Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
In the aquafit class I lifeguarded earlier today, there was a younger middle-aged woman with an older man. Sometimes they would hold hands while doing exercises. I assumed he was her father (or someone similar) and she was providing support. Turns out she is blind and he is her guide. Aquafit really is for everyone.
On Monday I had the privilege of lifeguarding at a women-only swim event in Ottawa. As far as the staff there know, it’s the first one organized at that particular pool, although we were told that a similar space was rented years ago for a privately-run swim.
Why women only? There can be many reasons, but one of the biggest in our multicultural society is that some women are not comfortable being seen by anyone other than their male family members. Other women may be self-conscious about their bodies. And some may simply enjoy sharing space with women.
A 2020 Danish study found that “The participants connected swimming with well-being and self-care and portrayed women-only swimming as a space of belonging, where they felt comfortable and safe and were not only protected from the male but also the ‘white’ gaze that they encountered in other situations, such as when wearing a burkini on the beach.”(Women-only swimming as a space of belonging, December 2020, Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise 14(2)). UK-based The Women’s Journal noted in March 2023 that “female-only swimming sessions can provide a safe and comfortable environment where women can exercise without feeling vulnerable or exposed. This is particularly important for women who have faced harassment or assault”. They also offer a a sense of community and camaraderie to women who may feel isolated or unsupported in other areas of their lives. And finally, they ensure more equal access to fitness and exercise for women who feel uncomfortable in mixed-gender environments.
The swim took some effort to set up: we hung tarps over every window in the facility so that no-one could peer in. At the last minute, we were advised that people could still peek through some cracks, so there was a scramble to tape things more firmly closed, and cover up gaps with garbage bags when we ran out of tarps.
We worried that not many people would come, but in the end there were some 120 participants for three hours. Not bad at all, considering that people told us they had only heard about the event the day before. But they were happy to come from all over the city of Ottawa.
So who did come? Women of all ages, many with young girls and their friends. I would guess that the majority were originally from North Africa or the Middle East, but there were also women who appeared to be of sub-Saharan or Indian sub-continent descent. There were women in burkinis, in tunics and leggings, in dresses, in bathing suits, wearing hijabs, head scarves, bathing caps, and glorious braids. There were women and girls of all ages from senior citizens to toddlers.
Will it happen again? I hope so. The head lifeguard on duty also runs women-only swimming lessons and mused about whether similar events could be run on a regular basis. Certainly the women who came to swim would welcome it, judging by the feedback we got. Several asked who they should contact to tell them what a wonderful experience it had been and how much they would like to see it repeated. If they do, I’ll be volunteering to lifeguard again.
Sunday was World Car-Free Day. The day before, there was a joyful critical mass ride and a climate change march. The biggest Kidical Mass Ride of 2024 in Ottawa will take place on Saturday. Cities for Everyone has free seminars coming up on The Power of the Commons and Towards Playable Cities.
These things are not unrelated and this article connects some of those dots. Here are a few of the highlights I took from it:
A fight for free, accessible public swimming pools, air-conditioned libraries, free museums, and community centers—can provide important heat relief and create places of fun connection for community members.
More free time can be a climate strategy. Lowering working hours (with living wages, of course) will give people more time to engage in a whole range of affordable activities—playing sports, gardening, hiking on public lands, or (importantly) organizing their community. There is also ample research that shows that a shorter workweek could limit carbon emissions, while also allowing people to live more fulfilled and balanced lives.
Connecting with nature and being outside has a proven positive impact on people’s well-being, but it needs to be accessible to everyone, not just those with cars or other expensive means of transportation.
Decarbonizing is not just a question of surviving climate change. It’s a question of creating policy to change our culture, and vice versa—the feedback loop we need to build a world we can all enjoy.
Motherload is a movie about cargo bikes and the people who use them. It’s going to be shown as part of June Bike Month in Ottawa. I won’t be able to attend, so I watched it on-line. Here’s my review:
Given that it is a self-funded documentary about an arguably niche topic, I was not prepared for a joyful, feminist movie.
There is quite a bit about the development of cargo bikes in the USA, with acknowledgement of the huge role cargo bikes play in everyday life in much of the developing world.
There is also plenty about the links between cycling, suffragettes and feminism going back more than a century. There is recognition of the inequitable access to transportation in the USA, and how cargo bikes could make a difference for poor and racialized communities, if cycling safely was possible.
But it was also a film with joyful scenes of kids having fun riding in, on or beside cargo bikes. My friend Cassie said her family had ordered their cargo bike before seeing the movie back in 2020, but it reaffirmed that decision! For her, being able to bike as a parent means freedom, reliability, physical and mental wellness, fun, and allows her to feel like she’s doing something to address the climate crisis. She just wishes more people had access to safe routes and could see cargo bikes as a possibility in their lives.
Though most of the cargo bike users in the movie live in places where there’s no snow, lots of people use them year-round in all weather, in Canada.
If you can’t get to a showing of Motherload, you can watch it here (free, with commercials).
Last weekend, I participated in the first Kidical Mass Ride of the season in Ottawa. What is Kidical Mass? From their website, it’s an alliance of hundreds of organizations from Canada to Australia united by the vision that children and young people should be able to move around safely and independently on foot and by bike. Children who are active by bike and on foot from an early age remain so as adults.
So where does the feminism come it? @envirojen.bluesky.social, a safe cycling advocate in Halifax says: “If you’ve attended one of our (Kidical Mass) rides, then you’ll know that many of us were radicalized by pushing a stroller, or cycling with kids. Motherhood has certainly helped me flex my movement building muscles.”
Change requires a mass movement. ‘Stop De Kindermoord’ in the Netherlands (1970s) and the ‘Baby Carriage Blockades’ in the USA (1950 & 60s) are historical examples of safe streets movements organized by parents, and in particular, mothers.
Historian Peter Norton, a professor at the University of Virginia, has been documenting how the movement for safe streets has largely been the work of mothers. He recently wrote about a protest in Montreal in April 1974, when about 70 parents, wearing black arm bands, marched to the office of Montreal’s traffic director, bearing funeral wreaths to present to him. They were calling attention to the deadly peril children faced on their walks to school. On paper, speed limits in school zones were 20 mph. In the absence of any signs near most school zones, however, motorists drove much faster. The parents demanded signs. The marchers were led by three mothers whose children had been injured by drivers. When the three arrived at the traffic director’s office he refused to see them, and had police escort them out. Before leaving, the women left their funeral wreaths for him at his office door.
Fifty years later the fight continues. As Cassie Smith, one of the Kidical Mass organizers in Ottawa says: Even now women have less access to cars and more caregiving responsibility giving us particular insight into the injustice of space.
This week, an eleven year-old child died while riding his bike in a supposedly safe area near his school. He was the friend of the son of one of my colleagues.
I got into cycling advocacy because of climate change and to have more safe access to the public space, especially for people on bikes, and because cycling is fun and practical. I was aware of some of the equity issues around cycling and active transit more generally, but I have learned a lot since, and now I’m angry. I hope I won’t still have to be protesting this shit for years to come, but I’m fully prepared to do so if necessary.
This post has a lot of different things crammed into it, kind of like an average December day. I tried to make them into a somewhat coherent whole but I’m not sure it worked. Let’s roll with it anyway.
On Day 3 of her 2020 Wellness Calendar, Martha telling us to Remember to Eat. This is another one of the basic that we often let slide during this busy month. We don’t feel like we have time to sit down for a proper meal so we just grab a snack and the next thing we’re cranky and running on empty. While I get that this kind of thing will happen from time to time, please do what you can to prepare in advance. That might look like making a plan about when you will take downtime for meals or it might look like planning for something quick to eat while you are on the run.
Speaking of all the busyness of the month ahead, one of the ways I’d like you to create space for yourself today is by ditching something from your to do list.
I know that sounds like heresy when there is SoVeryMuch to do but that’s exactly why it is a good idea.
Have a look at your to do list -whether that is on paper, on a screen, or in your head and turn your attention either to the list of stuff that you will do ‘if I have time’ or to anything on your list that you are absolutely dreading.
I would like you to ditch (or at least change) one of those things.
Yes, decide right now that you are not going to do it.
If it is something on your ‘if I have time’ list, then you will be able to create a little extra quiet in your brain. You will have one less thing that can float up to fill any downtime you are trying to create for yourself. And you will feel better about not doing it if it is a decision instead of a lack of time.
If it is something that you are dreading but that you really feel needs to be done, I’m wondering if you might be able to pass it on to someone else. Could there be someone in your life who would happily take that on – maybe not exactly in the same way you do but that’s fine too. Perhaps there’s someone you can pay to do it. Maybe you can trade disagreeable tasks with someone else. Or, maybe the task itself can be changed, reduced, or reshaped to make it less dreadful.
And, I realize that in one of the paragraphs above I told you to add something to your to do list (plan for your meals) and then immediately afterwards I told you to ditch something from your list. I stand by that apparent contradiction.
Adding things to your to do list that increase your well-being and your ability to take good care of yourself are more likely to reduce your stress than increase it. Taking good care of yourself increases your capacity to enjoy the rest of the preparations that you choose to include in your month and to keep the things you *must* do in perspective.
When I prepared last year’s Making Space posts I tried to include videos of people with a range of body types and abilities. I was moderately successful but I am determined to improve things for this year.
Since today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities I wanted to be sure to be open about my intention to be inclusive and to invite anyone who reads this to share any videos that they find useful. I don’t always know what search terms to use and I may be missing excellent videos because my vocabulary is limited.
These Making Space posts are not exactly the forum for an in-depth discussion of these issues but since I have your attention, I wanted you to know that the theme for this year’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities is “Transformative solutions for inclusive development: the role of innovation in fuelling an accessible and equitable world.”
I don’t think that my posts here are at all part of that sort of broad change but hopefully I can at least raise some awareness about today and give some of my readers something to think about.
I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about disability activism but some things things I do know are 1) every person on earth has the right to live with dignity 2) change depends on listening to those with lived experience 3) any practice, policy, or accommodation that increases accessibility, diversity, and inclusion is a good thing for everyone who makes use of the service/visits the building/ participates in the activity – an inclusive world is a better world 4) inclusive practices are not about catering to anyone or providing special treatment, they are about creating a more just world.
And I think we can all be part of that change by seeking more just and equitable practices in our organizations, workplaces, and daily lives.
Okay, back to the stated purpose of the Making Space 2022 posts: short workouts and meditations to help create space for yourself on your to do list!
If you’re not feeling up to a workout today, perhaps this meditation from Headspace might be just the thing.
However you choose to take good care of yourself today, I wish you ease in the process.
Please practice self-kindness.
All of my focus on progress after knee replacement surgery has been getting back on my bike on the trainer. That’s not as speedy as I hoped it would be. So I thought I’d remind myself and share with you some of the other ways this have gotten better in recent weeks.
Here’s some recent progress points six weeks out from knee replacement surgery.
♥️ I get up and down off the floor pretty easily now. I was avoiding it for awhile. This means there are a variety of exercises I can do that I couldn’t do before. Welcome back glute bridges!
♥️ I can stand for longer making standing exercises a larger part of my rehab program. Welcome back monster walks and standing clams. I’m also cooking more complicated meals.
♥️ At the gym I’m lifting weights again, mostly seated upper body weights but it feels good. Welcome back lat pull down and bench press!
♥️ While I still I can’t pedal forwards on my own bike on the trainer at home, so no Zwifting yet, my range of motion does allow me to pedal a recumbent spin bike at the gym. Yay. I’ve been gradually increasing the amount of time I ride the recumbent.
♥️ Now that my incision has fully healed I can immerse myself in water again. That means I can go in the bath and the hot tub but it also means I can do Aquafit classes at the gym. Time for those disco classics–It’s Raining Men!–and underwater skiing.
♥️ Also in preparation for returning to work next week, I’ve given up daytime naps. No napping means I’m pretty tired by the end of the day but that’s okay.
♥️ And maybe most importantly I’ve been thinking about things beyond my knee and recovery. I’m reading again but also I’m getting bored at home. I think that’s a good thing and a sign I’m ready to get back out there.
So I am the sort of person who is good at following the advice of physiotherapists. I’ve successfully rehabbed some serious injuries and I trust the professional advice of physiotherapists. I do what I’m told.
It’s also worth noting that I have exceptionally good benefits and they cover almost all of my physio costs. And yet, even for me, physio after knee replacement is tough and I thought I’d explore why.
First, advice about recovering from knee surgery can sound contradictory. The take home sheets from the hospital say to use your new knee as much as possible each day. It will help you heal faster from surgery and improve your chances of long-term success. But also it says to avoid pushing yourself too far too soon. So as much as possible but not too much. Yep.
And practically it feels like that too.
The knee feels good and so I go for a short walk. After that it swells up and is painful so it’s time for ice and elevation. I’m constantly moving between making the knee work and then helping it recover.
After I posted about going for a very short walk this morning, friends commented, great, now rest!
What’s as much as possible but not too much? There’s not really good intuitive measure at this stage since everything hurts a lot of the time.
Second, unlike other physio I’ve done this is really painful. It’s the kind of painful where you ice before and after and take pain medication around your pt sessions. Since you’ve just undergone surgery and things still hurt from that, you feel a bit like hiding on the sofa, covering yourself in blankets, and waiting until the pain goes away.
Third, it’s pretty time consuming.
Here’s a rough schedule of my days this week. Next week I’m hoping to be able to get on the bike trainer to help with my range of motion.
6 am breakfast, drugs, ice and elevation in bed
630 physio round one, basic stretching and mobility
700 more elevation and icing and getting ready for the day
Tiny walk
800 Breakfast round two, more pain meds, more elevation and icing
900 Physio round 2 mobility and stretching plus regaining strength
930 ice and elevation
10-12 free time for reading possibly napping
12-1 lunch
100 ice and elevation, more pain meds
130 Physio round 3, mobility and stretching and regaining strength
200 ice and elevation
230-4 free time for reading and napping etc
4-6 dinner etc
7 last round, 4, of basic mobility physio
Tiny walk #2
Bed with all the ice and more pain meds
That’s me on the deck post tiny walk, resting and icing, as friends and physio advised.
Patience my friends is going to be key.
Day 1 Surgery
Surgery was Monday, August 29th. It was supposed to be day surgery but my blood pressure wasn’t fond of the spinal so I kept flunking the physio exam to leave hospital. Each time I stood up my blood pressure sank drastically and I had to sit back down. That was frustrating, especially since the surgery itself went well, but I was happy to see they were obviously okay keeping you if you’re not well enough to leave. Yes, here in Ontario our hospitals are stressed but I felt very well cared for. The nurses and physios and the whole surgical team were lovely.
Day 2 Home!
Tuesday’s big adventure was making it from London to Guelph. Getting in and out of the car was the biggest challenge. I was happy to be home and settled into our ground floor back room with the fold out sofa. Usually it’s our Zwifting studio but no one is Zwifting right now. We have a main floor washroom and so I was saved the need to handle the stairs with crutches until I was a little bit more stable. For the first few days I relied upon a walker.
Day 3 My walker
Day 4
Today's progress report post knee replacement surgery, day 4, an in person physio visit and moving from walker to crutches. pic.twitter.com/DT4wWxyj2r
— Dr. Samantha Brennan (@SamJaneB) September 1, 2022
Day 5
Today's achievement was Sarah going into work today and me making out onto the back deck solo. Thanks to my mum for lunch. Hard to imagine doing this living alone. pic.twitter.com/KBo83dLuK0
— Dr. Samantha Brennan (@SamJaneB) September 2, 2022
Day 6
Day 6 post knee replacement surgery my knee has a knee like shape again. Thanks to all the icing and elevation it's no longer just a giant swollen blob. Also, I'm loving our back deck. pic.twitter.com/vKpnQmErUe
— Dr. Samantha Brennan (@SamJaneB) September 3, 2022
Also on day 6 I made it upstairs and slept in my own bed. Bonus!
Day 7
OMG Sarah installed a new handheld shower attachment and I successfully showered. The world is a better place today.
Surgical staples get removed and I have a follow up visit with the surgeon on the 15th. That’s the point at which I can ask about getting back on the bike on the trainer and maybe getting back to the gym for some gentle workouts.
Here are some of my thoughts so far about the recovery process:
It helps to have a team. Between keeping track of all the medication–pain drugs yes but also antibiotics and blood thinners and anti inflammatory drugs–and running out for ice for the ice machine, it’s a lot. Thanks Sarah, thanks mum, thanks Jeff. I can’t imagine going through this alone.
Functional fitness matters. I only needed the walker for the first couple of days and I’m pretty stable on my feet now even without the crutches. I’m using them for walking to help the joint but I feel pretty strong. The new knee is “weight bearing as tolerated” as they say. It helps too that I’ve got some upper body strength and reasonable mobility. All of a sudden when you’re trying to lower yourself into the toilet seat with one leg doing all the work and the other sticking out because it doesn’t yet bend, pistol squats start to make sense. We bought one of the raised toilet seats with handles but I really only needed it for the first couple of days. It’s packed away now.
Pain management is a thing. Part of me worries about pain meds and addiction. I also like feeling like myself. But knee surgery isn’t a time to try to soldier through. You need to keep moving and do the physio and to do that you need to keep the pain under control. There’s always some pain but I’ve been told to try not to let it get too far above 5/10. I’ve been using the heavy duty pain meds at night for sleep and before and after physio.
Physio, physio, physio. Recovery from knee surgery is a full-time job. I’m off work for at least six weeks and part of me wondered why. I could work from home and make my meetings virtual meetings. One reason is of course pain medication and judgement. There’s also time constraints. If you’re doing physio two to three times a day and you need to prepare for physio and recover after, there isn’t a lot of time to do other things.
This is also going to take a lot of patience. It’s tough work and I know it can feel like slow going. Wish me luck!
Happy to answer any questions anyone has about my surgery experience. Ask away!
For decades, families in southwestern Ontario have cooled off in the summertime heat at the St. Marys Quarry, formerly a limestone quarry that was converted to a public swimming area in the 1940s.
Thank to a recent addition to the quarry—the Super Splash Waterpark—there are two different swimming experiences for quarry goers. I share about my one experience, which was shaped in part by the other that I did not have.
Before the coming of the Super Splash Waterpark (SSW), with an admission ticket guests could swim around freely to about the middle of the quarry. The basic park now includes play features like a few rafts, a slide, and a trampoline.
The Super Splash Waterpark website explains that for this added option guests pay general admission and then 3x more to access to a giant inflatable on-the-water playground. Only a limited number of tickets are available for 2-hour time slots. Reservations are made through an online portal.
With one of the hundred spots reserved for SSW, at the quarry get a wristband, a fitted yellow life jacket, and a safety primer. SSW guests must access the inflatable playground by swimming through the “basic” swim area, now limited to the front quarter of the quarry.
The SSW park has a large set of access and safety rules. Few if any of the quarry’s water features are fully accessible, but the SSW definitely isn’t. Here’s a view of the quarry from land.
You might predict where my story of goes next. Some friends and I decide to go to the quarry, but due to the limited number of SSW tickets only half of us get access to the inflatable park. The rest of us—basic access only.
Let me tell you—there is nothing that makes an inflatable water park look like more fun than when your friends can go but you can’t (even if you are an otherwise mature, mid-life, child-free cis-woman). I sat on the grass in my suit, grumpily contemplating whether I would go in the water at all. Take that, quarry!
I asked a friend (who had walked away from her computer mid-reservation so was similarly relegated to the basic quarry area) how a 10 year-old kid might feel seeing but not being able to access the SSW. She recited some parenting wisdom about how making one’s own fun on the basic quarry side is better because it builds character. But I already had character, my 10 year-old self whined—what I wanted was the fun-looking waterpark!
My gaze could not even escape the inflatable obstacles that filled the quarry horizon, a constant reminder of where I could not go, the fun I could not have. Even my once-greater swimming freedom was reduced to a quarter of the quarry by that blow up monstrosity!
My friends eventually came back from the inflatable side—removing their special wrist bands and yellow life jackets—to spend time with the rest of us. And, as the oldest ladies on the trampoline on the “basic” side of the quarry, we did indeed make our own fun.
Aside from my poutiness, it all seemed some sort of microcosm of the inequalities besetting some exercise activities in a capitalist society: only a percentage of people get access to what looks like a bigger and better time if they plan in advance, have the added money to spend, and are physically able to participate. Those with less info/tech savvy, disposable cash, and/or differences in ability are more likely to be excluded but must also watch from the sidelines.
My friends reported that the SSW part of the quarry was harder and more tiring than they had expected, and they probably wouldn’t pay for it again.
If I went back, would I choose to plan further ahead to reserve a limited SSW ticket, even if the park is less accessible, I have to pay 3 times as much, and I may not even have that much more fun?
Sadly, my answer is probably yes—because I know that the real privilege of privilege (in a capitalist society or a two-tiered Waterpark) is having the freedom to choose.
