This week I’ve been thinking about and engaging in small journeys. Starting Monday, I did a 4-day meditation workshop — just an hour a day, but at 7:30AM. In the morning. Anyone who knows me even a little is aware of the magnitude of that feat.
I’ve meditated off and on for decades, and am using the occasion of this pandemic and social uprising time to restart a daily practice. Doing something daily is a commitment, and starting small is everyone’s advice. Small can be powerful, especially when it’s repeated over time.
I never agreed with the idea that familiarity breeds contempt—I mean, who thinks that’s true? Hmmphf. On the contrary, familiarity for me breeds concentration, security, and the leisure to be creative with what one knows well.
Which gets me to this post I wrote in 2016. I was extolling the virtues of non-gob-smacking nature, which we can find around us in our own neighborhoods. I still believe it, and appreciate the capacity to relax into the familiar and down-home pleasures of other people’s summer gardens, local parks, nature trails that are open, and water of any kind.
I hope you are able to get out into small and nearby nature. If you have, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
SamB shared a fun meme this week, and it resonated deeply.
The picture has a bowl of chocolate ice cream and the caption reads “Be honest with yourself: are you getting enough rest and are you eating enough ice cream?”
Now set aside issues regarding dairy and sweets and think about the message in this meme.
First are you getting enough rest? Probably not. I know I haven’t been getting my full complement. Part of it stems from needing to get stuff done. Often I look to the three hours after everyone has gone to sleep as my own time. I recently discovered this concept has a name: Revenge bed time procrastination. The literal translation from the Chinese calls it “suffering through the night vengefully.”
Daphne Lee at the Greatist says revenge bedtime procrastination is “a type of compensation, a psychological strategy that allows people to redirect their frustrations and insecurities.”
An interesting idea but I’m still not getting enough sleep. I’m on a mini vacation this week so I am sleep training myself and taking naps to recoup.
There is a lot of work to do on many fronts and I realized that not getting enough sleep is the direct line to burnout city. If I am a crispy critter I’m prone to poor decision making and in my fitness work, that leads to injury.
As to the ice cream part, that is a different story. We often use food, and treats like ice cream to self soothe. It’s been a stressful year. If the pandemic weren’t bad enough, daily I hear news that dismays, terrifies, and immobilizes.
Things like Murder hornets. Overly aggressive rats. Swarms of flying ants. Deer and goats run amok.
I digress. The point is self care matters. A little ice cream won’t do you any harm. If that’s not your jam, maybe a bike ride, or a walk in the woods, really anything that will take out if the weirdness that represents 2020.
I read that self care is a privilege, and for some aspects of self care like a pedicure, or a massage, the lack of economic security can make self care of that sort seem impossible.
I’ve also seen suggestions that not reading the news or stepping away from an issue is also privilege, and yes, it can be.However, burnoutis a risk and poor mental health as a result of overwhelm is nothing to joke about.
So have a nap and enjoy your treat. As for me, there is a bright red chair waiting for me so I can sit and watch the clouds go by. And I’m hoping later, after a walk, there will be pie.
Martha fit at 55 likes long walks on the beach with the wind at her back.
There are four blog topics I’ve been thinking about that are all tangled together. Common threads weave through them and they are all part of the same story. Really, it’s a story about strength, gender normativity, and women’s muscular bodies.
First, Catherine wrote about the names we use to describe our bodies. Catherine’s focus is on how complicated that task is when it comes to self-description. I agree but I think it’s partly because the words I want don’t really exist. I lament that there are so many positive words for muscular and heavily built men and no such words for women. Words for larger athletic male bodies? Burly, husky, substantial, strapping, brawny, to name just a few. Note that they are not necessarily gendered but they don’t work so well for women’s bodies.
Sidebar: There have been attempts to reclaim this language.
Second, I wrote about dad bods, asking yet again, where are the muscular-but-gotten-slightly-softer-with-age women’s bodies, the mom bods? Women can be svelte and muscular and desirable but most really strong women are actually large. It’s why there are weight classes in lifting. But no one sings the praises of larger, athletic women’s bodies.
Fourth, and finally, it hit home again with my Zwift avatar. I’m large and she’s medium sized because in Zwift the men’s avatars come in small, medium, and large and the women’s only in small and medium. So even when I am racing with men who weigh the same as me their avatars are much larger! It’s extra odd because your weight is no secret in Zwift. If you’re racing your weight is a matter of public record and it’s easily determined by looking at your watts per kilo and your speed. It’s simple math.
I’ve written about this before saying, “I have one complaint about my Zwift avatar. She’s medium sized person and I’m a large sized person. That’s odd because avatar size is based on your actual kg. It turns out that in Zwift women only come in two sizes regardless of how much we weigh. We’re either small or medium. Men come in three sizes, small medium or large. Here’s an explanation of avatar sizes. So when Sarah and I ride together in Zwift we’re the same medium size. That’s weird because IRL she’s medium and I’m big.”
So like there are no words to describe my body type, there are no avatars either. The message is clear. No woman would want to look like that.
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Here are some images of large, strong women, stronger and more muscular than me.
Image Description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a woman from the 1920’s, posing with her arm flexed. She has visible muscle in her biceps, triceps, forearms and shoulders. This juxtaposed with her vintage pincurl hairstyle makes for a striking image.
And here’s a modern day image of a strong woman. Jennifer Ferguson is A BC nurse in her 40s who is one of the strongest women in the world. She deadlifts cars for fun.
Thanks Zac Efron! His new show, Down to Earth, is all over my newsfeed (confession: I haven’t seen the show) and I read that viewers are “swooning over his facial scruff, chest hair and lack of a defined six-pack.” See Zac Efron’s ‘dad bod’ transformation on Netflix show shocks fans.
Just once more with feeling, WHAT ABOUT THE MOM BODS?
There’s lots of love for Efron all over the internet with a special emphasis on his love of carbs! Again, that’s great. He does look pretty good. But can you imagine a woman celebrity being praised in these terms? I think we should start a #mombod trend for all the muscular not chiseled hot women out there.
Now, that feels like I’m describing a dream. I was in SE Asia? Just wandering the world? Doing whatever I felt like? This YEAR?
That’s the thing. Since then, I’ve worked out another 227 times, easily sailing past my “220 in 2020” goal just past halfway through the year, behind Tracy and in parallel with Sam.
Counting those workouts is a thing, of course — and I’ve written a ton over the past four years of the impact of being in the “217 in 2017” etc support groups. I credit the group with a transformative shift from being a “person who works out and does fun fitness things” to being a person who moves my body, pretty much every day. In 2019, my last workout — a YWA for new beginnings, at 10 pm before going up on the roof for those aforementioned fireworks — was number 355. This year, I’m well poised to blow past 400.
But what does that mean, exactly?
I looked at a few of the photos in my camera that represent workouts 79 – 228. And I realized that this list of days and movement is one of those pandemic diaries historians have urged us to keep.
Workout 78 was the last time I did a class in a gym. I was ill for a few days after that (possibly mild covid?) , and the next workout was “nighttime walk, looking at all the closed shops and restaurants.”
Flicking through those March and early April workouts, I see how we were scrambling to make meaning. Dark nighttime walks — was it even okay to go out for a walk? Social distanced walks with a friend, prompting someone in the 2020 group to ask me if I thought that was okay to see anyone from outside my household. (Since I live alone, my answer was, yes, outside, and distanced. But her pouncing on me made me grumpy). I see a few runs that I felt anxious acknowledging because of the uncertainty about whether it was okay to exercise outside without a mask, and remember all the flurry of that one experiment about bikes and airborne particles that turned out to be not relevant. I see a walk I took on Good Friday on the Spit I didn’t post about publicly because people in my social media feed were shaming people who were “flaunting” their ability to to outside, making people who had to stay inside feel worse.
Against that, I also see resilience forming. Alex figuring out how to do meaningful, personalized classes via zoom, with bags of books and soup cans. Making thoughtful decisions about continuing to go outside but going quiet about it. Moving my body to keep myself from being washed over with stress, with the unease of uncertainty.
Then normalizing kicked in. The next slew of workouts in the list are rapidfire and consistent — Alex workouts, some YWA, runs, more long walks. Realizing how much I missed incidental movement, and adding skipping in the middle of my day, more short walks. Going after new physical challenges, like crow pose and freestanding handstands.
Then, with spring, more freedom. More runs and walks on the Spit and in the Don Valley, some woodsy hikes with Susan, a virtual 5K run, fundraising to replace a little bit of the money usually raised at the Pride and Remembrance run.
Somewhere in May, I also finally got my bike out (much later than usual), and rode on the Spit, around the city, out of the city, by myself, with Kim, with others. Turns out my bike is such a signal of autonomy, of personal strength, that once I got on it, my entire experience of the world changed. I started riding my folding bike to errands so I could swoop along like I was traveling somewhere. I squished in 30 km rides after a long day of zoom. Things shifted so much that even when I was out for a long ride with a friend and had a bad flat a couple of weeks ago, it was just … normal. He rode back to the car, I waited in a park, happy, social distanced, delighted with the world.
My notation in the FB group for #223 looks like this:
The flippancy, the intensity, the pure silliness of running in this kind of heat? This feels so far away from the defensiveness of acknowledging my runs or walks in March and April. And it makes me realize that I have written the story of this pandemic — so far — in my body. And my body is what’s let me ride out the experience so far.
Over the past four years, my 220 in 2020 — which has really translated into pretty much “every day in 2020” — has carved me into a person who can use my body as an instrument for navigating the world I find myself in. Pre-covid, I navigated quests and joy, like the feat of 108 sun salutations, deadlifting 200 lbs just before my 55th birthday. During covid, it’s given me a powerful means to experience, to feel, to make meaning, to process, to sweat out or fling off the anxiety of the world around me.
I’m not running around dripping with optimism or gushing about the Gift of The Great Pause — like most of the people I know, my life is harder. My work is just logistically harder, I worry about the world and especially the people I love in it, the people I care about in Uganda are suffering, my work horizon is uncertain, and I miss the dark intensity of spinning classes, the floating shared breath of yoga classes, the clang of heavy weights hitting the floor. I miss hugs.
But my habit of movement? It’s kept those things in perspective, given me a buffer that keeps the spirals of fretting or anxiety or irritability at the n-teenth zoom meeting at bay. It’s kept me present to the ground under my feet, the energy and persistence that are serving me well.
Right now, those feet are a little tender, with some nerve inflammation that got triggered in that silly hot run last Friday. But I know how to incorporate that tenderness into what I do — safely, carefully, with trust that things will shift. And in my body? Gratitude.
What story would your pandemic movement journal tell?
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who is frequently flinging herself upside down in Toronto.
As an avid blog reader and writer, I knew that Sam was doing a lot of activity during the pandemic. It’s been cool to read about her Zwift rides, yoga with Adriene sessions, and of course the backyard weight sessions. Oh, yes– there’s Cheddar walking, too.
As a member of the 220 workouts in 2020 group, I’ve been seeing others continuing or even amping up their workouts. One member is doing 25 pushups a day for 25 days, and others have devised their own virtual exercise plans. And yes, there’s lots of dog walking going on.
Here’s what’s been happening with me: I started out pandemic exercise in mid-March with lots of zoom yoga classes. I loved them and was thrilled to get more time on my mat without having to leave my house. I walked some– alone and with my friend Norah. I even did some strength mini-workouts, using the NYT 6-minute workout. If you want to read more about that, check it out here.
After a few weeks in lockdown, though, I lost momentum. Zooming for my academic job, managing my own uncertainty and helping distressed students was exhausting, and I felt pretty flattened by it all. It became much harder to leave the house. I did walk with friends, but less by myself.
Zoom yoga was still there and still appealing, but partly because of Zoom fatigue and partly because of pandemic disregulation and doldrums, that slowed, too. Not having a schedule that requires me to leave the house and be places at particular times (for work or play) left me struggling in the most basic ways: my sleep, eating and exercise patterns suffered.
Then school ended, but there wasn’t that feeling of relief I always get. We continued to have a lot of meetings and webinars. Those meetings and webinars will be happening all summer long to help us prepare for fall instruction. So it’s not a regular summer in any way at all. Of course this is true for all of us.
If others of you have had similar experiences, you are definitely not alone. I hear from loads of friends about how hard it is for them to maintain schedules and routines without some of those external cues and stimuli and structures. Team Less is real, my friends. Just as Team More is.
One big thing I’ve done to deal with being on Team Less is to restart daily meditation. I took a 4-day Zoom meditation workshop with Alex from my yoga studio Artemis. It’s really helping me. As I love making lists, here’s a list of some things it’s doing for me:
It made me get up early for a 7:30 class, so it’s helped me reset sleep hours a bit;
It’s offered me various meditation techniques which I already knew a little about, but needed some help getting reacquainted with;
It’s provided company for me in my meditation, in the form of other students and the instructor;
It’s helped me slow down some of my anxious thought processes, and identify them as such– just some anxious thoughts I have at some time;
It’s helping me put together some new structures for myself, and think about how to proceed in this new environment;
And it’s telling me that sometimes, less can be more.
In light of the last item, I’m now putting together a new team, Team Less can be More. Yes, I may be doing less physical activity than I envisioned for the summer, but I can be accepting of where I am, enjoy what I do, and notice the times I have more energy and oomph to go out and walk or swim or bike or do outdoor yoga or paddle, etc. And then maybe do some of those things sometimes. Who knows what is possible…
One important last note: we at the blog spend a lot of time thinking and writing about our relationships with our bodies and with movement and with self-care over the course of human events and the life trajectory. The fact that some of us are moving more and some of us are moving less at any given time is information for us, and we are sending out that information in the hopes that it will help others in their relationships. I like using the language of Team More and Team Less can be More because what we are really doing here is intramural scrimmage. We’re working together to find synergy– benefits for the whole through interaction of our diverse and inclusive parts. Sam’s post inspired me to think about how I’m reacting to a pattern of less activity, and share it with y’all. I hope it’s helpful.
What are you finding from your patterns these days? Do you need more? Do you need less? We’d love to hear from you.
In a case of weird timing, today was also the day I had to go the campus fitness centre to empty my locker. There was a pretty strict COVID-19 process involved: I completed an online self assessment tool and then was asked the same questions at the door. I wore a mask and used the hand sanitizer. I stayed 6 feet away from the one other person allowed in at the same time as me. I carefully followed the markings into the locker room and exited through a different door.
There were other rules too: No personal bags. Instead, they provided a plastic bag. No friends. NO symptoms (fever, cough, runny nose, sore throat, or shortness of breath. No travel outside of Canada in the previous 14 days. NO close contact with a confirmed or probably case of COVID-19.
All good. Mission successful. I actually wasn’t sure what I’d left there. Turns out it was all my swimming stuff. Three fitness bathing suits, paddles of various sorts, bathing caps, goggles etc.
It all felt strange and sad. When I left the gym for the last time in March I think I was imagining being gone for a couple of months. Lately the long haul nature of the pandemic is starting to hit home.
In the meantime, Gryphons Fitness staff are offering lots of Instagram Live classes. You can see them by following their Instagram channel. In the fall, some of these classes will move outdoors for students who are here in Guelph.
The numbers are really good for the online classes. Have a look!
Woohoo! I hit 220 workouts in the year 2020 yesterday. That was my goal for the year. And here we are just past the halfway mark for the year. Weird times. Cate also made it to 220 this month and Tracy was there exactly a month earlier. Wow.
What was my 220th workout? A lunchtime TRX all body circuit.
And now in 2020, I’m way ahead of my goal. So clearly I’m working out more consistently. Like Cate, I find moving is a pretty central habit now. I don’t much think about it. I just do it.
What am I doing?
Here at home I walk Cheddar the dog in the morning before my knee gets sore. At lunch I do resistance training with bands, or I use the TRX or the kettlebell. At night I’m riding my bike on Zwift or doing Yoga With Adriene. On the weekends, I’m riding outside some.
But the thing is, I don’t think it’s just that over the years of counting workouts, I’ve succeeded in making it a habit. That’s true. I’m not discounting that. It’s not the only thing though. There are also pandemic related reasons I’m working out so much.
It gives me a mental break from doomscrolling (my fave new word/phrase). By the way, here are some tips to help stop that habit. It helps me sleep. Exercise helps my moods. It’s a thing I can do when I feel like I can’t do much else. And more than all of that, exercise now structures my time and bookends my day. I’ve never worked at home before and it’s all a big blur of work and leisure but workouts mark the beginning and end and midpoints of my pandemic days.
Interestingly, serious runners are running less. People who in the past ran four or five times a week are running less. Why? The main reason that people give is that there are no big events, no races, no marathons to train for.
We’re all everyday exercisers now. Casual athletes are working out more and serious athletes are working out less.
See you at the path along the river! I’ll be the one walking the happy golden dog.
Sam shared an article with our bloggers, from the University of Toronto’s website. The article is about a study that “finds that tight, revealing workout gear can negatively impact physical performance”.
Did this study look at whether men who run without shirts on are slower? No. Did it look at whether men who wear tank tops instead of t-shirts at the gym show lower progress with their heavy lifts. No. Instead, Catherine Sabiston and Timothy Welsh, both professors at U of T’s ’s Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education (KPE), wanted to see if existing research that suggests women who wear tight or revealing clothing perform more poorly on cognitive tasks – as compared to women wearing loose or more concealing clothing – could be applied to physical performance as well. I’m not sure if there’s existing research that suggests men who wear tight or revealing clothing perform more poorly on cognitive tasks, but I doubt it.
Picture of a man running in shorts, no shirt. A woman with blonde hair, tied in a braided ponytail, wearing a blue headband, sports bra and shorts, a pair of yellow with white sneakers, smiles as she lifts a purple dumbbell on both hands.
Now, I am not an academic. Out of all of the bloggers at FIFI, I am probably the least academic. Maybe I’m not down on why some studies are carried out over others, or why some research is considered necessary and other research isn’t. Nor am I an expert in setting up studies fairly and making sure they are carried out in a scientifically sound way. But I have some questions in relation to the point of this study.
A girl in pigtails, wearing black framed glasses, holding a book, with her arm raised. She has questions.
Why is this a necessary study? What good does it do to carry out this type of study? Do women need more attention from others about what they should or should not be wearing? Will it benefit society somehow for women to know that they may not do as many reps at the gym if they are wearing shorter shorts or a crop top instead of a baggy t-shirt and leggings.
The article quotes Welsh as saying, “It is thought that these differences may emerge because the tight clothing activates body image and objectification processes that may shift cognitive resources to the body and away from the task.” It also says, “Using a sample of 80 women, aged 18 to 35 years, the researchers randomly assigned tight and revealing athletic clothing to some women and loose and concealing athletic clothing to others. All participants completed the same visual-motor aiming task to assess measures of motor performance in time and space. In addition to the clothing, participants were primed to be conscious of their bodies via measurements of height, weight and waist circumference.” So my question here is, did they do the same study without priming the participants to be conscious of their bodies via measurements of height, weight and waist circumference?
Perhaps, the results are related to a persons predisposition to be primed for such distraction, rather than the type of clothing they are wearing.
Also, who decided what is revealing? I bet if you asked 20 different people, they would all have a different idea about what should be considered revealing.
And, maybe if the study included women over 35 you would have a different result also. Maybe women who are older, are less likely to be distracted by what they are wearing and are more likely to be wearing whatever they are wearing out of function? I don’t know if that is true, just a thought.
When I do my HIIT workouts I wear a tank top and tights. When I’m running in the spring/summer I wear shorts, a tank top, my fashionable 🙂 water belt and hat. The clothes serve a purpose. Keeps me moving easily. Wicks sweat away. Don’t rub me the wrong way. Personally, I wouldn’t be able to workout in baggy clothing as it would feel clunky and would make me sweat more than I already do. That said, I see other women wearing long sleeves, baggy t-shirts, etc. all the time and they seem perfectly comfortable. I also see women wearing short Lycra shorts and bra tops, and not only do they look comfortable, they are working their butt off. I can’t imagine them working out any harder than they are.
What about you readers? Do you think these types of studies serve any benefit? Help women perform better? Or does it sound like just another way of policing what women should wear, or feel comfortable wearing?
Nicole P. is enjoying her socially-distanced park workouts these days and not distracted by what she is wearing while doing lunge rows, sprawls and deadlifts.
Catherine’s post about past sporting loves–To all the sports I’ve loved before— got me thinking about the ones I’ve left behind, the sports that just didn’t work out, the new ones in my life, and sports possibilities in my future.
First, there are the sporting loves that got away. Why they’d get away? Younger me wasn’t athletic and it was only later that I came to love rough and tumble physical activity, team sports, and risky, speedy sports. My big regrets? Downhill skiing, mountain biking, rugby, roller derby. See If I were 20 years younger!
Second, there’s the category of things I loved but I can’t do any longer because of my knee. I’ve said goodbye and moved on. It’s not you, it’s me. That’s a long list which started with soccer (as it often does with knee injuries). You can run, said the knee doctor, but how much do you love soccer? Then goodbye running. Goodbye CrossFit. Goodbye Aikido. I miss them all and it’s still a sad thing in my life.
Waving a sad goodbye….
Third, there are things that just didn’t work out for various other complicated reasons. That includes cyclocross: I liked riding the cx bike but never did race. The season is pretty short and I discovered that as long as the roads are clear I’d rather be riding my road bike. And rowing: I loved rowing but you need to be able to commit to a team training schedule and my work is too demanding for that. And swimming: It’s an ongoing struggle!
A monkey and a baby sailing a dinghy. Black and white animated photo.
Fifth, there are future things. Why future? Well, hiking but it depends on knee surgery and recovery. There’s also golf, which I didn’t hate. And I do plan a return to rowing in retirement. I’ve always wanted to try curling. Any other sports and physical activities you’d add to my future list?
Hiking over green rocky hills.
Sixth, there are my regular standbys, my rock solid life long loves: Weights, bikes, yoga!
An animated graphic of a woman in a blue striped unitard lifting a weight with one arm
How about you? What are you sports loves? What are the ones you left behind? What’s in your future?
