A few months ago, a Stanford study came out that said humans experience two big “bursts” of aging: 44 and 60. Like everyone on the cusp of 60, it set off an internal sputter for me — what can I do that I’m not already doing? I’m already pretty active and fit? What the hell is a “burst” of aging?

I’m not gonna lie, as the kids say — that study was probably one of the things that impelled me to join a bourgeois (mostly white, very middle class, mostly older lady) tennis club as my next gym, mostly because it’s close by, not bro-y, clean, not loud and — did I mention — close by, with free parking? It’s definitely a different vibe for me — any gym that teaches both mahjong and line dancing sure seems like a gateway to a retirement community, doesn’t it?

Anyway, antics with the Magic Age and Fitness Measuring machine in my initial fitness assessment aside (more about that later, no doubt), the gym is serving its purpose. I go with some regularity, lift things, stretch. Go to yoga, went to a line dance class (more about the Canadian Stomp also later). Allowed myself to be talked into a few sessions with a personal trainer, who made me feel good by telling me I control my breathing better than any of his other clients. (My sister finds this hilarious — “was ‘you know how to breathe‘ the only nice thing he could say?”).

So with the trainer, I’ve started lifting heavy things again. Before Covid, I lifted heavy things — two weeks before the first lockdown, on my 55th birthday, I deadlifted 200lbs, I frequently brag! — but I got out of the habit. And yes, I accept that for healthy aging, I need to start lifting heavy things again. So I push the sled, playing Chappell Roan in my earbuds, momentarily deluding myself I’m still part of queer pop culture.

So yes, there are some aging type things we can push against. Literally in the case of that damned sled, which is my nemesis. But some things just … happen to us.

About a year ago, I lay down to do some infernal figure fours after a sweaty session on my spin bike. For some nebulous reason to do with the kind of world we live in now, I took a selfie and sent it to someone. Then I looked more closely. My face looked weird. What was wrong? Then it dawned. Where the fuck were my eyebrows?

Gradually, mysteriously, my eyebrows had just … fled. Menopause? Post-covid alopecia? Just Plain Age? Who knows. No one had warned me.

And I looked again. What the hell was happening to my eyeLIDS? Both my mother and my grandfather had to get surgery for ptosis when they were in their 70s — but my eyelids are already drooping. Like, sometimes I have to manually adjust them because the folds get stuck.

Well, I hied myself off to an eyebrow maker post-haste and paid her an unfathomable amount of money to tattoo me up some fake brows. And I consulted a plastic surgeon about what I assumed was ptosis.

“Hm,” he said, his fancy, privately funded office shiny around me, before and after boob jobs flashing onto the tv behind him. “This isn’t classic ptosis. This is just age. And it’s not really your eyelids — your eyes are drooping because your forehead is drooping. I would actually recommend a forehead tuck — this is what you actually want.” He pulled back the skin on my temples showing me that indeed, it’s my whole face that is drooping.

I thanked him and the nice receptionist who gave me the list of fees (both cheaper and more expensive than you think), warning me that the prices would only be valid for three months.

I am pretty sure I am not the kind of person who gets a facelift. But I also assumed I’d have my eyebrows forever. Who can tell what I might do in the future?

So that was my face. Then, for my 59th birthday, I did a trek in Patagonia I’d been longing to do forever — the four day W trek. I carried my own pack over incredible terrain, about 29 km a day, most of it up and down — but stayed in huts where they also fed us. It was incredibly hard and amazing and once in a lifetime — and, at the end of the third day, where my feet were screaming in pain because of an endless rocky downhill, I realized that my big toenails were loose. Like baby teeth.

I ended up bagging the final part of my Patagonia trip, spending a day in a hotel in Santiago trying to soak my feet in the bathroom sink without bashing my head open.

When I got home, I had to get my big toenails surgically removed. They have grown back (remarkably!) But my feet are… bigger. My well worn in blundstones don’t fit. I need all new winter shoes. Did anyone mention that with aging, your toenails might grow back, but your feet will stay…expanded? And then last week, after three days on my feet facilitating a group in a comfortable pair of fluevog boots, I suddenly developed, for the first time in my life, plantar fasciitis. And I’m hobbling around. Sigh.

The notion of “aging in a burst” sounds like it’s the time when you suddenly might experience a massive heart attack, early onset dementia, the need for a hip replacement. But I’m finding it’s a steady drip. Small indignities that form a pattern. On one side of the coin, I’m this hale and hearty person climbing Patagonian mountains, riding my bike across Poland by myself, pushing a heavy sled in the gym. And on the other side of the coin, I’m a saggy-faced, metabolically challenged, no-eyebrows, splaying-feet person with chronic insomnia and a prescription for HRT I guard with my hot-flashing life.

Bodies are gonna body. Aging is gonna happen. I am still going to have adventures, build my strength and stamina and flexibility and try to ease my sleep and fascia. But what new, unforeseen indignity will show up next? I’m betting it has something to do with hemmorhoids.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who is planning to be in a nunnery in Bhutan on their 60th birthday.

“All you have to do is crawl. And you’ll make it to the top.”

That’s the main message I took from a documentary short called Almost Over the Hill that came across my feed the other day. My friend Julia Creet — who has blogged about riding solo in Cape Breton here and here — recently created a short film exploring what it takes to ride a bike up a hill.

The film features four cyclists sharing their stories of the strenuous climbs they’ve learned to make friends with, including a 200 km MTB trail, an 11 km high altitude climb, a short but steady hill in an urban neighbourhood, and Julia’s solo adventure on the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton.

Julia told me that what she likes most about the film is “the encouragement it provides to older athletes. We may have to adjust how we ride, but we can keep riding much longer than we might think. And, making it was so much fun. I love my little cycling group and the support we offer each other. Building community through sports is as important as the joy we get from the sport itself.”

She added, “Some things take a long time to accomplish. Climbing a hill is like many other hard things in life; you just have to put one foot in front of the other and trust that you will finish the task. Cycling, in all its aspects, demands that we stay in the present for every pedal stroke. That alone is a lesson for life.”

It was the “lesson for life” aspect of the film that really stuck with me. I happened to luck into it the day after the US election, and three messages have been going through my head since:

• Age and experience help us learn to do hard things
• Take every hill at the easiest possible pace so you don’t blow yourself out
• If you roll into a hill thinking it’s going to be the most terrible thing ever, you’ve already defeated yourself

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the past week that circle around the question “where do we find resilience?” I think this film points us once again to the wisdom we carry when we guide our bodies do hard things. Go slowly. Trust your experience and knowledge. Embrace the truth of the hard, knowing that you can do it.

Catherine, one of the cyclists in the film, says “zone 2 climbing flattens out the terrain.” I have been holding that close. As a queer, female bodied person with almost six decades of life behind me, I’ve been in the place many times before of having my needs and rights shunted aside, of having people I work with every day tell me to my face that they don’t think I deserve basic human rights, of having people literally tell me — misreading my reality significantly — that “homosexuals do not deserve to live.” When I was younger, I tackled these forces with zone 4 or 5 energy — throwing my whole self into protest, activism, fury, into the shared affirmation of outraged communities. Lots of shouting and marching, one memorable moment in 1994, encircling the Ontario legislature building with a giant pink ribbon.

Now, I’m a little more wary of outraged communities, no matter how creative or how much I agree with the values at the core. I see the impact of polarization, the futility of trying to shout each other into submission. One side wins and pins down the other, the weight ratio shifts, the wrestling continues. Burning each other out.

Hills are always going to be part of our terrain. Rolling hills I’m on for the long haul, not one long push to a top followed by a glorious descent. I reorient myself toward that slow crawl: teaching human-centred leadership, teaching dialogic practices, creating group processes where people can learn to hear each other, coaching people on finding their full, thoughtful voices. Appreciating music and art. Loving my people. I write emails when I think it might help, donate money. Lean into practices that might bridge some of that anger. Zone 2. Steady.

Julia’s film is making the festival rounds and isn’t available for public viewing yet. But I’m very grateful it came my way on a week when I really needed it. I’ll keep the blog community posted on when you can all view it.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in Tkaranto and is happy to talk to anyone about dialogic practices.

Julia Creet is an aging jock who still likes to play hard as much as possible. She is also an English Prof. at York University. “Almost Over the Hill” is her third documentary. juliacreet.com

As regular readers know, it’s been a veritable “turning 60 fest” around here recently. I think mine is the next turning, heading at me in early February.

I’m in a big reflective space about how I want to engage with the next decade in body and spirit, and I thought I should take a look at the second post I wrote for this blog, shortly after I turned 50.

The Lithe Old Lady Inside Me (Guest Post)

As I reread it, I was pleased at how well my sense of what I wanted has stayed true. A lot has happened in the past nine years — covid, menopause, <all that, waving vaguely at The World.>. Deaths. Work that matters deeply. Love in so many permutations. I’ve covered thousands of kilometres on my bike in many countries and in the virtual world of Zwift, done hundreds of sun salutations, deadlifted 200 lbs in one glorious moment. I’m still running when I feel like it, slower than I ever thought would be “okay.” Walking. Breathing.

I am still living in that gentle tension between knowing and accepting that I am going to just keep slowing down, losing random things like my eyebrows (wtf?), watching my forehead and eyelids droop, battling with hormones, feeling my energy shift in endless ways — and knowing that I can always keep building strength and agility, move my body through space in ways that give me all the good hormones and trust in everything that is still here.

When you are riding on a set course in Zwift, you get a little ghost avatar in front or behind you to show you what pace you were at the last time you rode this course. When I reread the post I wrote in 2015, I pictured that lithe little old lady like that ghost avatar. She’s getting closer to being completely superimposed over me. And I still hold her with care. My body, my routines? They’re imperfect. But they are always about honouring who I am today — and how I want to be as I age.

I think I can safely say I no longer have the pituitary gland of a 25 year old. But that’s okay. So far, I feel like I’m giving that ghost future self the care she needs.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in the part of the world currently called Toronto.

I travel alone, a lot. It’s kind of my thing, to be a middle-aged female-presenting human meandering around random places. The last year alone — my run up to turning 60 — has included doing the W trek in Patagonia, riding my bike alone from Vienna to Budapest, riding alone in Montenegro, Albania and Transylvania, and riding from Warsaw to Gdansk. And a few solo jaunts to British Columbia.

Over the past ten years, I’ve been to more countries than my climate impact shame will let me fully admit, most of them on my own. Across six continents. A lot of them have been bike trips, some with a small group, but many more either solo or semi-supported.

Some of the semi-supported ones — like Montenegro and Romania — have been challenging enough because of heat and hills and distance, even when someone is transporting my bags for me to my next night’s stay. But the true challenges are the ones that are stubborn inventions out of my own head, like the ride in Poland, which involved first fetching a bike in Lithuania, and, at one point, getting fished off a highway by exasperated but kind police officers when I accidentally bumbled onto a “no bikes allowed” autoroute. (The rest was uneventful and quite zen, except for the moments where I had to take the loaded bike up and down sets of stairs, in train stations and to cross busy roadways).

When I talk about traveling alone, I often get comments from people to the effect that they could never do that, or that it feels too scary or intimidating for them. Women from patriarchal cultures ask me how I get my father to let me do it. And I’ve met solo travelers — especially men, oddly — who still seem uneasy, well into their trips, never fully relaxing into the unexpected, the continual potential for the variable splendours and misery and joy and discovery and boredom and loneliness that any travel day might bring.

But for me –despite the complexities — bikes on stairs, or getting lost, or not being able to find a gate when a flight is being called, or bonking in the heat and feeling like I truly can’t pedal another metre — always, I have a core sensation that whatever happens, I will be okay.

In 2013, I traveled alone to Myanmar, and hired a guide for the first two days to take me to a specific attraction on top of a mountain I wanted to see, and to orient me to traveling alone in a country that doesn’t see a ton of western travelers. The guide couldn’t explain to me why she sat with me while I ate but wouldn’t eat with me, and neither could I draw her out on anything political. But she did say something that became a core principle for my life, when I asked how to manage when I was confused: “people want to help: just ask them.“

That belief — people want to help, just ask them — is the root of my sense of okay-ness, even in moments like having to ask reluctant strangers to fill my water bottle, or getting lost in the dark in Mandalay with a monk, when no one recognized the name of my weird hotel. In Lithuania, I ended up on the wrong side of a channel with a boat to catch, and within 10 minutes, a nice man with a small boat transported me and my bike to the dock with time enough for a coke and potato chips. In Chile, my bags were lost in the airport and I could barely walk because of an infected toe from incessant downhill pounding; I left the airport without the bags, and 10 minutes later, a baggage handler I’d chatted with called me on whatsapp, bringing my luggage outside the terminal and giving me a smokey hug.

When I got picked up by the Polish police and put in their van like a kid out after curfew, I didn’t feel anxious. I had been anxious on the road as cars whipped past me on a narrow shoulder, but as soon as they put me into the van, I just trusted it would be okay. And sure enough, five minutes later, they deposited me at my hotel with a shake of their heads.

But. Two things happened during my most recent trip — one to me and one to my community at home — that put a little frost in my solo travel zen.

After my bike trip in Poland, I flew to Bulgaria to spend a few days with one of my best friends, who lives on the Black Sea. I’d always taken the train before, but the train is ancient, hot, crowded and painfully slow. So I decided to drive. And less than an hour after leaving Sofia, I had the first experience in all of my travels where I was truly frightened. When I stopped to fuel up in a remote place, I was relentlessly and upsettingly harassed by a police officer who accused me of having an invalid license. (I wrote about this in detail here). This wasn’t a mistake or something that could float its way to a natural resolution. He was actively harassing me as a foreign woman alone. And he didn’t let up until I phoned my Bulgarian (male) friend.

The other thing that happened was more removed from me, but it shook me. Longtime readers of the blog will know that Sam is an avid participant in the Friends for Life Bike Rally, a five day fundraising tour from Toronto to Montreal, and many of us have also done it once or twice. This year, a long-time rally leader and participant, a deeply beloved member of the community, suffered a heart attack while riding and died. He was two years older than I am.

Even though I only knew Jeff distantly, this really shook me. I kept thinking about the empty rural roads in Poland where I didn’t see anyone for kilometres at a time, the remote hills in Montenegro where I had near heat stroke and had to push a bike uphill the final two kilometres, the remote road in Bulgaria where I was completely done and out of water but had no choice but to push on for another 20 kilometres, each turn of the wheel painfully difficult. Between the malevolent cop and the sudden, visceral awareness of the vulnerability of an aging, overheated, lonely cyclist — I might be rethinking my cavalier attitude to solo traveling, just a little bit.

I don’t know what that means in practice — there’s nothing on my current roster that I’m rethinking. But I’m aware that I was grateful to be on the train back from Burgas to Sofia, instead of in a car, even though it was overheated, endless and gave me covid. I’m also finding myself looking more closely at some of the photos of times I’ve hiked in mountains or cycled with friends or small groups and thinking, yeah, it was pretty nice to be there with them. There might be a few more of those choices going forward.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in Tkaranto and is less than six months away from being 60.

Over the past week, I’ve been riding alone from Warsaw to Gdańsk, about 350 km. I planned the trip myself with a borrowed touring bike, and sketched a route that was mostly pleasant farmland — apart from being thrown into a construction zone and finding myself on a dangerous highway on the first day. Some safety conscious patient police officers plucked me off the autoroute and deposited me at my small hotel for the night, like a child out after dark.

Other than that — and a bad saddle sore from a new seat that didn’t like a particular pair of my shorts — it was an uneventful, peaceful solo few days. The pace gave me a chance to reflect on what is really there in every slow revolution of the wheels on this kind of tour. And what it means to move your body in this kind of way. I wrote about it here:

Działdowa to Ostróda (~69km)

What about you — what do you like about moving slowly?

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who is currently in Gdańsk eating perogies.

Riding along the Danube from Vienna to Budapest is one of those trips that cycle tour folks tend to assume they will do one day. Castles! A richly historic river! European snacks! Three countries! Castles again!

I didn’t plan to do this trip this summer — all my plans are aimed at a ride in Poland a few weeks from now. But my intention to treat one of the Ugandan women who’s been part of a project I’ve been involved in for 18 years was thwarted by the biased visa practices of the Austrian government. So I found myself with a ticket to Vienna and legs that always want to pedal, so I pulled a plan out of my back pocket.

I’m on a train right now, heading back from Budapest to Vienna, skin a little more tan, muscles a little taut, labia a little tender. Grateful. It was a really good, solo ride, and NGL as the kids say, I’m happy not to be wearing cleats for a 5th day in a row. (My toenails have still not recovered from my February trek in Patagonia!)

I chronicled the journey in my own blog. Links are below.

First, this was Plan C. I started on this trip with a fair bit of angst, partly because of the nonsense with britah’s visa and partly because my attempt to reassemble my bike was a massive fail.

Day 1, I rode from Vienna to Bratislava. Slovakia was a new country for me. I was there less than 14 hours so I’m not sure I got the full picture, but I did try a dish that I — and my cholesterol levels — won’t soon forget.

Day 2, Bratislava to Gyor in Hungary, was a bit of a slog, for no real reason except a sore back and the dawning reality of so many hours on a strange bike. Like staying with the friends of friends when you have to be polite over coffee. But Gyor was a really nice town with unsettling historic resonance for me.

On Day 3, I took a turn southwest instead of staying along the Danube, and found myself in a very pretty lakeside town with — you guessed it — a really nice castle. And an excellent meal with a live accordion accompaniment.

The final day, Tata to Budapest, was the source of some morning indecision, when I briefly regretted leaving the Danube-adjacent standard route, pondering multiple options over breakfast that all involved trains for some portion. Planning anxiety in action. But I stuck with the plan and was gifted perfect weather.

The hire bike, in the end, turned out to be perfectly okay, a bit trudgey and chain-droppy on the steep hills on the last day. And my soul? It pedalled through all the rhythms it needed this week.

What about you? Do you have a cycling trip you imagine you’ll do “one day” you might find yourself doing at the last minute?

Fieldpoppy is Cate C-D, who is still really mad at the racist practices of the Schengen visa bureaucrats.

Mango gelato with 25 km to go on my last day.

As you read this, I should be in Vienna, sipping a fancy coffee and eating a Sachertorte. (Followed swiftly by digestive enzymes).

I’m not supposed to be alone — I’m supposed to be here with one of the young women from Uganda I’ve known for 17 years, since she was 9. She’s a remarkable human who works in HR, is doing a master’s in leadership and runs a foundation for girls’ education (as well as parenting a toddler and building a marriage). I thought it would be a fun time for both of us to take her to Europe(TM) for a week or so, so we can spend time together, work on something we’re writing together, and just experience the world differently.

Well, the world thought differently. The incoming European country initially denied her visa for blatantly racist reasons (basically ticking the box that says “yeah, your paperwork is in order, but we don’t believe you’ll leave again after your week’s holiday” [subtext: “Africans are all just swarming our precious borders“]. Then they obfuscated and obstructed for more than four weeks until time ran out when we appealed it. (Deliberate vagueness here for google purposes).

Privilege reveals itself in new ways every day. Here’s how Canadians go to Europe: 1) have a passport; 2) have the money to buy a plane ticket; 3) go to Europe. The only systemic barriers are economic. Here’s how people in sub-saharan africa go to Europe: Submit a complex, 20 page application demonstrating that you have a reason to go (work or formal learning), submit every document proving that you are an upright citizen with a flush bank account and a job, buy specific medical insurance, pay a large fee, and wait for an indifferent bureaucrat to grant you benevolence. And it’s usually a no. (See this piece that notes more than half of African visa applications to visit the 29 european countries in the Schengen region are rejected).

So the trip that was supposed to be with the daughter of my heart is me alone. And I don’t really have a desire to wander the streets of Vienna, Saltzburg and Budapest on my own — so I cobbled together a cycling trip.

Tomorrow, I’ll put together my disassembled bike with no backup. This will be a Feat — I’ve only really done that once, and it wasn’t this bike. Monday, I hope, I’ll wander and rest. Tuesday, I’ll take off on a little ~300 trip over four days, riding from Vienna to Bratislava, then onward to Budapest. I’ll take the train back to Vienna and come home. Totally self-supported. Pretty flat.

Flatter, anyway, than the extravaganza I did two weeks ago, when I did a gear shake out in Ontario. I took the train to the eastern end of the GO commuter line in Oshawa, rode to Peterborough and stayed overnight.

I had a few discoveries on that trip, not least of which was that you’re not allowed to take a bike on a Via train (!) and that Peterborough doesn’t have Uber. My route home was more problematic than I planned. I also discovered that google maps will take you on a bike path that is actually just a 5 km skinny sandtrap. Hence, 110 km instead of the planned 85. And 800 m of ascent.

But that’s cycle touring. There’s the pretty map, and then there’s every turn of the wheel under your feet. I’m pretty good at packing by now (ever smaller panniers for the win!) — but the world is ever surprising. Send me good wishes for the perfect temp and lots of cheese sandwiches.

Fieldpoppy is Cate C-D, who lives on Treaty 13 land and has Big Feelings about privilege and crossing borders.

I’ve written this “Ask Fieldpoppy” advice column off and on for the past couple of years. With all the energy around “how do I want to do this year?” that comes with the first week in January, I thought it was a good time to dust it off.

I’m starting with a pair of questions that are all about the greyness of the northern hemisphere at this time of year.

Dear Fieldpoppy,

Over the holidays I got to take a proper break for myself for the first time in ages. It felt amazing! But I got in the habit of sleeping loads and now I don’t know how to reset myself to ‘real World time’. Even though I wake up feeling fine I just don’t want to get out of bed and be in said real world again. I’m actually feeling some minor depression and anxiety about the concept of setting an alarm clock again. Thoughts? Signed, Sleepy and Dopey

Dear Fieldpoppy,

How can I make it through the grey of winter? I can take and enjoy sun and snow and cold, and I’ve done a ton of things to find fun new ways to Get Outside in the winter. But this grey is brutal. Signed, UGH.

My sad little sunflowers,

I hear you. I went to Costa Rica over the break and when I got back to the colourless, static, hibernating world, I fell into some kind of funk and huddled over a jigsaw puzzle in my plaid jammies for two days. January in Ontario is … Not Inspiring.

Both of you have done some of the important foundational stuff to get through this time — Sleepy, you took a much-needed break (yay!), and Ugh, you have found things that keep you moving and going outside. The next step is to set an actual intention for January — not a goal, but an intention. A goal is quantifiable — e.g., “get outside every day for at least 24 minutes” or “do the annual January Yoga with Adriene 30 Day Yoga Journey.” These things are great (and they are two of my goals). But without intentions, they can feel hollow and easy to skip. And then you end up feeling worse.

By “intention,” I mean making choices not about what you DO but about how you ARE in this time. How do you want to engage with the truth of this world we are in? We’re explicitly talking about winter and darkness and cold, but I tend to believe in the precept “wherever you go, there you are.” How do you want to BE with the challenge and discomfort of this time, temporal or global? Brave and spirited? (Get out there and ride that fat tire bike, noticing just how brave and spirited you are). Future-oriented? Set a spring or summer physical goal, or plan a trip or a project, and throw yourself into your identity as a Travel Planner or Trek Trainer. Playful? Try doing something brand new (play pickleball! learn pottery!) or put yourself under a SAD lamp and pretend you’re an orchid. Optimistic and grateful? Cultivate the small daily activities that put remind you of the moments of grace, the joys, the possibilities of your life.

And — you can also give yourself permission not to fight the grey. I recently heard an interview with Kathering May, the author of “Wintering”, that really stayed with me. This book isn’t explicitly about “winter” — it’s about the winter of the soul. She explores the value of letting yourself lie a bit fallow, not fighting to find a springlike energy when you don’t feel it, but letting the rest and retreat reveal something new about who you are and what you need. Be with the truth of the discomfort, and see what is there. Meditate. Rest. Maybe that’s January for you. Just do it with intention and mindful observation, not by default.

Dear Fieldpoppy,

Sometimes with everything going on in life I am just so very tired. I want to move my body, but I also want to lie down. How do I tell if pushing through the tired to do some movement will be helpful or double down on my fatigue? Signed, Motivated but Exhausted

My dear little droopy daffodil,

When I’m trying to decide if I’m really too tired to move or not, I think about the fact that by the time we feel thirsty, we usually needed some water a while ago. And if we wait too long, we end up cranky and dehydrated.

You don’t want that to happen — but you also don’t want to glug down a big jug of movement just because it’s on a training schedule or you feel like you “should.” The trick — as above — is intentionality. What does your body actually need? What does your soul actually need?

So when you feel like this, try this. Lie down on the floor or a yoga mat. (Don’t go to bed or lie on the couch — this is intentional). Go into shivasana for a minute. What is there? What do you notice? Where is the desire for movement coming from? What does your body want? To stretch? to twist? is there restlessness? or are you surrounded by the enveloping bliss of rest?

When I’m in shivasana, I can often find what my body needs — usually a calf and hamstring stretch, but sometimes it’s saying “lie here.” Or, LIE HERE. And sometimes I hear a whisper of restlessness that means “you’re going to be movement-thirsty soon.” When I feel that, I dress for a run and go for a walk. And sometimes a run breaks out.

Dear Fieldpoppy,

I would love to know what makes challenges/resolutions “stick” for people. I set a lot of resolutions and they’re always dead on the ground by the end of January. Signed, What am I doing wrong?

Dear befuddled begonia,

There is a whole industry of social science (and bloggers) dedicated to answering that question. Feel free to click on any of those links for their take on this. But for me, it always goes back to intention and identity, just like in my first answer. Why did you set this goal? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to your idea of who you are and what you want to be?

My (long-ago) PhD research was about how we enact our stories of who we are and who we want to be in the world. We tend to generate a lot more energy around the things that make us feel like “this is the sort of thing a person like me does” than “this is the sort of thing that is good for me.” If your goals are sort of externally generated (“I should move more” or “I know I should eat better”), but they aren’t connected to your sense of self in some way, they remain external, and easier to hit the snooze button on. But if your commitments are linked to who you are (or want to be), you have a wider set of resources to engage with them.

Example. One of my goals is to improve sleep hygiene. I’ve had this goal for years, because I know I litter my bed with devices and toss fitfully around on the web of semi-sleep most nights. I know it’s not good for me or my health (and super annoying to my girlfriend). But the only way I make any progress is to explore my real intentions. It’s not “sleep better” — that’s the goal. Truly shifting this is about identity — wanting to be the kind of person who reads in bed and honours my health, not the kind of person who falls asleep with my phone in my hand. And it’s about the deep intention of being healthy enough and awake enough and energetic enough to engage in the world, not shaking myself awake with caffeine every morning.

So think about your challenges and goals. What are your real intentions behind them? Why do they matter — to YOU? Who will you be if you can live into them? You got this!

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives on Treaty 13 land in what’s currently called Toronto. Most of their work involves leadership development, strategy and coaching, and they have been very overly interested in other people’s stories since they were very small, according to their grade two and three report cards.

I’ll be 60 in 14 months.

SIXTY.

S.I.X.T.Y.

What the everloving eff.

Most of the people who read this blog know that Tracy and Sam started this whole enterprise as part of their project to turn 50 with the best fitness of their lives. Now, several of us are thinking about the next decade milestone, as Sam wrote about the other day.

In that post, she shared a quote from someone on substack who wrote “if your goal is to be a kick ass 90 year old, you can’t settle for being an average 50 year old,” who pushed for the idea of “winning at the game of life.” That requires, the writer said, of maintaining fitness in the “top percentile” of strength and VO2max.

Hm.

I have a pretty visceral response to this kind of competitive framing of aging. What the hell is “average?” And what the hell is “winning at the game of life?” Blech.

Absolutely, I want to age in a way sets me up for functional fitness and an active life for however long I live — in fact, one of my very first posts for FIFI, at the age of 50, was about being fit for “the lithe old lady inside me.” In many ways, I’m not that different from the dude Sam was quoting.

But I come at the intention very differently. One of the things I’ve learned over the past two decades is to let go of that kind of … voraciousness. Feeling like I have to meet some external definition of “top tier strength” or VO2max completely displaces the true gift of aging, for me — learning to be very present to what my body is saying, responding to its shifts in a graceful, grateful way.

Movement, strength, bendiness, balance — all of these things are tremendously important to me. But I do those things now with a kind of awe, a kind of gratitude, an amazement at what my body does. At amazement that even as I’ve weathered nearly six decades of life — of loves and adventure and bad choices and moments of grace and a pandemic and a world that never stops supplying new waves of grief and anger and beauty — with all of that, I get out of bed, I go outside, I feel the air on my face and feel energy and light and a need to keep moving. How bloody amazing is that. I am *alive*. What a glorious, unlikely thing.

I run much more slowly than I did when I was running marathons in my 30s. My body is heavier. My skin is softer. I need a lot more sleep, but I have a lot more insomnia. I have had to learn about menopause and vaginal atrophy. My eyebrows fell out, FFS.

If I think about things like whether or not my running time is in a certain percentile, I just feel a sense of loss, a sense of a “losing battle.” No matter how much I train, what I eat, how I structure my life, there will never be another 95 minute half marathon in my life. That was a whole other person.

It’s freeing to let go of that. And to be in companionship with my body, to appreciate it even as it changes, to ask it what it needs to enable me to do the things I truly want to do.

This year, those things have included — riding my bike alone around Montenegro and Transylvania, in blazing heat. Embracing my yoga practice. Working toward a 3.5 minute plank. Riding my spin bike through the fake zwift world. Grabbing a rare rain-free two hour slot on work trip to Vancouver to walk the 11 km around the Stanley Park seawall, tossing in three separate kilometres of running when I felt like it. What a gift.

When I turned 30, my commitment was to quit smoking and start moving my body a little more. I didn’t know that that goal would completely reframe my identity related to my body. What a revelation that was, to let that unfold. Like Sam, like Tracy, like a lot of us — I want to turn 60 feeling fit and strong. And I want that to set me up to keep moving, to keep being able to do the things I care about, with energy, with awe, with gratitude, for the rest of my life.

I don’t think I need a particular external challenge or goal to get there. I’ve been integrating movement into my daily life for 30 years now. I know how to do it. What I do need is to keep building my capacity for awe, for gratitude. For appreciation of being able to show up for what is important to me and to the world.

What about you? How do you orient yourself to aging and fitness?

Cate Creede-Desmarais wrote this from the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsail-Waututh peoples.

“I don’t know what to say right now,” said one of my friends. “So I just look at whoever I’m with and say “it’s CRAZY.” And then we both nod. I have no idea if we mean the same thing at all.”

It froze for the first time in Toronto this week. Pathetic fallacy. My soul is frozen, my ability to speak is frozen. I remember learning that the war in Vietnam was called “the living room war,” because Americans could watch it on their TVs while they were eating dinner. What is this war? Genocide visible through countless digital platforms. No pause button. I’m frozen.

This is a blog about fitness and movement. That seems like an impossible thing to think about right now.

A friend’s dad died last week. On the weekend he told me he noticed he had suspended all of his sense of movement, attentive eating. Grief distances us from our bodies. “Start moving, just a little bit,” I said. “The rest will come back.”

When my mother was dying, every time I left the hospital I walked hard, ran in the blasting sun, further and longer than I’d run in years. Pounding my feet into the trail near her house, the house she’d never come back to. Trying to get rid of the hornets burrowing into the little sidewalk between the garage and her house. Crunching through the fishflies that laid their annual blanket on the city as my mother died. Then after she died, I couldn’t move. Had to force myself to walk along the river, into the western sun, tapping my watch to make sure I was still moving as time slowed down.

Many of the steps of my life have been in Uganda and Rwanda, tending to children without families because of genocide, genocide directly caused by settler colonialism, when the Belgians set two Rwandan cultural groups against each other, setting up a power keg of power and resentment that eventually exploded when the Belgians left. Part of me is there right now, in the horrific memorial I went to 15 years ago where bodies are laid out in former classrooms, preserved in lime. The sign pointing out that French soldiers played volleyball on a mass grave.

After my mother died, I added my mother’s family name to my own. Partly to honour her, and partly to root myself clearly in my own settler colonial history. My family were among the first French settlers in the Windsor Detroit area, in about 1710. Adding the name Desmarais onto mine is a daily reminder that we have to surface and own the paradoxical, uncomfortable truths of our lives, of our ancestors, of our histories. The stories of how my people displaced — a white-washed word for genocide – the Ojibway (Chippewas), Odawa and Potawatomi Nations who formed the Confederacy of the Three Fires of peoples, who shared that land my ancestors moved onto. My ancestors who created the structures I get to live in today. For a long time I leaned into the parts of my identity where I was marginalized — my francophone family that lost their language, my queerness, my female-bodied experience. My adult journey has been to own the parts of my identity where I am the oppressor.

I watched the horrors of the Hamas attack, and I grieved. And I watch as Gaza is razed, and I grieve. It seems self-evident to me that everyone should be able to recognize zionism as settler colonialism, that this horror is what happens when you occupy land and behave as though the people already on that land are “other,” are less than, must be vanquished. Are not human. It’s happened over and over again in history.

I know not everyone sees Zionism this way, that the unique history of the founding of Israel in the wake of the holocaust means for many people, critique of israel equates to anti-semitism. I grieve for the fear and pain so many North American Jews are experiencing. And I grieve for the pain of North American Palestinians.

We need a way to own the paradox, this truth of humanity and history that we can be both victim and oppressor. That the quest for safety, for a better life, cannot endure when it means oppressing another people.

I am frozen in this moment, in this grief, in the powerlessness. Movement in every sense seems impossible. There is only breathing, trying to feel my humanity, my grief. Creating space to hold the complexities, to be with others in their grief, their fear, their need to connect. To collectively call for a #ceasefire and move toward a time where everyone can live with dignity and safety.

Cate Creede-Desmarais lives in Treaty 13 territory, the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.