Do you ever have the kind of day where working from home seems to put you to sleep? The home office set-up isn’t great so you have migrated to the comfy couch. You have no physical meetings to attend, so you just sink deeper and deeper into the upholstery. No-one ever seems to schedule breaks between those virtual meetings, so there is no chance to get up and stretch, grab a fresh cup of tea, or even go to the bathroom. Suddenly hours have gone by and you can barely move. Maybe that’s just me.
I am trying really hard to break this pattern. I use an app on my phone to remind me to get up and move for five minutes every half hour – when it doesn’t interfere with those meetings, or my flow when trying to write or revise documents.
When I do use that app, or just have a few free minutes, what to do? There isn’t enough time for a yoga session or a walk around the block; I feel silly doing jumping jacks or squats. But I can get behind a quick YouTube dance video. Today it was a couple of six minute videos from MOOV, a hip-hop/street dance studio in Ottawa.
There are so many to check out on YouTube. Zumba, hiphop, salsa, African dance, Bollywood, even Disney tunes – all in 10 minutes or less. But right now my favourites are the Caleb Marshall dance workouts. Inclusive, easy to follow, and just a little bit goofy so I don’t stress about messing. They are perfect. Check this out and see if it doesn’t bring a smile to your space as you bop around on your “way to the next meeting”: https://youtu.be/zxbN_r3Xx-w
I’ve been a fan of Alison Bechdel since the early 1990s, when she was writing a weekly niche queer comic called Dykes to Watch Out For long before the Bechdel test and the phenomenal mainstream success of Fun Home, her graphic memoir that became a heart-wrenching musical.
“Fan” isn’t even the right kind of word, really — I feel a strange intimacy with Bechdel for someone I’ve seen read in person once but otherwise have no actual relationship with. I don’t have this kind of “parasocial” connection to too many public figures — but Bechdel is one of the few people whose life tracks feel so aligned with mine, who reflects my lived experience of self in ways I rarely see in public space.
When I spread out my treasured original paperbacks of Dykes to Watch Out For, the chronicles of a crew of queer and lefty folks in a tofu, granola, make-your-own-family world of the 1990s, I see my own queer history and yearning for visibility, community, acceptance in narrative form. These books were carefully hoarded from the time when queer/feminist bookstores were rare, semi-hidden affirming oases.
When I was in my first serious relationship with a woman, I saw my own coming out angst mediated through the relationship between Harriet and her family. In Bechdel’s sly capturing of the “look” of mid-90s queers, I saw a community where the haircuts, male-of-centre clothing and sharp eyeglasses of my tight little breakfast club were the norm. When the DTWOF gang ventured into the world of procreation, and of women’s bathhouses and polyamory, of genderqueer identities, it paralleled my world. When same sex marriage became a possibility, I grappled with the same paradoxes of mainstream acceptance and subsequent scrutiny on my relationships as Sydney proposing to Mo with “Will you do me the honor of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?” DTWOF was the our pop cultural touchstone, a tracing of the evolution of queer culture as nothing else did. The comic faded out as queer culture became more mainstream, feminist bookstores disappeared and the treasured little pockets of carefully curated affirmation got woven into greater openness — but that imagined world was always a mirror realm where I both saw myself reflected back and could aspire to the confidence of a fleshed out community where queerness was taken for granted and people had language I hadn’t stumbled across yet.
In that fading, Bechdel also produced work that had more mainstream resonance in her graphic memoirs Fun Home (about her relationship with her father) and Are You my Mother (about her mom). Her success with these felt like my own sibling was being recognized in the ways I’d always hoped for — and her re-telling of her life in relation to identity, to family, to gender, to sexuality, to community, to wanting more for the world — opened up new spaces for me. So when I heard she had a new book, I ordered it without even looking at what it was about.
And lo and behold, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is about Alison’s relationship to her body, to movement, to fitness. It’s like I dreamed this book into being.
Like her earlier memoirs, this is a telling of Bechdel’s life, a literal trek through running and skiing as an adolescent, karate in her early 20s, hiking, yoga, cycling, more skiing — a bulging gear shed of four decades of changing culture AND Bechdel’s own grappling with her understanding of self as she experiences her body. Bechdel’s unique gift is her ability to depict a deeply familiar experience in “comic” image form while scraping four layers off the skin to reveal the sheer human emotion, existential questioning and revelation underneath– and then interpolating a philosophical inner dialogue with other voices. In Superhuman Strength, as she experiences and inhabits her body differently over her life, she — in true Bechdel form — also ponders romantic poets and transcendentalists like Wordsworth, Emerson, Coleridge and Margaret Fuller, Fuller’s descendent Buckminster Fuller, and Jack Kerouac.
On one hand, Superhuman Strength is an illustrated, accessible treatise of a lifelong ontological journey to understand the transcendence of movement, the eternal question of the interplay of body, mind and spirit. It’s a clever depiction of queer life in North America over the past 50 years, a where’s waldo of lesbian tropes and nostalgic recognition of moments where bare breasts at a womyn’s music festival were giddy and freeing, a reminder that the quest for a more progressive, interdependent, accountable world have been woven through our culture for a long, fatiguing amount of time. It’s a funny telling of how our culture has successively and obsessively grasped at different forms of exercise, movement and promises of spiritual enlightenment. And it’s one person’s gloriously, lovingly told life story, a fundamental grappling with meaning, with belonging, with presence, an unexpected, perfect additional melodic line in Bechdel’s life work.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who practically crowed picking up this book. Buy it from your local independent bookstore, like she did!
It’s spring when a cyclist’s heart starts thinking about NEW CYCLING KIT. And all the ads in my social media newsfeed are for cycling clothing. I wrote this a few years ago and I guess I still have mixed feelings about fashion and cycling gear. How about you? Any new cycling clothing purchases planned for spring and summer 2021? Let us know in the comments.
I use the kitchen counter to balance myself for 15 reps of mini-squats as I stare forlornly out the window at a cyclist pedaling by on my street on a gorgeous sunny day and wonder “when will I get to do that again”? I fell while riding recently, breaking and dislocating my femur. I’ve been told 6-12 months until full recovery. I’m fully weight bearing because of the long Cephalomedullary nail that is now a permanent part of my anatomy, so at least I can balance myself here long enough to do my PT exercises, but six or more months feels like an awfully long time.
As I was approaching my 50th birthday a couple of years ago, I became very conscious of time and how much of it I had left to do the things I enjoy. I made a focused effort to not wish away any of it. No longer would I say things like, “I can’t wait until this is over” to a crazed period of work, or “I can’t wait until -fill in the blank- event/ day/ activity is finally here.” As if anything between now and that time didn’t matter. Be in the moment, even when those moments are difficult and try to figure out how to make the best of it. Appreciate the mundane as well as the more exciting days. So when the pandemic hit, this approach was challenged. How do I make the best of things in this isolated new world?
I pondered how I could reflect back on this time and not think of it as a horrible year. Perhaps I could even consider it with some fondness. If I do say so myself, I think I did a pretty good job of adjusting. I grew to not hate working from home by finding pleasure in the little activities I could do during the day that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I befriended a herd of goats, which I blogged about. I cooked up a storm and returned to my recipe blog with renewed vigor. I took virtual group guitar lessons that turned out to be much less intimidating than in-person ones. And, of course I rode my bike and ran on trails because moving outside is typically a cure for all that ails me.
I settled into a new groove and was fairly content even though I missed a lot of activities from the Beforetimes. There was light at the end of the tunnel: more people I knew getting vaccinated, warmer weather was descending upon us, and I was making actual plans to partake in weekends away with friends this summer.
Bam! There I was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Me and my “fall risk” bracelet.
In the last many weeks I’ve been trying to come up with yet another new groove and a way to get through this period of time without wishing it to be over as fast as possible. I depend on movement and specifically movement amongst the trees to socialize, keep fit and stay in good spirits. With that gone, this mindset of not wishing away time has become much more difficult, but I am trying hard to stay the course.
As anyone who has been injured knows, the recovery process is just as much about tending to the emotional challenges as it is to the physical ones. I’ve been given a lot of advice during my recovery, all of it well intended, yet not all of it helpful. However, I’ve found on several occasions, someone has come along and said just the thing I needed to hear in that moment. At a particularly low point, a friend said to me in a texting conversation, “think of all the firsts you have to look forward to!” I stared at that text for a few moments and realized this was the thinking I needed to adopt. (Thank you, Rachel!)
Rather than expending my mental energy focusing on all the things I can’t do right now, I will recognize and celebrate each of the firsts I encounter. The first time walking with a crutch instead of a walker. The first time changing my bed sheets. The first time going into my basement to do my own laundry. The first time making something in my kitchen that was more complex than boiling water or heating prepared food in the microwave. The first time visiting my goat friends. The first pedal strokes on my indoor bike. (I’m hoping this last one will be soon.) This provides me with many milestones to reach and allows me to feel a sense of accomplishment regularly.
I’m curious to hear from the readers out there about how they made a recovery period not only tolerable, but perhaps even, dare I say, enjoyable.
Now that the weather is warmer (or threatening to be warmer) in the Northern hemisphere and vaccination numbers are going up (albeit gradually), many of us are heading back outside on two wheels. Yes, we’ve been dutiful and some even enthusiastic about indoor cycling (see Sam’s posts about the joy of Zwifting, like this one). But nothing beats riding outside on or off-road, amidst sun and clouds, greenery and flowers, breeze and sounds.
Two road bikes– mine in foreground, Pata’s in back, relaxing while their owners stop for coffee on a fine summer Friday. To be resumed.
Resuming cycling in real life does require us to dust off long-unused skills like bike handling, holding one’s line in high-traffic areas, paying close attention to road conditions and getting used to the abundance of sensory input.
If this seems challenging, imagine how pandemic-furloughed pilots feel about getting back into the cockpit of a 737. In a New York Times article this week, one pilot reported:
“It’s not quite like riding a bike,” said Joe Townshend, a former pilot for Titan Airways, a British charter airline, who was laid off when the pandemic hit in March last year.
“You can probably go 10 years without flying a plane and still get it off the ground, but what fades is the operational side of things,” he said. “There is a multitude of information being thrown at you in a real working environment, and the only way to stay sharp and constant is to keep doing it.”
Tell me about it. Driving a car felt similar after months of staying home and off the roads. And my dashboard doesn’t look remotely like this:
An updated 737 cockpit from the Mid-Canada Mod Center (no idea what that is). Many dials, levers, screens and buttons.
Still, having to process all that information in real-time, while on or off-road cycling, requires some focus and adjustment when we’ve been riding in our basements for months on end.
Which leads me to tip #1: remember that cycling (like flying) is a full-sensory experience.
We can all appreciate the need to brush up our skills with our sporting equipment, especially when it’s been a long time since we’ve used it. The same goes for aviation. From the article:
There is no “one size fits all” training model aviation experts say. Typically, pilots receive variations of training based on how long they have been idle. In simulator sessions they will be required to perform different types of landings and takeoffs, including those in adverse weather conditions, and practice for emergency events.
So, tip #2: Check that all safety and repair and emergency supplies are in good order.
As cyclists, we need to remember to take lights with us, checking that they’re charged, testing brakes, replacing weak or worn-out tires, cleaning out and refilling saddle bags with safety and repair tools, some dough, ID, etc.That will help us be ready if and when some weather or emergency situation comes up.
Once we’re back out there, we may not feel completely up to speed yet (as it were). Pilots feel this way, too:
“There’s certainly an aspect of rustiness that comes with not flying regularly,” said Hassan Shahidi, the president of the Flight Safety Foundation,… “As travel recovers and demand increases, we must make sure that our pilots feel fully comfortable and confident when they get back into the cockpit.”
“Before the pandemic these pilots were practicing the same procedures day in and day out flying over and over again. When you’re not flying as often your cognitive motor skills are degraded,” he said.
Here comes tip #3: know that you may be rusty (even though your chain isn’t). Give yourself some time and space to ramp back up in terms of speed, handling, distance, etc.
Airline pilots who were furloughed had to find other jobs during the pandemic. Many of them worked in warehouses or did package delivery. Those jobs paid some bills, but they didn’t feed them vocationally. For many pilots, flying is part of who they are, not just what they do:
“At the beginning there was a lot of worry about the risks of Covid, but now that vaccinations are underway everyone who has been recalled is so happy,” said [one pilot].
“We love the air, the view, the aircrafts and it’s so much more about those feelings than the money, although in this pandemic you realize that the money is also important,” [the pilot said]. “Everyone is making a big effort with training because they just want to get back.”
Which leads me to tip #4: despite the worries, the logistical hurdles, the changes in equipment and physical acclimation to exercise, for many of us, riding bikes is a big part of who we are, not just what we do in our free time. Getting back to riding means reclaiming that part of our identity.
For me, that means getting ready to fly again– in my case, down some hills on two wheels will do nicely.
Readers, have you been dusting off gear, checking batteries, replacing parts in preparation for a return to sportsing outside? How’s it going? We’d love to hear from you.
Today is World Migratory Bird Day. You know, those flying creatures with feathers. I’m not a birder but I am very fond of the wee yellow finches that show up every year in my garden. They remind me spring has finally arrived and the trails are open for walking, or running, or both. However, other birds not so much.
Image shows a church-like building with people running from birds that are flapping overhead.
The gif above accurately sums up my experiences with birds while enjoying some outdoor fitness. I’ve been pooped on twice, which I have been told is lucky. I am not sure why. Bird poop is weirdly liquid and solid at the same time.
My truly horrific bird experience occurred when a pigeon landed on my head as I was heading homeward after an epic trail walk. I didn’t know what hit me. It wasn’t until the pigeon dug its feet into my ponytail trying to stay steady that I realized there was a freaking bird on my head.
Image shows a little fuzzy bird trying to flap its wings.
Did I stay calm? Nope. I brought my heart rate back up to stratospheric heights as I was flailing around. The bird was flapping like crazy (and goodness, wings whacking at your head hurt like the dickens too). At some point, I realized I had shrieked as various people came to my aid.
The bird finally flapped away, taking my dignity with it. I still go walking but I keep a wary eye out for our feathered neighbours. I’m pretty sure I wear this look on my face.
The image shows an eagle walking determinedly on a beach with text above it saying: Me going on a stupid little daily walk for my stupid physical and mental health.
Have an excellent weekend and if you can, get out, enjoy the world, and watch out for birds.
The subscription unlocks video content that is parceled both in terms of explaining yoga postures, elements based flows, and remedies.
The first class I tried was “stiff kitty”. At just under 20 minutes it was a short class to help alleviate upper back and neck tension. My partner joined me as we went through the class.
I appreciated her frank discussion of biomedical stuff, like lifting bellies off thighs or how your hand freaks out sometimes. Jessamyn acknowledges that we do yoga in the spaces we have available to us in our bodies, no striving for perfection, rather radical self love and acceptance. I feel at home in her classes.
The time flew by as we went through a series of seated postures. Her approach to twists got me to a new awareness and engagement in my body. Pure gold. My partner and I both felt much better after the class. Yay!
Jessamyn’s delivery includes swearing. That works for me. She is an advocate for the legalization of marijuana. I live in Canada so that is not controversial for me. More than that, she shares her challenges, what she finds helpful and invites you to explore your practice with self compassion.
She is also hilarious and her wonderful sense of humour keeps me from taking myself too seriously or adding tension to my practice.
But also. Friends. She added a class in April 2021 called 1-900-sexercise and I have never felt so seen.
It’s a class about opening up hips, about feeling good about being on top, and celebrating what our bodies can do.
After having gone through a lot of the content I realized the thing that most impacted me about Jessamyn’s facilitation style is her class is ABOUT ME. Unlike other instructors who seem to be putting themselves out there demonstrating advanced postures with a smile, Jessamyn dials it down so I can try something new.
Of course she can do all kinds of amazingly impressive postures, she’s a professional athlete! But her classes are not about that, they are about you and me being on the mat, trying new things, revisiting old favourites, and taking time to care for ourselves.
My absolute favourite class is a twenty minute meditation class found in the “sprouts” section called “Open Mind”.
Jessamyn is seated facing the camera explaining that we don’t need to rush through our meditation practice.
Have you found a new way to approach exercise that is working for you?
We often say that you’re only competing against yourself, as if it’s fine to be competitive with your past self and sometimes problematic to care about beating others. But maybe we should be kinder to ourselves as we age. It’s not PRs forever. As we age we can’t beat 30 year old or even 40 year old versions of ourselves as athletes.
Second excerpt from my forthcoming book Growing Old, Going Cold: The Psychrolute Chronicles, about my Life as an (aging) cold-water swimmer by Kathleen McDonnell
I remember standing in line with my fifth-grade classmates as we waited to get our polio shots. I knew that throughout history there had been terrible epidemics, like the Black Death, where people dropped dead in the streets (which was actually more the case with cholera than the Plague). Like most people who grew up in the twentieth century, that was pretty much the extent of my acquaintance with serious contagious disease.
So when the Covid-19 pandemic and the worldwide lockdown hit in early 2020, I wasn’t terribly phased by it, at least on a personal level. Shelter-in-place? No problem. My spouse and I already worked from home. In fact, a lot of the writing of this book was done during that time. Social distancing? No problem there, either. On this part of Toronto Island the houses are close together – sometimes a bit too close together –so we don’t feel isolated. Like everyone else, we stayed separate from our daughters and grandchild, but FaceTime and outdoors visits made up for that. Get outside once a day for exercise? Let’s see, I live in a village on the edge of a nature park, on an Island surrounded by water. I venture outside, walk for less than five minutes and I’m in the water. Even in the time of Covid Isolation, there couldn’t be a better situation for a swimmer. As time went on, though, I realized just how extraordinary my situation was, how truly fortunate I was.
I began to see posts by fellow open-water swimmers going through withdrawal, lamenting that they couldn’t get to the water since parks and beaches everywhere were closed. It was just the time of the season when cold-water swim groups were gearing up, and now they were blocked. In the UK the guidelines were rigidly enforced in some areas, with patrolling bobbies chasing people out of the water. One determined outdoor swimmer stopped because she couldn’t stand the stares, the sense that onlookers were thinking, “Why should you get to swim, when I can’t?” A couple of months into the pandemic, swim memoirist Bonnie Tsui published an article in the New York Times entitled “What I Miss Most Is Swimming” “There’s a poignancy to being a swimmer now,” she writes, “in that we’re not able to do it just when we need it most.”
I was always disdainful of those single-lane lap pools, and the so-called “Endless pool,” a jet resistance you swim against, basically going nowhere – endlessly! But with the shutdown of conventional pools, swimmers were buying them or, more commonly, wishing they could afford to. Meanwhile, the open-water community in the UK refused to take the situation lying down. I saw a flurry of posts on online sites about blow-up backyard pools. Yes, folks who proudly describe themselves as “wild swimmers” were ordering blue plastic inflatable pools on Amazon, setting them up in their backyards, tethering themselves to a stationery object and proceeding to swim in place. Swimmers who hate chlorinated pools were dumping chorine into their backyard pools so they wouldn’t become germ infested. They patted themselves on the back for making do with cheery British pluck. And as pitiful as it all looked to me, I could totally understand. It’s an addiction, this need to be in water. I even felt a bit guilty. They had these postage-stamp-size pools, and I had a Great Lake.
After the full-on lockdown began to ease up in early summer, outdoor pools in Toronto began to re-open, but with restrictions. The city imposed strict limits on the number of people in the pool at any one time, and each swimmer’s time was limited to 45 minutes. Between shifts the pools were cleared and surfaces sterilized. People found they had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, and often didn’t even manage to get into the water. Lanes had to be booked ahead of time. Lockers were off-limits. Time in the change rooms was minimized: Swimmers were encouraged to wear their suits to the pool and home again. Once they managed to get into the facility, some users even found themselves singing the praises of the restrictions. “Forty people is nothing. You feel like you have the place to yourself. Maintaining distance is a breeze.” Ian Brown wrote in the Globe and Mail. Still, in the middle of a summer heat wave, Toronto pools were operating at a quarter of their capacity, in a city that sits beside an enormous freshwater lake.
Now, I don’t believe that the big concrete-and-chlorine tubs are going to disappear, nor do I think they should. But I look forward to a day when they’re no longer the default option for getting into the water. Covid-19 has changed the swimming universe. As I write this, indoor pools in Toronto are once again declared off-limits. And the various Open-Water and Wild Swimming sites I follow on Facebook show a huge jump in interest.
I found evidence of this in my own back yard. A neighbor of mine who is a dedicated pool swimmer told me the lake was too cold for her, even in the summer. But the lockdown forced her hand, and this past summer she broke down and bought a neoprene top. Off Ward’s Island Beach, there’s a line of buoys to keep the boats out of the swimming area. We reckoned they were a little over 50 meters apart. From then on, most days I’d see her doing her daily 1500 meters between the buoys. (Okay, so it is possible to swim lengths in a lake.)
The Wild Swimming trend may have begun as a necessary adjustment to pandemic conditions, but it’s taking hold worldwide, as more and more swimmers go for regular dips in open-air pools, lakes and rivers. At one point, demand in the UK was so high that the Outdoor Swimming Society was forced to take down its map of wild swimming spots, in an attempt to prevent overcrowding. Even colder weather, more challenging water temperatures and the discomfort of wriggling into dry clothing in public is failing to deter many of the converts. The National Open Water Coaching Association (Nowca), which operates bookings for 30 open-water venues in England and Scotland, said the number of swimmers in October was up fourfold or 323% year on year, after a 60% rise in swimmers over the summer. The surge in outdoor swimming has been a boon for watersports suppliers. Sales of swimsuits are down because of the closure of indoor pools, but cold-water swimming gear – wetsuits, dry robes, neoprene swimcaps – is flying off the shelves.
Covid-19 has introduced countless water-lovers to the joys of open water, and a lot of them will never go back. As one convert wrote on an Open-Water Swimming site: “Ya gotta love not having to book lanes at the pool.”
Kathleen McDonnell
Kathleen McDonnell is the author of nine books and more than a dozen plays, which have had award-winning productions in Canada and the United States. She’s also been a journalist and CBC radio commentator, and does a fair bit of teaching and public speaking. As befits a passionate swimmer, McDonnell lives on an island; Toronto Island, a unique, vibrant, mostly car-free community a ten-minute ferry ride from downtown Toronto where she and her life partner raised their two daughters. Check out her website: http://www.kathleenmcdonnell.com/.
