Author: alisonconway65

Do the Next Right Thing
fitness

Do the Next Right Thing

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Since a friend lent me the Jan/Feb issue of Canadian Running, I’ve been mulling over some of the insights of one of the issue’s articles, “Goals, Goals, Goals.” I was particularly struck by the essay’s reflections on how to process a missed goal: taking time to mourn it, acknowledging the effort that went in to trying to achieve it, figuring out the lessons learned, and, maybe, letting it go. Citing Sharleen Hoar (mental performance lead at the Canada Sport Institute), Molly Hurford writes, “It’s OK to leave a goal in the past, whether you got it or not.”  This may sound like common sense to most folk, but to me, it came as a something of a revelation. Perhaps I knew it, but needed to see it in black and white.

I don’t think of myself as a goal setter, mostly.  My adult life has been taken up with work and raising children and maintaining relationships as best I can, and it was only when I turned 50 and started running again after a long break that setting goals (other than work-related deadlines) came into focus. And these goals were pretty straightforward so I didn’t need to think a lot about them: sign up for a race, train for the race, run the race. If injured, rehab and hit return.

Ten years after I signed up for my first 5 km clinic, I find myself at a crossroads. Turning sixty has reminded me that my time on earth is finite, and there is so much that I still want to learn. But setting the goal, “Learn new things!” is vague—so much vaguer than a marathon build. It would be easier, in some ways, to cling to the old goals than to leave space for new ones. These days, I’m trying to resist reaching for quick answers. I’m writing this blog on Mother’s Day, contemplating the questions asked by a New York Times piece that my son sent me, “25 Questions to Bring You Closer to Your Mom.”One of the questions it asks is, “What’s a phrase that has kept you afloat during hard times?” For me, that phrase is, “Do the next right thing.” Right now, the next right thing is walking my dogs, enjoying the spring weather, allowing myself some time to rest. What the next, next right thing will be—time will tell.

fitness

Boston Strong

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“Boston Strong” is a phrase that emerged in the days after the bombing at the 2013 marathon. In my mind it’s associated with the beautiful eulogy Barack Obama gave for the victims of the attack at an interfaith service a few days later. He began, “Scripture tells us, ‘Run with endurance, the race that is set before us.’” He went on to praise the Boston marathon as a race that draws the world together, a space of friendship and support. We can finish the race, he continued, because around each bend, “someone is there to boost our spirits.”

Lately, Boston has been under a different kind of attack and its mayor, Michelle Wu, the first woman and first person of colour to take on that job, has emerged as a fierce leader. In her State of City address on March 20th, this spring, she declared, “Boston is not a city that tolerates tyranny.” Like President Obama, she called on the city to stand tall in the face of adversity. 

The months leading up to this year’s Boston marathon have been so much harder than my first time getting ready for the race, in 2020, when I was crushing hill repeats and long runs until Covid put an end to all our plans. Five years later, a pinched nerve made for stabbing pain in my left leg as I started my high-volume weeks. Hill training went out the window. My heart rate shot up in distress every time I started a run, until the leg warmed up and the nerve settled down. With the help of my physiotherapists (two!), I was able to keep running, but oh so slowly. I developed a pace I called the “dog trot.” I planned a race that would keep my leg from blowing up before the Newton hills. My only goal was to find my way to Boylston Street, one way or another.

I decided to run in a Canada singlet and hat for the first time, to show Americans that we are a tough bunch who will finish what we start, no matter what. What I could not have imagined was the outpouring of support from the spectators: “Go, Canada!” “Canada, True North Strong and Free!” “We love you, Canada!” “Ca-na-da!”; people apologizing for their president; a call for refuge: “CANADA! Take us with you!” I claimed the high fives offered by the crowd. I raised my arms for Canada when I heard the first line of the national anthem being sung. I smiled as I ran. I cried as I crossed the finish line.

“The sun will rise on Boston tomorrow,” Barack Obama promised in 2013. Dark clouds have gathered again, but we can work to dispel them by putting one foot in front of another. Together we must run with endurance, the race that is set before us.

Alison gets ready to high five an outstretched hand.

aging · fitness

On Being Old(er)

alisonconway65

I’m old-ish. Having just turned sixty, I’ve entered the third act of my life, which may be shorter than my first two. But I’m not old like my mother is old. She is 90, so she probably has entered the last decade of her life, unless she crosses the century line (Go, Mom!).

These are empirical numbers, however, and it’s caught my attention lately that the facts of aging don’t mean much to people talking about being “old.” Or rather, about being called “old.” We want to avoid being called “old,” apparently, because the label signals that we’ve lost a bounce in our step or in our minds. And sometimes just looking a certain way—like, growing in grey hair after years of colouring—can signal this decline or a willingness to let this decline occur. We need to look like we’re going to fight “old” every inch of the way.

We are all familiar with the description of post-menopausal women as decrepit crones, and one hopes feminists fight ageism when they see it, calling out the misogyny hidden in the word “old.” But I worry that for fit feminists, the temptation to stay on the younger side of “old” may complicate what we know and don’t know. We value our fitness and we work hard to maintain it. Competitive folks may like their AG (age group) wins. Even if our times get slower, we like being faster than our peers.  All this is well and good, but it doesn’t necessarily bring us face to face with the cold hard truth: death is coming for us, sooner, in my case, rather than later. We watch the elderly struggle and pray that our cardio and strength training will preserve us. We pretend that the products our social media feeds are so keen to sell us will erase the lines we see in the mirror, that we can push through tiredness and ignore changes to our bodies.  

But, as a friend of mine pointed out, those of us who are able-bodied are only temporarily so.  Anyone, through injury or accident, can find their embodied lives radically transformed in an instant. And death will certainly put an end to all of us one day, whatever the tech-bros say. Are we ready?

In a poem titled “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop describes her seven-year-old self accompanying her aunt to a medical appointment. While in the waiting room, the child hears her aunt cry out in pain. The sound prompts a sudden realization of the humanity that the young Elizabeth shares with her older relative: 

What took me

completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice, in my mouth.

These days, I’m trying to listen to the less steady steps of the elderly and to witness my own aging without simply imagining ways to avoid it. I am working toward giving up the dream of radical autonomy and accepting myself for what I am: a frail mammal given a brief moment to share this beautiful world with other living things who will also die one day.

Jane Goodall enjoying a wetland walk with an elderly friend.

William Waterway, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Elsie Conway, Scholar Athlete

alisonconway65

I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, and I’m thinking about my grandmother. Born in 1902 to a homemaker and farm manager, she was a young woman at a time when women’s roles were rapidly changing in post-WWI Britain. She graduated with a PhD in botany from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and took a position at the University of Durham that year.

            My grandmother was an academic and she was also a grass hockey player. All of her academic achievements are well-documented, but about her life as an athlete, I know almost nothing. I do know that women in the 1920s were taking the field of sport by storm, and that 28 women from Great Britain participated in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, bringing home 8 medals. Gertrude Erle was the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926, beating the men’s record in the process. Did my grandmother cheer when she read the news?

            I know nothing about my grandparents’ courtship, but my grandfather was also an athlete scholar. He graduated with a first-class degree in classics from Cambridge and played rugby for England in the early 1920s, going on to become captain of the Rugby Club. For my grandfather, intellectual and athletic idealism was rooted in his historical moment—the rebirth of the Olympic movement, the celebration of classical traditions of masculinity, and new regimes of health and physical exercise all contributed to his success. 

            What I want to know is: were my grandparents attracted to each other as athletes or scholars? Of course, this question suggests a false distinction—both of them were a mix of both. But what I mean is: did they talk about sport on their first dates? Or did they talk about the careers they aspired to as scholars? What drew them to each other? I doubt they went for runs together before hitting the books, but I like to think they found some way to speak to each other’s passions, both athletic and intellectual.

            All of this is idle dreaming, on my part. My grandfather suffered with mental illness throughout his adult life, perhaps as a result of his time in the trenches in WWI. He never was able to follow in the footsteps of his father, a famous classics scholar, despite his early promise. My grandmother found herself a single mother during WWII, temporarily when my grandfather was posted to Egypt, and then permanently, when he divorced her at the war’s end. She went on to achieve success as an academic, despite the obstacles placed in front of university women. But it must have been hard, for my gran, to be a professor and a single mother of three at a time when divorce was rare and conservative domesticity was on the rise. Did she ever dream of her grass hockey days and the promise of the 1920s, in those challenging years?

Today, I honour my gran and the rugby player she loved when running up and down a field meant so much to both of them, in the days before the world went to hell in a handbasket, again.

Gertrude Ederle

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10212 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Sarah raises a fist in triumph as she approaches the finish line. “Do Something Different!”
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“Do Something Different!”

alisonconway65

Recently, I tried finding Valentine’s Day cards to give to friends. But everywhere I looked, it was only romantic love that the cards celebrated. Today, I urge readers to reach out to a friend they love. This blog is for my friend Sarah, whose story I tell here (with her permission).

Sometimes, coarse, grey yarn and shimmering, golden threads are strangely woven together in the tapestry of our lives.  Sarah’s 2024 was like that – a sad year of marriage breakdown unspooling alongside a year of tremendous achievement and growth.

When Sarah told me, in the fall of 2023, that she had won a lottery spot in the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon, June 2024, I said something along the lines of, “Are you sure?” By which I meant, “Are you out of your mind?”  The triathlon is notoriously difficult—the swim in particular. Competitors jump off a boat in the San Francisco Bay into waters that are very cold (average temperature on race day, 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and gripped by strong currents. Men in grey suits (great white sharks) are hanging around. San Francisco’s famous fog can roll in, reducing visibility to zero.

Imagine this on race day: nothing but black, cold waves and a blanket of grey mist hanging over them.

And this was the triathlon Sarah chose to tackle as her first (after warming up with a Try-Tri). A torn ACL in the spring of 2023 had interrupted her running program, and, with the blessing of an orthopedic surgeon who let her know she could train without one, she considered the triathlon. She had enjoyed riding bicycles as a child, and swimming as well. How hard could it be?

As anyone who remembers clipping into the pedals of a road bike for the first time or completing their first open water workout, training for a triathlon is a very tricky thing, indeed. So many new skills to learn!  So much gear!  So many fears to overcome! Sarah discovered that she was a terrible swimmer. She found an instructor who would yell, when she made the same mistake repeatedly, “Do something different!” 

“Do something different!” became a way of confronting the mental anguish that was accompanying Sarah on her journey toward the San Francisco race. The wrecked ACL was a reminder of a marriage tearing itself apart, the injury that was not going to heal. But that did not mean there was no path forward. The question was: how to find it?

Sarah found it in the cold waters of the San Francisco Bay, ten days before her race. She had attended a clinic a week earlier, where the excruciating pain of the cold water and limited visibility had brought on a full panic attack. Somehow, she pulled herself out of the bay into the Zodiac, that day. Now she was back, with a different instructor, who walked Sarah through the body’s response to the cold and taught her how to breath and stroke in the rough waters. There was a way to get to shore. Kelly taught Sarah how to do something different, just in time.

The weekend before Sarah competed in San Francisco, we swam together in Lake Tuc-el-Nuit here in the Okanagan Valley. We circled the pylons set up for a race the next day, and then we circled them again. The hills around us were bathed in late afternoon sun. It was a beautiful day for an open water swim. It was a beautiful day for a workout with a friend. I could see the confidence in Sarah’s easy stroke. I followed her lead.

On June 10th, the currents racing through San Francisco Bay were the strongest on record for that day. But Sarah had already navigated the dark water in her mind and the dark water in the bay, and she was ready. “Trust the training,” she told herself as she jumped from the ship deck. 

And Sarah did her training proud, that day.

Three months later, she separated from her husband and moved into a new home. Three months after that, she completed a 70.3 in Mexico.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sarah! Your friendship is precious to me.

With love and admiration, Alison

Sarah raises a fist in triumph as she approaches the finish line.
Sarah raises a fist in triumph as she approaches the finish line.
Kelowna Running Club Building Community, One Runner at a Time
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Building Community, One Runner at a Time

alisonconway65

When I moved to Kelowna seven years ago, I went out for a run with the club I had recently joined. There were just a few of us out that December morning—it was the holiday week run, added to the schedule for those who had extra free time over the break. The pace was relaxed and easy. I fell into conversation with another runner. He had moved to town a few months earlier, and we talked about our house searches and making the adjustment to new lives. I shared my fears about my first marathon, looming on the spring race horizon, and I asked him if he liked to race. He said he did, and when I asked him what his favourite distance was, he said, “5 km.”

It turns out that my running companion that day was David Guss, named Canadian Masters Athlete of the Year in 2019. That year he set two new records in the M55 division, including one for the 5 km distance. On that wintery day late in 2017, David would have been running a pace that, for him, must have felt like a crawl. But if the pace got on his nerves, it never showed. Nor did he mention any of his achievements or ambitions. Instead, he made time for someone trying to find her running feet in a new place. He made me feel welcome.

Ours is not a “no drop” running club, and most of the people I run with have paces and distances they want to hit as they advance their training programs. And I’ve heard plenty of stories from folks in other places about showing up for the first time to a run club, only to feel unwelcome or intimidated. Which raises the question, for me: What does it take to build community when all of us have a plan of our own? 

The answer came to me when I talked it over with pals on my long run last week. Community never happens accidentally. It happens because people take time to notice the newcomers, to answer, with care, emails they might send, to find out about their goals and their history. It happens because someone makes sure the newbies have running partners when they’re trying out the club for fit, and because someone makes sure they’re invited to stay for coffee afterward.

 I say “someone” because it could be anyone in the club, not just the members of the leadership team. Indeed, to welcome others is, in any circumstance, a collective responsibility. But that means that we all need to remind ourselves to reach out to the newcomer, not hope that someone else will do the work. And, for runners, it means that we should each slow down, once in a while, and put someone else ahead of checking the time on our watches.

Kelowna Running Club.
Kelowna Running Club.
Running a Marathon—Or, the Problem of Ambition
competition · fitness · racing · running

Running a Marathon—Or, the Problem of Ambition

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And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Recently, I posted here about the inner critic who reminds me not to want too much—a donut, say, or a marathon finish. A friend asked about the donut/marathon analogy. Surely, she said, a marathon involves too much suffering to count as self-indulgence.

Which got me thinking about the problem of women and “too much.” In her excellent book, Monsters, Claire Dederer tackles the question directly, linking it to the problem of women owning their ambition. She recounts a male friend telling her about his very important book, a description Dederer goes on to quote for laughs when describing her own work to others. And then Dederer asks, “But, really, what’s so funny about saying your life’s work is important?” She goes on: “Ambition and self-confidence are all bound up together. Ambition is the thing that men have. …It turns out that this is not such an easy word, for women.”

To say, as a woman, “I am ambitious,” is to invite a range of responses, most immediately: “Who do you think you are?” Where, for men, being ambitious might simply signal a desire to do well in a chosen profession or to pursue a goal outside of work that involves challenges and determination, for women, it’s more like naming a character flaw. “Look at me, I am a selfish person. I am willing to make other people suffer so that I can succeed. Because if I’m thinking about myself, I’m not thinking about everyone else.”

Which brings us to the marathon. Ten years ago this month, I bought my first pair of trainers—that is, running shoes for running–in thirty years. I was shopping for a pair of runners for my daughter, home from university for the holidays, and they had a “buy one, get the second pair 50% off” deal on. I decided on my goal right there in the store: to run 5 km. Looking back, this was actually quite a large ambition, because it broke a pattern of twenty years, which involved not taking seriously exercise of any kind. I know there are amazing women out there running marathons in between domestic and work shifts. Me–I would have lost my mind if there had been one more item on my to-do list while I raised two kids and held down a job. But, at fifty, I had more time available. With my new sneakers on, I reclaimed my love of running. And then I wanted it all—the shoes, the watch, the sun glasses, and, a couple of years later, the marathon.

A marathoner cannot hide her ambition. She devotes hours to training. She goes to bed early. She frets, she obsesses, she consults with other runners, she joins a club. She has a plan. She has a goal. She needs to get to the start line uninjured, and then she needs to finish what she’s started.

There’s no pretending that you’re heading out for a jog around the block.

A few weeks ago, as my nephew and I stared down marathons we were about to run, I messaged him, “Remind me again why we sign up for this?” And he replied, “Because sometimes you have to do hard things!” That’s how I define ambition—it’s the desire to do hard things. It can be writing a book, it can be running a marathon, it can be trying something strange or unsettling—like therapy, or not drinking. You slog through the muck of feelings and effort. You quiet the voice that tells you to let it go, that it’s too much.  You do the work because you’ve set yourself the task.

Ambition implies forward movement and that can create problems when we don’t allow ourselves to stop or slow down. I hope I can set ambition aside when it isn’t helping me. I’m looking forward to retirement, when I can let go of the ambition I’ve attached to my job. But I have miles to go before I sleep, and I look forward to pursuing new goals.

And you?