It’s spring! And time to get on our bikes and ride. And if you want to do that in skirts and dresses, go right ahead. Enjoy.
Sam is checking in for April, with good news and bad news
Last month’s check-in was all about sad knee surgery news.
Luckily, it’s spring and so even during the pandemic it’s not all sad. Sarah and I did get out for our first road ride of the year. On April 10th, Saturday afternoon, we did the Tour de Guelph 50 km route. We liked it so much we’re going to do it again. It’s all country roads, not very much traffic, and beautiful rolling hills.
We’ve registered for the Tour de Guelph, a local charity bike ride, chosen that for our route, and talked our friend David into coming along too.
Yes, I miss the crowds and the community but I’m riding anyway because it’s a cause that matters, more than ever in these times. Tour de Guelph supports Guelph General Hospital and other local charities. You can sponsor me here and Sarah here.
What’s the new covid friendly format? “Once again, we’re welcoming new and past riders to register, fundraise, and complete one of our Tour de Guelph routes, or any route of your own preference. Enjoy your ride any day starting Friday, June 4th and by Sunday, June 27th and in compliance with the current safety recommendation on the day of your ride.”
We haven’t picked a date yet but one weekend day in June we’ll go out, ride that fun 50 km, take lots of pics for social media, and BBQ in the backyard after.
So getting out on the road bike was April’s good news. The bad news was that I got sick for a full week. I even had to appoint an Acting Dean for a day. (Don’t worry. Not covid. I was tested twice.) Weirdly there are still serious stomach bugs around. I spent a night in the emergency department after getting severely dehydrated and passing out. The nurses and doctors were lovely. They were glad I came. They did all the heart workups and various other tests, declared me mostly suffering from dehydration and pumped me back up with fluids before sending me home. And I’m fine now. But boy, that wasn’t fun.
Recently I blogged about recovery rides, but last week was all “recovering” rides, as in recovering from illness. While sick I didn’t ride at all and I had a full week off the bike. I went to bed early, started re-watching the Sopranos, and lived on a diet of dry toast, apple sauce, and Gatorade. I’m getting better slowly and felt like doing some things but I wasn’t ready to get back to racing right away. Instead, while recovering, I gave one of the Zwift workouts for new parents a go. I’ve written about them before, see here. “It’s a workout collection consisting of shorter workouts for expectant moms, new parents, or any riders who are looking for “a less intense, yet still motivating, workout.” This one was called Sleepless, which feels about right at 30 minutes.
In addition to that I’ve been doing the HERD Wacky Wednesday and the DIRT family values ride on Tuesday. These are some of the best group rides on Zwift, I think. Friday I worked my way up to racing but just finished two laps out of four. Then on the following Thursday I rode the team time trial staying with the gang for two of three laps. I felt strong (until all of a sudden I didn’t) and I got a PR on that particular course.
Anyway, I’m almost back to normal and I’m looking forward to a)more Zwift racing and b)some leisurely outdoor rides (nowhere too far or too fast with our hospitals in the state of overwhelm that they’re in.) And I’m hoping May is a better month all round. ❤ ♥💕
Anti-fat-shaming videos: don’t do more harm than good, folks!
CW: Inclusion of an video that depicts a scene of fat shaming and purports to be anti-fat-shaming, but in fact is fat-shaming. Discussion of body weight, eating, fat-shaming. Mention of the “Karen” phenomenon. Mention of an ableist term and its use.
There’s a new anti-fat-shaming video out there, and it’s very sincere in its attempts to alert people to fat-shaming and to explain why fat-shaming is wrong. Here it is (again, note content warnings above):
The initial scene plays out roughly as follows: A fat woman walks up to the counter of a coffeeshop, orders a kale salad and a small chai tea latte. The cashier– a thin woman– calls her “Fatty” instead of her name, Patty. She also interrogates her about the order in ways designed to fat-shame her. When Patty receives her latte, the name written on the cup is “Fatty”. She runs out of the shop.
Customers in the shop look silently on the scene, no one speaking out, until one man comes up to the cashier. He gives a sincere soliloquy about how the cashier– called, yes, Karen– shouldn’t have bullied Patty.
Here’s where things go wrong:
- He defends Patty’s right not to be bullied, saying she deserves respect and is trying to change. Change what? Her body size, one assumes. Argh.
2. Then he cites her food choice of a kale salad and small almond milk chai latte as evidence of her desire to change. No, dude. You shouldn’t have gone there.
3. He compares Patty’s state of self to being sick in a hospital, indicating that none of those groups deserve shaming. This is getting really bad really fast.
4. He does go on to connect fat-shaming to stress-eating and point out that studies show that weight discrimination doesn’t “motivate change”. Sigh. This is a more subtle error, but error nonetheless. He’s fully on board with the idea that fat people suffer from fatness and need to be motivated or helped to change. This belief is at the heart of fat-shaming.
5. He uses a ableist word, “lame”, to criticize some views about body image. Gotta be more careful, dude. You don’t want to do more harm here.
6. Here’s my least favorite part: he wraps up his heartfelt speech by entreating the cashier to “accept them for who they are, and lovingly encourage them to be who they could be”.
NO. NO. NO. That is flat-out health concern trolling about body weight. Patty doesn’t need loving encouragement to become something else. Not from her family, not from her doctor, not from her friends, and not from the cashier. What Patty needs is for the cashier to take her order and give her what she asked for in a professional and courteous way. That’s it.
And honestly, I would’ve watched that video and shared it with others.
There are many other flaws in this video, but alas, my blogging time is up. Readers, what did you like or not like about this video? I’d love to hear from you.
Part 1: Covid-19 and the Tyranny of the Pool (Guest post)
by Kathleen McDonnell
An excerpt from my forthcoming book Growing Old, Going Cold: The Psychrolute Chronicles, about my Life as an (aging) cold-water swimmer.
It’s not that I have anything against pools. I’ve swum in plenty of them. They’ll do in a pinch. For competitive swimmers they make perfect sense – separated lanes, straight lines on the bottom, water sanitized to kill bacteria and other undesirable critters – everything is controlled, predictable. And there’s the rub. That’s precisely what those of us who prefer to swim in open, natural, “wild” water are trying to get away from. But in the modern world, pools have become the default option, and the pool mentality intrudes where it doesn’t belong.
Some years back I found myself back in Chicago in the height of summer. It had been a long time since I’d been in my hometown during swimming season, and I was excited at the chance to immerse myself in the waters of Lake Michigan once again. This would be a pilgrimage to Touhy Beach, the very source of my swimming passion. The day was calm, the water warm, and I headed in, anticipating a nice long swim. A Big Swim: A round-trip to a beach a half-mile to the south.
There was a lifeguard in a rowboat a little ways out from shore. I nodded to him as I passed the boat, on my way into the deeper water where I could commence my big swim. I dove in and my stroke quickly settled into a nice, steady rhythm. Until I got near the first of the short wooden piers and saw the lifeguard boat in front of me, blocking my progress. I tried to swim around the boat, but he rowed in front of me again. I stopped swimming and faced him, standing in water that was no more than shoulder-deep.
“Something wrong?”
“You’re not allowed to swim lengths here, Ma’am.”
“Lengths? What do you mean, lengths?”
He just shook his head at my question.
“Sorry, Ma’am. Swimming lengths isn’t allowed here.”
“You mean, I can’t keep swimming in this direction?”
“That’s right, Ma’am. You have to stay in this area.”
“Why? It’s not very deep here. I’m a good swimmer.
“We have to keep an eye on everyone in the water, Ma’am. You’re not allowed to swim lengths here.”
Again with the lengths! Not only was I not permitted beyond the pier, it appeared I was only allowed to bob up and down in this narrowly-defined area. I’ve been “ma’amed” before by lifeguards at my home beach in Toronto and I usually try to keep my cool. But it was all I could do to keep from yelling at him. “This isn’t a pool, it’s a lake – a BIG lake and I’m going to swim in it!”
Was I asking for trouble? Would he call the other lifeguards to pull me out of the water? I acquiesced and swam a few strokes back the way I’d come, then swam a few strokes the opposite way, curious to see if this short back-and-forth distance fit his definition of “lengths.” Of course, to show me who was boss, he inched the boat as close as he could without the oar hitting me. We went on like this for several minutes, a few strokes, going a bit farther each time, then turning back the other way, the lifeguard maneuvering the boat so that it was never more than 2 or 3 feet away from me.
Finally I’d had enough. I’d come to the motherlode, the original source of my Great Lakes swimming passion, and all I’d managed to do was get a bit wet. And be treated to a demonstration of how the act of swimming had become distorted, synonomous with “lengths” of a chlorine-filled concrete hole-in-the-ground. It’s yet another way humans turn away from the natural world, and foolishly insist that the experience of being in water can be replaced or – worse – improved upon.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when swimming in natural bodies of water was considered completely normal.
Moats, Swimming Holes and Pools
You might think pools are a modern invention, but in fact they go back several millennia. As far as historians know, the Great Bath at the site of Mohenjo-Daro in modern-day Pakistan was the first human-created pool, dug during the 3rd millennium BC. This brick-lined pool was about 39 by 23 feet and was likely used for religious ceremonies. The structure is still there, and has been designated a South Asian World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Both ancient Greece and Rome had extensive public baths that were central to community life as meeting places for socializing and relaxing. Later the Romans built artificial pools in gymnasiums that were used for nautical and military exercises. Roman emperors also had their own private pools in which fish were also kept, hence one of the Latin words for a pool was piscina.
These early pools were used as healing baths for various conditions, rather than for swimming, which took place in natural bodies of water. The Romans built baths in other parts of the empire too, including the one that gave its name to the city of Bath, England circa 70 AD. The original Roman Bath was a renowned healing spa and swimming locale until well into the twentieth century, when a deadly pathogen was discovered in the water. The historic structure is now for tourist viewing only, replaced for swimming with more modern facilities. It’s one example of what Roger Deakin discovered on his epic swim across Britain, lamenting the abandonment and decay of many traditional bathing sites. Deakin’s book Waterlog traces the history of swimming in Britain and its evolution from natural swimming holes to contained, human-made structures. Deakin started his journey from a spring-fed moat on his own property in Suffolk. Typically he would swim from place to place, then walk back to retrieve his clothes and gear at the starting point, basically the opposite of doing “lengths” (So there, Touhy lifeguard!)
The early twentieth century cemented the transition to enclosed swimming structures, and dozens of open-air lidos were built across Britain. For the most part these lidos are much bigger than modern pools, like the massive art deco Jubilee Lido in Cornwall, and they typically designated separate areas or times for men and women to swim. Mixed bathing only became common from the mid-twentieth century. By tradition, many lidos were kept open right through the winter, and were situated by the seaside to capture seawater in the enclosure. There’s an example of this practice in my hometown of Toronto. Built in 1922, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavillion is almost twice the length of Olympic size pool and has room for 2,000 bathers. Now known as the Gus Ryder Pool, this concrete behemoth filled with several tons of chlorinated water sits right next to a Lake Ontario beach – an almost perverse turning away from its own environment. As Roger Deakin said of pools, they are “simulations of nature with the one essential ingredient – wildness – carefully filtered out.”
With the worldwide growth in pools’ popularity came the need for better sanitation measures. Originally they employed archaic filtration systems that required the filters, and the water itself, to be changed frequently. By the time of the polio scare in the late 1930s and 1940s, a panic arose over the public’s fears that children could be exposed to the poliovirus in community swimming pools. In 1946, however, a study showed that chlorine was one of the few known chemicals that could kill the polio virus. As the problem of polio transmission receded, swimming pools regained popularity as a fun and exciting summer venue for families. Moreover, chlorine, as a polio disinfectant, became the near-universal method of pool sanitation, and by the early sixties, strict regulations on chlorine in pools were in place. And it will only get stricter with the rise of a new virus.
Hello, Covid-19!
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/
Keep an eye out for Part Two, on May 7th, here at Fit is a Feminist Issue.
Tell Me It Will Be Okay
There are a lot of wonderful things about exercise in mid-life. We talk about them all the time on this blog. Fun with friends (my biggest motivator), overall health and longevity, quality of life, crushing the patriarchy etc. There is one thing that I do not like, Sam-I-am, and that is injury, especially a nagging, chronic, endless vexing type. The flavour of this season is bicep tendonitis. It’s been building for some time and I do believe it started with my 30 day yoga journey with my best virtual friend, Adriene. It’s not all flow but there is a lot of that sort of thing and I was really trying to increase my skill and my capacity to do more than 4 push-ups. Unfortunately, my bicep tendon was having none of it.
So, here I am, injured, in pain, prone to keep trying, then making it worse, then backing off and doing nothing and getting depressed and unmotivated and stiff and sad. It’s a cycle I endure over and over and sometimes it feels like it overshadows my gains.
I know that isn’t true.
I am doing my best to care for it, getting to the root of the problem maybe with my new chiropractor is a big part of it (my beloved osteopath is still not allowed to work in Ontario because of the way our pandemic rules are). He’s a beefy guy who likes to stick needles in me and zap them with electricity. I’m up for that sort of torture because I’m at my wits end with this baloney.
I think that I’m extra distressed this time because I feel the precious nature of my strength, balance and mobility more keenly with every passing year. When I was 40 and I injured my knee running, it didn’t feel like a big deal, I would just back off and it would heal and that would be that. But this year, perhaps because of the acute sense of fragility in the world, I’m just feeling defeated and a little scared. If I can’t do a downward dog any more, what does that mean about me? What if I can’t portage a canoe? Or wait, not even that, how will I paddle? All these things that are so precious, I know they will eventually slip away, but not yet damn it! It feels weirdly close right now, the end. It seems that bicep tendonitis has triggered a bit of an encounter with the existential givens.
Tell me it will be okay. I think everyone needs a little of that right now.
Happy #InternationalDanceDay!
According to Days of the Year “Dance is one of the ultimate activities to destress, lose inhibitions, meet new people, and boost physical health.”
Whether it is classical ballet, Bollywood, square dance, Zumba, Jazzercise, ballroom, hip-hop, folkdance, or any of the multitude of other dance forms, today is the day to put on some music and be joyful while you move. Bop around your kitchen between meetings. Shake your bootie if that’s what makes you happy.
I love to dance. I love everything about the experience, no matter what the dance form: the music, the challenge of executing each movement perfectly, the chance to pretend I am a prima ballerina or the star of an old movie musical. Sometimes it’s an excuse to get dressed up in something sparkly and show off. It is a source of several valued friendships. It’s a fantastic way to improve posture, and build strength and flexibility. The memory work involved in learning dance patterns is also great for your brain; combined with the social aspects and the physical exercise, it may even help fight off dementia.
These days, I do an average of three dance classes a week. I would do more if my schedule permitted. In fact, I love dance so much I also celebrate World Ballet Day on October 29. I’m definitely not your stereotypical ballerina, but neither are my classmates. We are mostly middle aged or older, and many – like me – started dancing as adults (I was in my mid-40s).
Who inspires me as a dancer? Sonja Rodrigues, a mother of two who is still a prima ballerina at age 50. The dancers of Pretty Big Movement, a New-York based full-figured dance company that specializes in hip-hop, jazz, African and modern. Debbie Allen, the dance teacher in in the movie and TV show Fame, who is still teaching and performing at 71. And every one of my ballet, lyrical, modern, English country, Renaissance, belly, Bollywood and powwow dance teachers over the years. You taught me how to push myself to be strong, expressive and joyful.
Happy international dance day! Everybody dance now!
Diane Harper lives and dances in Ottawa.
Catherine discovers parkour, and it’s fun (if harder than it looks)
Today is National Parkour Day, so 1) feel free to leap onto your bed or sofa in its honor; and 2) take a look at my blog post from 2019 about a 50+ parkour class I took. It was much more rigorous than I expected, but I enjoyed it. Another thing to return to as we venture out into the world more.
Covid vaccines and vaginas: a link round up
I had a follow up mammogram a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing the tech asked me was if I’d had a vaccine yet. I thought she was making conversation, but it turns out that vaccines can cause inflammation in the lymph nodes, resulting in inaccurate results.
I tucked that information away, but started noticing a lot of buzz about whether there is a relationship between any of the covid vaccines and fertility (apparently a lot of healthcare providers are not getting their vaccines because “I haven’t had my family yet”), and more recently, vaccines and periods. Is this all just noise? Or is there anything to it?
First — and the most important thing — is that researchers haven’t yet really studied the relationship between the covid vaccines and the menstrual cycle. There’s a whole long patriarchal history behind this, but as this New York Times piece outlines, researchers just don’t study (or understand) menstruation well enough. But there does seem to be some increasing anecdotal suggestion that many period-having people have some disruption in their menstrual cycles following vaccination, either skipped periods, breakthrough bleeding or heavier, earlier periods. So what does that mean? Should we be worried about the intersection between vaccines and reproduction?
To try to unpack this, I turned to The Vajenda, my favourite source of gyne-related info, written by Dr Jen Gunter, an OBGYN and pain physician. (It’s a substack, so you have to subscribe, but there is a free option that gets you about half the posts.)
Here is her definitive post on the vaccine and menstruation:
The covid 19 vaccine and menstrual irregularities
Here are two related posts:
Don’t blame bleeding after menopause on the COVID-19 vaccine
The COVID-19 vaccine and mammograms
And my favourite:
The Covid-19 vaccine is a vaccine, not a spell — no, it can’t affect other people’s reproductive cycles by proxy. More on this below.
I’ll distill the key takeaways from these posts — with the most important being that even if scientists haven’t fully studied menstruation and vaccines — and they SHOULD, hello patriarchy — we can still use science to do some thoughtful and factual analysis of what might be happening.
First, mammograms.
- The point of a vaccine is to engage the immune system to teach it how to fight a foreign interloper that looks specifically like the thing you are being vaccinated for. A critical part of the immune system is lymphocytes, which produce the cells that make up the antibodies your body needs to fight to off any illness or infection. You have lymph nodes — small glands that produce and filter lymphocytes — all over your body, but very noticeably under your armpits.
- About 10 – 15% of people experience swollen lymph nodes after any vaccines, which is totally normal, because it means the immune system has received a signal that something foreign has happened and it is marshalling its little knowledge system to figure out how to respond to it.
- These swollen nodes can show up on mammograms as an irregularity, which can mess up mammogram results — so if you are going for a regular screening, try to put it off for “at least four to six weeks” after your last vaccine dose. But don’t put off scanning for any problem you might be experiencing.
Now, menstruation.
The first thing Dr Gunter underlines is that there may actually be no link between vaccines and period weirdness — it may be something people are connecting because it’s happening anyway and they just happen to be paying attention to their bodies in a more heightened way, or there may be changes caused by stress. But IF there is actually an impact for some people, there are different hypotheses for why this might be true. All of them come back to the relationship between the uterus and the immune system.
I have to say, I’m pretty interested in menstruation — I’m well known around these parts for a post on menstruating well into my 50s that shows up in the top 10 almost every month — and even I did not know that there are “a lot of complex immune system interactions in the lining of the uterus that are also involved in menstruation.” In other words, your period isn’t just a thing happening out there on its own little agenda, it’s highly intertwined with all of the other things going on in your body around health and your general experience of immunity. This is why stress and fatigue and colds and other illness can affect menstruation.
Dr Gunter outlines three different mechanisms for how the vaccine could possibly interact with the menstrual cycle:
- nitric oxide, which is produced when the immune system is activated, also has a role in causing endometrial tissue breakdown — so it could accelerate a ‘normal’ cycle
- vaccines can trigger the release of inflammatory cells called “mast cells”, which also relate to the enzymes that break down the lining of the uterus
- proteins called “toll-like receptors” (Tlrs), which play an important role in regulating the essential functions of our uterus and ovaries, are also sensitive to changes in single-stranded RNA; COVID-19 is a single stranded RNA virus, and the Pfizer and Moderna are RNA vaccines.
I could go down a rabbit hole here, but the basic upshot is: menstruation is intertwined with the immune system; vaccines trigger the immune system; ergo, just as we may experience immune responses like chills, fever, fatigue, etc after a vaccine, we may very well experience effects in this menstrual part of our immune system. And as Dr Gunter underlines, actually CATCHING COVID-19 is likely to have an even more powerful impact on your menstrual cycle.
So. Don’t put off getting vaccinated because it might mess with your period: serious illness will mess with it more. Do, however, pay attention if you bleed after the vaccine after menopause — that IS something to pay attention to. And if you want to participate in the first research to track the relationship between vaccines and your period, here is a link to a brand new study:
https://redcap.healthinstitute.illinois.edu/surveys/index.php?s=LL8TKKC8DP
Now, what about fertility?
First, studies have been done on the relationship between pregnancy and vaccines, with the conclusion that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe for pregnancy, not associated with miscarriage, and does not damage the placenta. And again, it’s more dangerous to actually get COVID while you’re pregnant. The province I’m in added pregnant people to the list of vaccine priorities last week because of ICU admissions for pregnant people.
I do understand anxiety about something unknown and pregnancy — someone very close to me didn’t even want general anesthetic when she had to have her appendix out during a pregnancy for fear of what it might do to the fetus. (The surgeon, appropriately, said no, she needed the anesthetic, and both she and the baby were fine.) Pregnancy can be an anxious time, and this is new. But again, the science is helpful here.
There is a full, great explainer of how vaccines work here in the New York Times. But the basic takeaway is that once either type of vaccine has done its work of teaching your immune system how to specifically respond to the spike protein on the surface of the COVID-19 virus, it disappears. It has one job, just like every other vaccine. It shows up, livens up the party, does a little dance, and leaves, leaving you with a temporary hangover.
So yes, it’s possible that the parts of your reproductive system related to the immune system might be triggered during the time you are actually responding to the vaccine — but that goes away. There is no reason whatsoever — no hint in the science, no hint in the research, no hint in the logic of how vaccines work — to think that there will be any more impact on long term fertility than any other vaccine. For more in-depth understanding, read the piece linked above in Nature — it details how the rumour about mRNA vaccines and fertility got started, and why the science completely counters it.
Now, lunacy
The final thing I want to just briefly touch on is the lunacy that people who have been vaccinated could affect the reproductive cycles of other people. There are alarming pockets of the world who believe this, including a private school in Florida that has forbidden people who’ve been vaccinated from interacting with their students. That’s just plain bonkers. As Dr Gunter wrote, it’s a vaccine, not a spell. And it’s a terrible indictment of people’s complete illiteracy about basic biology.
So the bottom line: of course I’m not going to tell anyone what to do. But if you’re hesitant, spend some time dwelling in the science. Even though these vaccines are new — we didn’t even know this virus existed 18 months ago! — the science behind them is tried and sound. Reassure yourself. And protect yourself. And everyone else.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who is an amateur immunologist. Here is her vaccine selfie, for which she is very grateful.
Back on our bikes! Six thoughts on spring riding and training (#reblog, #blogluv)
It’s spring! Right now it’s sunny and the temperature is in the teens. Here’s my things to remember about riding outside in the spring. Enjoy!
Virtual Challenges
In these days when gyms are closed and exercising alone at home can be dull, I have discovered the joy of virtual fitness challenges.
The first one I heard about was Ottawa Race Weekend, to replace events that had been scheduled for late May 2020. It is on again for this year, with more than a dozen different running challenges for kids through to team events. Both it and the Canada Army Run, which runs in September, are going virtual again this year, and you must complete events during the weekend or week that they would normally take place in person. There also a couple of virtual triathlons, but, oddly, I couldn’t find any bicycle events in Canada; there are virtual cycling events in other countries.
The first challenge I tried was offered by Masters Swimming Ontario, to get swimmers into open water when all the pools were closed last summer. We could do any or all of four distances from (1, 3, or 10 km) by Labour Day. I did three of the four distances, but didn’t feel ready to try 10 km in the river because of the current. Maybe this year, if I can get a friend to provide support from a boat.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been playing along on UK-based Henley Swim Brass Monkeys challenge. This series of cold water swims, which must be completed before April 30 in any unheated outdoor water, has distances ranging from 50M to 1500M, in water temperatures from under 6C to under 14C. There are 18 possible swims, with difficulty rankings from Plucky through to Intrepid. I completed the 1,000M swim on Saturday.
I’m also tempted by the Lake George Virtual 32 Mile Open Water Swim, for the months of July and August. Lake George, in the Adirondacks, normally hosts a major open water swimming competition in August each year. My friend Nadine did a virtual double crossing of this virtual swim last year. She says she knows full well she could just swim it on her own, but the virtual swims through an event are uplifting and the support on social media is a bright spot for her.
Many of these events are fundraisers for local causes, and all seem to have fun swag. That’s great if it’s what gets you motivated. It doesn’t do much for me though.
I walked Hadrian’s wall through a very large organization called The Conqueror Challenge. You can do any distance-based exercise to complete 20 virtual trails on virtually every continent. The medals are gorgeous, and there are even social media groups so participants can connect and get advice or share successes. It was okay, but not has fun as I had hoped. I was disappointed by all the chat about weight loss. It was, however, the first one I encountered that was great for people with mobility issues because there is plenty of time to complete each challenge, and assistive devices such as wheelchairs are an option.
The one I am focused on right now is Walking to Mordor. It is delightfully low-tech, and perfect for this unsocial hermit. The distance achievements are simply locations along the route from Bag End to Grey Wood, as laid out in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s 3,109.17 km in total, a very satisfying walk. There is no swag; there are no completion medals. It’s just a simple distance log with the feature of being able to follow your friends along the way. The best part is that it gives me a great excuse to re-read the trilogy, something that will probably be as gratifying as completing the walk.
