Before the holidays, I listened to the CBC podcast, “Now or Never,” which told stories of folks who had failed in some way and how they recovered from their setbacks. Natasha Wodak, who currently holds the Canadian women’s marathon record, told the story of trying to qualify for the Olympic team at four different races leading up to the 2024 Paris games. Of her failure, she says, “It sucks. It really sucks….It doesn’t make any sense.” She goes on to describe the mental gymnastics she’s been performing ever since as she navigates her future as a runner.

2025 did not provide Wodak with any easy answers. In a Facebook post, she describes not feeling quite right in the months leading up to the World Championships, where she placed 31^st. Her uncertainty about what the future might hold, and her willingness to entertain various possibilities, reminds me to approach 2026 with an open mind. 2025 was a disappointing year for me, as a runner. I was injured when I ran the Boston Marathon. A summer of easy running was restorative, but as soon as I increased my volume in the fall an old injury flared up again, wrecking my early new year’s race plans. I’m frustrated that extra effort, with physio and strength training, has not delivered results, and I’m fretting about wasted entry fees.

I have been telling myself that I don’t want to end my marathon journey on a low note. But why not? Had I recovered from my injury in time to run a strong Boston, would I have quit while I was ahead? Unlikely. Now I’m working toward letting go of the marathon so that I can move on:  to swim more, work on my strength training, and learn to enjoy shorter runs. It’s hard because the flow of a long run is a joy I will surely miss, if I can’t get back to longer distances. But my sixties will surely encompass new joys and discoveries, just as my fifties did, if I keep the door open for them.

Last month I wrote about writer Shirley Jackson, who thought about running away from home as she approached fifty. In one sense, it was impossible—physically, she didn’t have the strength to run a block and she suffered, in her later years, from agoraphobia. Whether Jackson could have escaped, mentally or otherwise, to a happier place was, in the end, a moot point. She died at 48, taking an afternoon nap.

The 1950s, when Jackson settled into the routines of adult life, was a particularly restrictive decade for women. I’ve written about British women athletes and the freedoms they enjoyed in the 1920s here, but lately I’ve been thinking of a group of fit women from a decade earlier. This summer, I took a bike ride with my partner from the Cambridge (England) train station to Grantchester, a small village just a few miles away. There we stopped at The Orchard, where British poet Rupert Brooke lived at the Old Vicarage before WWI. The posted history described Brooke and his friends taking long walks and swims in the nearby river Cam and Byron’s Pool in between writing sessions. One of those friends was writer Virginia Woolf, who dubbed the group the “Neo-Pagans” for their easy relation to swimming naked and, more generally, their association of outdoor life with mental rigour.

Essential to this group were four sisters, Margery, Brynhild, Daphne, and Noël Olivier. They were raised by progressive parents who allowed the girls to have roam freely around their home in Surrey. The youngest sister, Noël, attended the coeducational school, Bedales, which included daily runs in its curriculum. Noël went on to Cambridge University and refused Rupert Brooke’s offer of marriage, declaring her commitment to training as a doctor. She did eventually marry after completing her medical degree. Wisely, perhaps, she chose a fellow doctor, with whom she raised five children while working as a pediatrician.

Unlike Shirley Jackson, Olivier had a mother who encouraged her to live fully in her body, to find her strength and use it. The school that she attended developed her appreciation of outdoor life and physical activity while training her for university and a career. Unlike Jackson, Noël Olivier lived a long life.

The lesson here? Encourage your daughters to climb trees, both mental and physical.

(You can read more about Noël and her family in Sarah Watling’s 2019 biography, Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters.)

To celebrate Hallowe’en, I read Shirley Jackson’s terrifying novel, The Haunting of Hill House (recently adapted for Netflix). Jackson’s famous story, “The Lottery” impressed me as an undergraduate forty years ago, but I had never wondered about its author’s life. This fall, a podcast led me first to the novel and then to Ruth Franklin’s wonderful biography. There I learned that Jackson had managed to write six novels and dozens of short stories while raising four children and supporting her husband’s academic and writing career; I also learned of the ill health, both mental and physical, that preceded Jackson’s death at 48. She died taking an afternoon nap. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest caused by coronary occlusion.  

“If only Jackson had taken up running,” was the thought that came to mind. I know, I know—women jogging around the neighbourhood was not a thing in 1950s America, although there were superlative women runners who represented the country in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics (Mae Faggs, Catherine Hardy, Barbara Jones, and Janet Moreau won gold in the 4×100 relay in 1952; Isabelle Daniels, Mae Faggs, Margaret Matthews and Wilma Rudolph won bronze four years later). My response was a projection; in my late forties, I suffered, like Jackson, from panic attacks, and while I’m grateful to the care I received at the time, I wish that someone had suggested exercise as a possible therapy. It may be that my symptoms were perimenopausal and would have abated on their own. In any case, they disappeared when I turned fifty and took up running.

That year my youngest child left home for university. I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, a moment to breath and find my feet after twenty years of full-time work and children’s hockey, soccer, and music lessons—and also puppy training, dog walking, and household chores. The freedom that running afforded was an extension of a broader sense that new horizons were opening up in front of me. Jackson suffered agoraphobia in her mid-forties and was prescribed tranquillizers, which didn’t alleviate her fears and only left her feeling “stupid” (her word). In the novel she was drafting in the months before she died, Jackson tells the story of a woman who leaves everyone behind, finding a room of her own far from the demands of children and marriage. Clearly, freedom was on her mind.

Jackson drank, smoked, and ate poorly—all contributing factors in her untimely death. I can’t help wondering if exercise might have extended her life and helped her overcome her fears—if she had walked the hills around North Bennington, the Vermont town where she lived, would she have gained the sense of freedom that running gave me? Had Jackson lived to fifty, maybe she would have caught a glimpse of a new life on the path ahead.

I am grateful for the amazing narratives that Shirley Jackson gave the world. But I can’t help wishing, for her, more years of writing and the health she needed to sustain it.

(The featured image is “Vermont Countryside.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Nat has been writing about her strength training recently and I’m impressed by her enthusiasm. Because to my mind, if there’s one activity for which the word, “meh,” applies, it’s strength training. I don’t hate it, but I’d rather do just about anything else: swimming, running, biking, dancing, singing… But I am at that age when strength training becomes essential to the life I want to live in my third act. At the very least, I want to be able to swing a toddler to the rhythm of Beyoncé. But I also hope that retirement will afford me the chance to take up hiking, kayaking, and whatever ever else looks fun.

So, strength training. I have spent the last five years taking various stabs at it, after a bad knee injury took me out of running for a year during Covid times. I did the exercises my physio told me to do, most of the time. I tried various You Tube videos. When I started running again, I told myself I only needed to do 10-15 minutes after my runs, three times a week. I ended up doing ten minutes, sometimes, when I remembered.

In desperation, I joined the gym, hoping that the guilt of paying a monthly membership would prove an incentive. That worked, sort of, but I was still attaching the strength training to a run, so I would invariably cut short the weights workout so I could get to my run. Finally, I lowered the boom. I am not allowed to do ANYTHING other than strength training, twice a week, at the gym—and I must stay in the weight room for ONE HOUR. It doesn’t matter how light the weights are or how little effort I expend. I’m in that place for the hour and there’s no run or swim or bike added on as the real workout. The weights are the workout. The only workout.

Lately I’ve been reading More than Pretty Boxes, Carrie M. Lane’s fascinating glimpse into the world of professional organizers, and I’m reflecting on the wisdom of organizers, who, like coaches, recognize that the only systems that people will adopt, when they need to make changes in their lives, are the ones that work for them. What each of us needs to do, or think, in order to change our behaviors, varies wildly. My goal, as I list the changes that I hope to make in the years ahead (hello, green vegetables!), is to aim for consistency, rather than perfection. My friend Stephanie (who also happens to be a health coach) wisely noted, “60% consistency over a year is better than 100% consistency over a month.”

Who knows, maybe the new year will see me measuring my progress with the weights or trying a dead lift. For now, I’m keeping it simple, in the hopes that habit will fill in the blank space where enthusiasm usually lives.  

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.  

In Covid times, two of my fellow-travellers were James and Simon from GCN (Global Cycling Network), whose endurance ride up the Passo Falzarego and V02 max session up the Passo Pordoi (available free on YouTube) helped pedal me through a running injury. Years later, when I tune in for the occasional session on my trainer, the sound of their voices still cheers me up. They helped me through a lousy time.

One of their mantras stuck with me. Warning riders not to rush into their first tough interval on the endurance ride, James says wisely, “We’re going to look for the effort to come to us.” This idea runs counter to all of my thinking. If you want to do a thing, make yourself do it! If you’re not doing it right, try harder! Stressing about it shows how committed you are!  

But sometimes, trying harder only leaves me frustrated and defeated. So, this summer, I decided to back off effort entirely during my runs. Instead, I’ve been enjoying the beautiful summer mornings that London, UK, has offered me, jogging around my local parks and along the Regent’s Canal. I have a Park Run start line steps from my front gate, so I’ve enjoyed meeting locals and running around Highbury Fields on Saturday mornings. And, without thinking about it, I’ve been getting faster each week. I don’t set out to race. I just wait for the effort to come to me. 

I’ve tried applying this approach to other activities. Like walking home from work. Some days I’m tired and would rather sit on a bus than walk 3.5 km. But when I tell myself that there’s no rush and remember the lovely community garden that I pass along the way, where there are roses blooming, I think less about effort and more about pleasure. The effort, such as it is, takes care of itself.

Maybe I need to get out of my own way more often and just show up—so that when the roses along the way appear, I’m there to smell them.

There’s been a lot of press about menopause and its treatment—or lack thereof—so I’m taking a moment to remember what, for me, have been the highlights so far:

1. Wearing white jeans. Even if the title of the Big Mouth episode weren’t titled “Everybody Bleeds” (season 1, episode 2), we know, the minute Jessi puts on white shorts, that menstrual blood will appear at some point. I remember fighting to wear white Le Culottier jeans to an event at a girls’ school I attended for a couple of years (the expectation was that we’d all wear dresses) but that was before I got my period. Since then, I can’t remember owning a pair. Now, I have my Levi’s 501s in white, which I love immoderately.
2. The wisdom of women friends. The older women I know are smart—they know things! I love carrying their wisdom with me and looking at the world through their eyes, as well as my own. Those who had children have more time, now that the young ones are mostly launched, to share their thoughts. So I’m gaining more insight all the time!
3. Flowers. I have recently developed a hobby, which involves putting flowers into containers. I especially love flowers grown somewhere near the place where I’m arranging them, whether at home or abroad. The world is full of flowers: I notice them everywhere I go. It reminds me of being pregnant, when suddenly all I saw were strollers. Only now it’s wild flowers and flowers in gardens and flowers in bouquets on café tables… Beauty everywhere I turn.  
4. Jogging. Running, for me, involves looking at my watch and criticizing my performance when I fall short. Recently, I’ve taken up jogging, which fosters more kindness in me. The distinction between jogging and running applies to other areas of my life, as well.
5. New beginnings. Menopause marks the start of my third act. What an adventure!  Maybe I will write a novel. Maybe I will swim across a lake. Or maybe I will just read more novels like Miranda July’s All Fours, the best story of a woman contemplating menopause that I have ever read. July says she wrote the novel in a state of “ecstatic joy.” I believe it.

On Friday I wondered about finding motivation to do hard things from a place of compassion rather than self-criticism. What might that look like?

Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Brown University, discusses this in a podcast interview with Dan Harris (10% Happier, Jan. 27, 2025). He describes how we cling to our habits, which we experience as a craving, and how curiosity and self-compassion, rather than willpower and discipline, can release us from the patterns inscribed in our minds.

For me, the insanity of thinking the same ugly thought over and over, expecting a different result, came home during a recent heat wave. I found myself burning up during an easy 10 km run. It was early in the day and the temperature was around 22 degrees Celsius—not a problem for the women I run with. But for this fair English flower, heat is a killer. I had forgotten how quickly I wilt as the temperature climbs and, on that morning, I only felt my failure to keep up. The inner critic started chirping: “Train more, train harder, force your body to adjust to the heat.” In the days that followed, I let myself be curious about those thoughts. Why did I feel a need to run in the heat? There is a beautiful lake waiting for me! The gym where I’ve been strength training lately is air conditioned. I reflected on why running seemed so important, this year, why I’m not remembering the summers when I’ve trained for triathlons, instead. Was it because I have been disappointed in my last two marathon finishes? Probably.

A few days later, I set out on another 10 km. It was hot, but early enough that the temperature was bearable, just, for me. I came around a corner at 5 km and stared down a long avenue of open, sun-drenched pavement. To my left was a side street lined with shady trees. I turned and made my way down the cool sidewalk, setting my route along whichever roads offered me shade. At the end of the run, I walked into the lake to cool off. 

What might finding the shady path look like on race day? My wise friend and health coach Stephanie Levine maps out how leading with self-compassion can work: “You are injured or not well prepared, so you shift your expectations. If you are well-prepared, healthy, and strong, you can celebrate for yourself what you have accomplished. If someone is ahead of you that you want to pass, it is a beautiful moment of strength rather than a desire to crush them.” So, to answer Friday’s question—”Can we be fierce and kind at the same time?”—the answer is “yes,” if by “fierce” we mean fiercely loving, toward ourselves and others.  

(One for the summer reading list: Kristin Naff’s Fierce Self-Compassion).

This spring, waiting with me for the Boston bus that would take us to the marathon start line was Bettina, who declared, as we lined up, “I’m suffering from imposter syndrome.” Not knowing how to respond, I asked if it was her first time running Boston. “No, my eighth,” she replied. “I figured I had better come when I qualified again.” “Huh?” I wondered, “Who suffers imposter syndrome after qualifying for Boston eight times?”

Of course, the answer is, “Anyone.” Anyone who lives with an inner critic who judges her performance and finds it lacking, for whatever reason. Thinking about the ugly feelings some of us carry in the inner pocket of our hearts got me thinking in a more general way about ugly feelings and sport. Because, on the one hand, sport is a place that allows feelings that, in a different context, would be deemed inappropriate. I’m not going to say to a colleague competing for the same grant as me, “I’m coming for you!”  But I might say it to a friend at the start of a 10 km race if we have a rivalry in place. We’re allowed to compete with each other on race day, to harness all of our aggression to reeling in other runners as we approach the finish line. We talk about runs we will crush, tempo paces we will master, control we will exert over desire for donuts or drinks as we train for a race.

And yet. We only have to look at the trial unfolding in London, Ontario, to know how these feelings can walk off the ice and manifest as truly ugly interactions with others. Closer to home, how much energy do our inside voices gain from the language of mastery and domination we indulge as sporty? I’ve asked friends busy unleashing inner demons on themselves if they would use the same language to describe the efforts of their friends, and they insist they wouldn’t.  “But why not?” I ask. If you blame yourself for the injury that wrecked your marathon time, why do you think others deserve compassion for the injury that destroyed theirs? Your demons might be satisfied with the diet of self-criticism they dine on, but is there no risk that they might ask for envy, malice, and petty jealousy for dessert?

A friend recently described her feelings of being “less than” among our running peers. I pointed out that the group she belongs to is extraordinary in its running achievements—a bunch of women over 60 who routinely knock off marathons. Marathon statistics tell us that this group is not representative. In the most recent Vancouver marathon, women over 55 counted for only 122 of the 6886 who finished that day, a mere 2% of the total. At Boston, where each age group is guaranteed spaces, they counted for only 7% this year.  But, just like Bettina on the bus, my pal has internalized a different standard, and it’s a punishing one.

So, I ask:  how do we set ourselves up for success, however we define it, from a starting place of care and compassion? Can we be fierce and kind to ourselves at the same time? 

(Stay tuned for Monday’s post.)

As soon as I saw the Insta post (above) by Kelowna runner and mental health advocate, Christy Lovig, I rushed to a grab a notebook and jot down my thoughts. In the past, my claim that running without music, a podcast, or an audiobook is a wonderful experience has fallen, more often than not, on ears that have AirPods lodged in them. “Why,” a friend might say, “would I turn down the pleasure of listening to music that I love for the drudgery of noticing my laboured breathing?”

Here’s why. Unless we live in a monastery ruled by vows of silence, most of us live noisy lives. Text messages, emails, meetings, work tasks, domestic labour–all keep us listening for the next thing we must attend to in a state of vigilance and, often, high stress. The stimulation of our screens keeps the mind revving, the privacy of our thoughts invaded, over and over again, by the lighting up of a phone, the appearance of a badge on a laptop. A run without a phone separates me from all of this. I run early and the silence of the morning, before the rest of the world wakes up, is like a warm blanket after a chilly swim. My mind stops shivering and starts to settle, to notice all the world has on offer: the soft quietness of fresh snow, bird song in the spring, the smell of fresh-cut grass. Were I in a library, another quiet space that I enjoy, I would rustle my thoughts into focused attention. On my runs, a thought drifts in, but I don’t try to hold on to it. Without some kind of tool to fix it in place—a pencil, a keyboard—there’s no point. Thoughts, feelings, plans, and memories rise and fall like waves.

I won’t lie: staring down a long run alone can be daunting. I sometimes ask myself, “How on earth am I going to get through the next three hours? I’m going to be so bored!”  The miles stretch out in front of me. I have learned to simply start and let the miles, and the hours, take care of themselves. And to trust that, when I finish the run, I’m going to find myself renewed in ways I can never quite anticipate—mostly, calmer and happier, even in the absence of any answers to the problems of that week, or day.

While in Vancouver last weekend, I ran the seawall and took note of how many solo runners had ear buds in—about 99%. I’m sure they were enjoying their weekend run, catching up on tunes or news or stories they want to hear. But I wondered if they weren’t missing an alternative kind of catch up, one that might restore their sense of self in a different way.

Just a thought.