now 83, she was the oldest female swimmer (and may have been the oldest overall) this year.
Penny and I after our swim last year. Ignore that random hand on my shoulder; it is not AI. I cropped the photo.
This year, I was paired with Lisa. She had recently had surgery and was anxious. I was technically still recovering from my surgery but knew I could do the distance. We were well matched and took care of each other.
Lisa and I in the line waiting our turn to get into the water. There were 995 swimmers this year.
Nadine has moved away, but her influence is still felt in the Ottawa swimming community. She introduced me and several other friends to being swim angels. This year there were four of us out of 38 angels who met through her.
And the word has spread within my master’s swim club; four of us were angels, including Sarah, plus our former coach. Not bad for a tiny 35 member club.
Two months ago, I tripped over a big old tree root while running and hurt my shoulder (I wrote about it here). The Urgent Care doc said that probably it was just a sprain and I should come back for an Xray and MRI only if the pain or mobility symptoms worsened in the next couple of days. I’m averse to medical tests, so that recommendation aligned with my own avoidant inclinations. Nothing worsened. So, I went about my life. As was possible. Given that I had severely restricted mobility and, yes, some pain, which I worked hard to minimize, going so far as to take fewer of the prescribed painkillers, to monitor my recovery, I told myself. Minimizing pain is an inherited trait. Discomfort was not to be acknowledged in my family.
More than a month after my shoulder injury, I finally started physical therapy. Although I already felt miles better, the therapist said she wouldn’t treat me without an Xray and MRI. The results were shocking (not just to me, also the doctor and the physical therapist). I had multiple fractures and partial tears. You know that feeling when you have just had a close shave and then afterwards you are shaky, thinking about what might have been? That’s how I felt when I got the MRI results, oh — that’s why my shoulder hurt so fucking much. The results gave me retrospective permission to feel all the pain I’d been in. Even though it was mostly gone by then. I realized that I’d been very tuned into what provoked more pain. But I was less tuned to the level of daily pain.
I would like to move beyond my inherited relationship with pain. And yet, here’s what I’m wondering: did not naming the pain, nor seeking an accurate diagnosis, help me? My recovery has gone better than expected. I’m not back to doing handstands or pull-ups. Yet. Eight weeks out, almost everything else is back, with only minor tweaky discomfort. I can throw on a jacket or wrestle off a sports bra without a significant extra physical negotiation. Running. Cycling. Yoga. Oh, yes, I am using lighter weights at the gym. I’m not that insouciant.
In an easy version of this scenario, I tell myself, see, not knowing healed me, the mind is powerful, trust the body over the scan. The reality is that I have no control case. I don’t know what would have happened to this shoulder if I’d had the MRI on day three instead of day thirty-two. Maybe I’d have been sent to surgery, immobilized properly, protected from re-injury, and healed faster and cleaner. Maybe the delay allowed me to heal in blissful ignorance. I can’t know.
Here’s a possibility I’m considering: Not knowing how bad my injury was meant I didn’t guard the shoulder the way I might have if a radiologist had handed me a list of exactly what was fractured and torn. I kept using my shoulder, to the extent my body allowed, without the extra layer of fear that comes from a diagnosis. Pain research talks about fear-avoidance, catastrophizing, the way bracing against a movement can cost you more function than the injury itself does. Maybe less fear meant less guarding, and less guarding meant more range of motion stayed available while the tissue healed.
At the same time, I’m suspicious of my own desire for my not-knowing to have helped, because that’s the version where I’m tuned into and trusting my body. I like that story. And I’m going to hold it loosely.
What I’ve learned from this incident is not, don’t get a scan. In fact, I’ll be more likely to get an early scan next time. And I want to create more permissive space for my pain to be real, no matter if there’s a diagnosis or not. At the same time, I want to stay tuned to my body and keep dancing with my potential fear and the threshold of what’s still possible.
I started the Hybrid Calisthenics routine last Monday and I swear I can feel a big difference in my movements already.
Yeah, I know, it’s unlikely that I actually have many results from a single week of focused training but my brain is convinced otherwise so I am just rolling with it.
In fact, my brain is so convinced that it isn’t fighting me on finding time to exercise every day. Instead, it has let me just get started* when I reach ‘exercise time’ each day. This is virtually unprecedented.
And I think this shift comes down to two things:
A meditation on Insight Timer called Train Like An Athlete** in which Amanda Sellers said (among lots of other helpful things), “You don’t need motivation, you need a decision.”
I swear when I heard that, I actually said ‘Oh!’ out loud.
I don’t know why that really hit home at that moment – I know perfectly well that I don’t need motivation but perhaps subconsciously I didn’t believe it until just then.
Right after I listened to the meditation, I got out of my chair and did some stretches, squats, and standing twists just to keep myself in the right frame of mind.
And later that day, when I was mowing the lawn, I reframed that chore as exercise and decided to make sure to push myself a bit harder throughout the process. My ADHD brain loved the feeling of that decision and it loved the fact that I was accomplishing two things at once.
The good feeling of DECIDING to move my body more effectively lasted through the rest of the yard work the next day and brought me right up to Monday morning when I realized that I could build on the momentum of the last two days by choosing a new exercise program and starting it RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT.
And that’s when the Hybrid Calisthenics app kind of floated into my mind.
The Hybrid Calisthenics program app is VERY straightforward and VERY clear.
I have sort of tried the program as outlined on the website before but I didn’t get very far with it because, as I now realize, I don’t do very well with just a list of exercises.
When I just have a list, I always either push myself too far and overdo it early in the process or I don’t push myself enough and I get bored with it.
So, while I love Hampton’s friendly and encouraging style on the Hybrid Calisthenics YouTube Channel I had kind of filed his program away for later. You know, the perfectly logical process of putting a program that will help you slowly build your fitness on hold until you feel fitter. (Note: please read that sentence in a dry sarcastic tone. Include an eyeroll if you can.)
But once I took a look at the app, his routine felt a lot more possible so I once again took Amanda’s advice and made two decisions 1) to give the routine a try and 2) to follow the routine as it was laid out – no second guessing, no figuring things out, just following the instructions in the app.
Before I knew it, I was doing two sets of 30 wall pushups and two sets of leg extensions, recording my progress on the app, and feeling a real sense of accomplishment.
It must have been the perfect combination and level of exercises for me because while my muscles were a bit tired the next day, they weren’t discouragingly sore and I could do the next part of the routine without strain or stress.
And now it’s a week later and I could increase my wall pushups by a few reps this morning.
All because I heard that line “You don’t need motivation, you need a decision.” and made a decision at just the right time.
Now I just have to keep deciding to show up for myself.
“The 51-kilometre former Orangeville-Brampton Railway is being transformed into a multi-use active transportation trail spanning Mississauga, Brampton, Caledon, and Orangeville. Acquired by local municipalities in 2022, the route will connect the region and create a north-south link for the Trans Canada Trail.”
Sport was not my category. I filed myself under something else early on — books, ideas, arguments, the life of the mind — and closed the door on the rest without many qualms.
My parents had been sporty in their youth but didn’t particularly push me in that direction. The biggest influence on me was my grandmother (Nana). She taught English literature, loved Henry James, and instilled in me a passion for fiction and is who I credit with my choice to study philosophy and specialise in ethics. She was brought up Quaker — the British kind — and had long since stopped believing in God, but she believed firmly in seeing the good in people. Despite loving watching all sport on the telly, she also had no interest whatsoever in physical activity herself for its own sake. She would only consent to walks with a clear destination — preferably a pub — and plenty of conversation along the way. Even the word ‘body’ made her shudder.
Nobody in my family saw sport as particularly important. There was an unspoken hierarchy: physical activity was fine as a hobby, but the mind was what mattered. Academic success, being clever and well-read was the real currency.
I was actually a fast sprinter, and I loved swimming. But I couldn’t catch a ball reliably, and at secondary school my tennis game suddenly plummeted (probably because I needed glasses) and I simply gave up. I only enjoyed things I was good at. If I couldn’t excel, I wasn’t interested in trying.
So I chatted through PE lessons, got shouted at by teachers, and felt collectively humiliated alongside most of my classmates when we were bussed to a state school to play field hockey in the cold and mud in our terrible PE kits. When sport was no longer compulsory, I stopped doing it.
In my twenties, I took up half-hearted running to keep in shape — thirty minutes maximum. I swam when I could because I loved the feel of my body in the water, but I still lived principally in my head.
In my thirties, pregnancy made it impossible to keep ignoring my body entirely. I realised I was a mammal in a way only breastfeeding can teach you. And I took up yoga, which was the first physical practice that made me connect my mind and body. Having moved to rural Catalonia, I also started running for pleasure in our beautiful surroundings, and running for longer than half an hour because I wanted to.
Then, just after turning forty, almost by accident — watching my son do judo one afternoon and feeling something I can only describe as envy — I started jiu-jitsu.
I was terrible at it. I’m still not good in any conventional sense. I feel slow, awkward, and uncoordinated in ways that have nothing to do with catching a ball and everything to do with a body that spent four decades being treated primarily as a vehicle for a brain. There was also something about being brought up to be a ‘nice girl’ (hello again, Nana!): I had no siblings, had never experienced rough-housing, and rolling around on the floor trying to get someone in a submission hold – particularly a massive man – was new territory in more ways than one. There were sessions where I drove home feeling defeated not just physically but psychologically. My teacher recognised from the beginning that my mind was my biggest enemy and he still says to me ‘Don’t think! Just do!’
But something else happened. I discovered I build muscle quickly. I found that I liked feeling strong — something distinct from feeling thin or healthy or any of the other things women are mostly encouraged to aspire to. My body, which I had spent four decades ignoring and underestimating, turned out to have things to offer that I had never bothered to look for.
Nobody told me this was possible. Or if the capacity was always there, it had been buried under forty years of a story that turned out to be old data. Collected young, never updated, mistaken for fact.
The stories we tell about what we’re not tend to start early and stick, because we stop questioning them. A verdict reached in childhood, on thin evidence, shaped by forces we couldn’t see at the time, starts to feel like a fixed feature of the self.
I work in implicit bias research, which makes it particularly uncomfortable to admit how long I carried an unchecked assumption about my own physical capabilities without noticing it was an assumption at all. The hardest biases to spot are the ones we hold about ourselves. They don’t feel like biases. They feel like self-knowledge.
I’m still not good with a ball. But I’m more careful now about what I let that mean, and about which doors I decide to close without enough evidence.
And I love that my four-year-old daughter wants to be strong when she grows up, does judo, and regularly asks if she can feel my biceps.
Chloë FitzGerald is an academic turned coach and facilitator. She helps people and organizations navigate uncertainty — whether it’s a career transition, cultural adaptation, or learning to work sustainably with new technologies like AI.
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
Martha
Planning our meals for the week: before the pandemic, we had a vague idea of what we would eat but once we were limited to a shop once a week, we planned everything. We saved money, had fun trying new recipes, and most importantly reduced our collective stress as a family. We did order in on occasion to give everyone a break. Not having to think every day what would be for dinner was a game changer. We also got better at balancing options, and having more variety. It’s a habit we’ve kept ever since.
Nat
Practicing sleep hygiene. Having a steady wind down routine that is simply charging my phone away from my bed. I then go brush my teeth and put my night guard in. I hope into bed and slap my CPAP on. I usually fall asleep within a couple minutes. I don’t use my bed for anything other than sleep and sex. I have a do not disturb mode on my phone at night. All of this has helped me sleep better and feel more focused and calm in my waking day.
Elan
I have next to no regular habits, which means I cannot compare their relative value to my life. But once a year, on New Years Day, I write in a journal. It used to be annual goals but now it’s just lists of memories and things I am grateful for. I limit myself to one page per entry per year. I cannot say how it has improved my life: perhaps that it is a living record I look forward to adding to each year is enough.
Diane
When my kid started his food snob stage as a teen, I promised him I would make a new dish from an actual recipe once a week. He moved out for university in 2012 but I kept it up. I have discovered so many interesting recipes: historical, vintage and modern, and gotten really good at using everything in my CSA basket. I think my meals are healthier (certainly higher in fibre), and there is almost no food waste.
The image is a Russian mushroom and potato soup with carrots, leeks and lots of dill.
Soup
Tracy
Daily meditation every morning before I interact with the world.
Nicole
My decades-long morning exercise practice. Whether it’s a run, going to the gym or a walk, it’s my most precious time of day.
Sam
Sleep! It’s boring but true that everything is better when you’re well rested. I’ve been an early to bed, early to rise person since I had babies and small children in my life. There’s a lot of hard things in my life and a lot of joy and fun too and I feel like sleep helps make it all better.
It’s almost mid-July, but there’s plenty of summer left (I keep telling myself). And in fact, my two biggest getaway plans are ahead of me.
This week I’m going to Boone, North Carolina for a 4-day meditation retreat with my favorite meditation teacher Jeff Warren. It will be held at the Art of Living retreat center, which I’m looking forward to exploring. But I’ll be sitting a lot, which is kind of the point of being there.
I’m really looking forward to a dedicated time and space for stillness and quiet, and also walking and experiencing the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I doubt we’ll be meditating here, but I’m hoping for coffee or ice tea on this terrace. Picture from the retreat center website.
Naturally, I’ll report next Sunday on how things went.
In early-mid August, I’ve planned another getaway– this one to Quebec with my friend Felicity for cycling Le Petit Train du Nord cycling route. We are driving up together with our bikes and parking at the southern terminus of the trail, where bus service takes us and bikes and luggage to the northern terminus. We’ll ride at a leisurely pace down the 234-km trail, staying three nights and ending our trip with an overnight celebration in Montreal. I’m so looking forward to this trip! It’s easy cycling along with opportunities for swimming, strolling around little towns, experiencing nature, and breaking out my creaky French. In case you weren’t already envious, here’s a little Youtube video to help you along.
This trip will be more active and interactive and engaged, which is also just what the doctor ordered.
Dear readers, what getaways or dedicated staycations do you have planned for the rest of the summer? I’m always looking for ideas and inspiration.
It started as a joke a few years ago. My colleague Net would regale me with her retired husband’s adventures.
Each morning Net would wake up early to walk Rodney, her hilarious Rottweiler. Doug would jump on his bike. Net would log in to work before 7am. Doug would go for a swim. Net took her lunch at 11 and walk while Doug played hockey. Yes. This is all the same day.
Net and I would often meet at the end of her work day and I would always ask what Doug was up to.
Net would brief me on his myriad of activities and exclaim “I wish I lived the life of Doug!”
A few years later, Net retired and she joyfully does activities all morning then “whatever I want” in the afternoon.
I recently got a sweaty hug from Net on my morning walk with Michel & Lucy. She was biking to an aerobics class. We laughed and agreed she was “living like Doug”.
It’s a schedule I aspire to. And I’m giving it an honest go. On Tuesday and Thursday this week I walked Lucy & Michel. I then biked to the pool. I swam for an hour. Biked home. Then had a lunch walk with Lucy and Michel.
My bike, Myrna, at the pool
But then, then I had a GIANT NAP. It turns out I’m not in good enough shape to “live like Doug” yet. I’m trying. It’s going to take some time.
Me making a goofy face while having fun walking.
My summer plans include swimming, cycling and strength training but I also need recovery days. Yesterday (Friday) I decided I needed a recovery day instead of my planned bike ride. I was bone tired.
So it was an active recovery day of walking with Michel & Lucy, a short utility bike ride and a decent stretching session.
Me, continuing to be a goofy goober, on my bike.
Michel could care less what I accomplish in a day. His only concern is my wellbeing. He’s delighted I am finding a new daily routine that includes lots of activities.
An example of an active day. 183 minutes of exercise including walking, biking and swimming.
I did have sore abs on Wednesday that responded to gentle movement. I’m really looking to avoid injury as it feels like I have been in physio for one injury or another for YEARS.
So yes, Doug, I’m working up to being as active as you are every day. I bet by the end of the summer I’ll be able to fully “live like Doug”.
I was 38 and a half when I was pregnant with my child. My ultrasound referral slip gave the reason for the scan as “late maternal age.” It could have been worse; I could have been described as having a geriatric pregnancy or being an elderly primigravida (first pregnancy after 35). Perhaps I should count myself fortunate that I did not have a lazy uterus after the birth, although my stalled labour could have also been defined as a “failure to progress.”
Later, after I had my child, I met women who were told they had an incompetent cervix, an incarcerated uterus, or an inhospitable womb. I also learned that some people were told they had a blighted ovum or that their recurrent miscarriages meant they were habitual aborters. Now that I am post-menopause, it appears I am at risk of hosting a senile vagina, although I’ve read they like to call it vaginal atrophy these days.
Image description shows hands on a laptop on the left and a tipped-over plant next to a red and white crocheted uterus and ovaries. Photo by Gwen Mamanoleas on Unsplash
Back in June, I came across a post by the Female Quotient on Instagram that identified several negative terms used to describe reproductive issues affecting people with uteruses, vaginas, and ovaries. The account wrote: When it comes to women’s health, words aren’t just words. Language shapes perception, influences decision-making, and can impact how women experience healthcare. Some of this terminology reflects assumptions about women’s bodies that have persisted for decades, even as medicine has evolved.
I never felt elderly at 38 (even now approaching my mid-60s, I find it hard to imagine I am—gasp—a senior!), and I resented the implication that my age implied greater fragility, increased risk or diminished agency with my pregnancy. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear I had an incompetent cervix, for example, as if infertility were a personal failure instead of a structural malfunction.
We see similar things with fitness language. Women shouldn’t lift weights because they will look masculine, develop big muscles, or become less feminine. As none of those possible outcomes pose any threat to the world turning on its axis, I have always wondered why these would be bad things.
Certainly, I desire bigger muscles so I can do all things like drag soil around my garden, or pull stubborn tree roots, or shift bricks for an ornamental wall. I also enjoyed slinging sacks of oats, beans, raisins, and lentils for my bulk food club without needing extra help when we were active, or carrying all the groceries in one go from the car. Who wouldn’t want to be able to do those things?
Using language that embeds assumptions about social expectations for acceptable behaviour or appropriate appearance perpetuates those stereotypes. Instead, what if we used positive language to describe interventions? We might not achieve success, but we could feel better about the effort to make something work the way it should instead of blaming the individual for the problem.
MarthaFitat55 has a lot of thoughts and feelings about language, inside and outside the gym.
When the Men’s World Cup started, I had complicated feelings. I fell in love with soccer while living in Brazil. I was there for the 1992 event, which Brazil won. Brazilians go all out in their love of the game. We had to shut down my workplace every time the home team played because even public transit was pulled off the roads, leaving employees with no way to get home.
By the time of the Qatar event four years ago, I was pretty much over FIFA’s management of the tournament but I had grown to love the women’s game, which I discovered via the Olympics.
This year’s Cup was shaping up very badly, at least in the USA, what with the treatment of that Somali referee and the entire Iranian team, and I just couldn’t bring myself to give the organizers even a penny of advertising dollars by watching games.
So when I saw repeated slights* to the women in reporting on the men’s game, I bought a ticket to an Ottawa Rapids game. The Ottawa Rapid is part of the Northern Super League of Canadian women’s soccer.
What started out as a bit of a protest instantly became my new favourite summer sports thing to watch. The game was fast and skilled and it was fun to see so many past and future Olympians and Women’s World Cup players up close. I’m not quite ready to commit to season’s tickets because scheduling in the summer is complicated, but I have gone to a second game and have plans to take a friend for a third.
I have previously written about the joys of watching the PWHL, and Sam has written about the queer joy of the WNBA. I’m happy to have another professional league to support.
I have a lot to learn – names of players and teams (I was even confused about what team was playing at my second game – turns out it was Calgary). And how can they run around in the heat, especially with all that long hair touching their backs? I was uncomfortably hot just watching!
Ottawa (in black) makes a corner kick against Calgary (in red) near the Calgary goal. You can just see the ball highlighted against the dark staircase beside the first section of the stands in the background.
*Slights included:
claims that the USA could win their first World Cup (the women have won four);
Canadian men had scored the first ever Canadian World Cup goal and gotten past the group stage (Canadian women did both, years ago, and this image never gets old);
Janine Beckie, Canadian gold medallist in soccer at the 2020 Olympics, reacts to one of the other panelists saying that Alfonso Davies’ goal against Croatia at the 2022 Men’s World Cup (the first by a Canadian man) was the best moment in Canadian soccer history. This is supposed to be where I describe what’s happening in the image, but I have no words for the expression on her face.
Lionel Messi had scored the most World Cup goals (that was Marta, though he since tied her record), and been in the most World Cups at six (that’s actually Formiga, who played in seven, though Marta has also been in six, and is likely to play in next year’s Cup so may also be able to recoup that scoring record);
and overlooking Christine Sinclair when talking about greatest players (she scored more international goals than any person and and was at the game when it happened);
and all the men getting angry when any of this gets pointed out (patriarchy should not be the default, my dudes).
