Thanks to a whole bunch of massage therapy (Yay for Renee!) as well as a combination of rest, stretching, and curation of my activities, my neck and back are feeling a lot better than they were two months ago.
In fact, I spent the last week at the Storytellers of Canada- Conteurs du Canada conference in Halifax – plane rides, lifting stuff, sitting for long stretches of time during concerts, meetings, and performances, telling very animated stories during my workshops, sleeping in a dorm bed, and walking for long distances with a backpack – and I had very little trouble with my back or neck.
The view from my dorm room in Loyola Residence at St. Mary’s University – a very comfortable place to stay, by the way. Image description – a photo of the view from a window on the 19th floor of a building on a sunny day. We are looking down on several university buildings with lots of windows as well as the tops of a lot of deciduous trees with glimpses of buildings and houses here and there.
All of that has really convinced me that I’m ready to get back into more strenuous exercise on a regular basis.
I’ll be careful about it, of course. I don’t want to have any sort of avoidable setbacks and I think the key to avoiding trouble is to only take on activities that let me control the intensity and duration of my efforts.
Overall my capacity for exercise has slowly increased as my back and neck have been healing and I had noticed that walking the dog was feeling easier over time and my new habit of ‘walking to work’ has been very straightforward, exercise-wise.
Then, while I was away, I really enjoyed my long walks, even though they were sometimes difficult. I liked the purposeful feeling of striding* (sometimes ambling!) along to get where I was going and it felt good to be the kind of tired that comes from solid exercise.
I think that longer walks could be a good way to take things up a notch without wearing myself out and possibly putting my neck and back at risk.
Maybe I’ll start with 1 or 2 longer walks per week and see how that feels.
More reports as events warrant.
Image description: a photo of a white paper zine cover that says “The Stories We Wear (a workbook) Presented by Christine Hennebury at the SC-CC Annual Conference – Halifax, 2025” and is decorated with stars, spirals, and dots.
Yes, you’re right, it probably would have been better to share a photo of someone telling a story or of myself leading a workshop but I somehow didn’t take or request any of those – too caught up in the moment, I guess – but I am really proud of how the cover of this little workbook turned out so I am sharing that instead. Meanwhile, to be transparent about it, I couldn’t actually get to the photocopy place before it closed so my fun workbook is going out to the attendees after the workshop instead. During my workshop they answered the questions in their own notebooks.
*Meanwhile I suspect that part of the reason I enjoyed those walks so much was because I had moved walking from the ‘exercise’ category to the ‘transportation’ category in my brain so I’m going to see if I can make that happen in my regular life as well.
I am making today a “five things” day. I spent all day yesterday feeling overwhelmed by financial paperwork so today I am doing five things. I have already had my appointment for getting hot water on demand, watered outdoor plants, and done some cleaning. Now I’m back at the paperwork. Thing five needs to be laundry. After that, the day will be mine to do as I wish because I will know I have done five things.
When I play this game with myself, I often end up doing far more than five things because the mere effort of tracking (and setting a limit for success) makes me feel like I’m on a roll and can keep going. But if I don’t, I have the satisfaction of having achieved what I set out to do.
I’m going to focus on drinking enough water and on eating healthily on campus. It’s a bit of a struggle in the summer since once the students leave, so do lots of the food options on campus. Mostly it means grocery shopping and bringing food into my office. That’s the plan anyway.
How is this better than yesterday? The problem is that weekends are also a challenge in the food front. Too much socializing and eating away from home. Also, summer is a challenge. I don’t feel like eating during the day when it’s hot and I can’t eat at night because of acid reflux issues. Welcome to 60, said my doctor.
Catherine
Wake up, meditate, have coffee and breakfast, and spend some time outside in the sunshine before it’s time to get on a plane again. This works even on days I don’t have to get on a plane. So I’ll go with that!
Christine
Yesterday was a pretty good day overall but I’m going to take today up a notch by spending a lot of time writing and drawing.
Elan
Yesterday my day was full of great exercise (batting cages, biking, swimming, stretching), food, crafts, and loved ones. I read a book; I watched a show. I cuddled with my cat. The weather was warm, and I got to control how I spent my own time. Does my today have to be better than my yesterday?
Social media memories reminded me that nine years ago, I was riding bikes with friends during a heat alert. Hi Susan, Cate, David, Nat, and Sarah. It was a big day of hard, hot riding. There were tears. It was Susan’s birthday and some of us were trying to meet training goals for the Friends for Life Bike Rally. We even blogged about it all.
See ‘Dangerously hot’ heat wave arrives in Toronto. Here’s what you need to know. “Environment Canada’s heat warning has officially settled in as experts warn “dangerously hot and humid conditions” will grip much of the GTA this afternoon heading into Tuesday night. As of 5:43 a.m., the alert now suggests temperatures could reach 30 to 36 C, with humidex values between 40 and 45 and overnight lows of 21 to 25 C “providing little relief.” “You can’t escape it. It’s there,” Environment Canada’s senior climatologist, Dave Phillips told CP24.”
Sundays in June in my life usually involve bike rides. But this year it was just Sarah and me. Spoiler alert: This year there were frequent stops, a wait for the ferry, and even a lunch break.
While I love riding with Sarah– it’s how we met, riding bikes–I miss riding with groups of friends! Riding friends, you are missed!
We were in Toronto this weekend and after considering various riding options, decided to ride out to the Toronto Islands. We only rode 25 km, but it felt like a good exercise in getting acclimatized to riding in warmer weather.
Loved the new bike path on the bridges on and off Villiers Island, loved the ferry, and noodling slowly around the Islands.
Also love love love how many people are riding bikes in Toronto. Great to see so many kids out there.
All was fine until our last dash uphill up Jones on our way home. It wag okay riding but whenever we stopped at a light everything steamed up.
Sunday biking on Toronto Islands
We collapsed on the front porch, drank chilled mango juice, and gradually cooled down enough to tackle the job of carrying the window unit air conditioner upstairs and installing it.
Wish us luck making it through this week’s heat wave.
The world’s climate is changing, with significant impacts on human and animal well-being. Many people will be climate refugees and need to find new homes in cooler parts of the world.
Other parts of the world, now habitable and arable, will be under water. Everywhere, the weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. It’s a horrible mess for which humans are responsible, even though more than humans will suffer.
And here I am, starting a blog post about riding my bike. 🚲
On the one hand, my riding my bike feels so trivial in the grand scheme of things. Yet on the other hand, it feels like it’s all connected because one of the many reasons I started riding a bike was my worry about the carbon impact of automobiles.
Riding a bike is something I do for fun, for relaxation, for fitness, as a means of getting to work and getting around town, but I’ve also made that choice as part of rejecting, as much as I can, car culture. And then there’s the emotional wellbeing aspect of cycling in my life.
Increasingly though the intense weather has made me nervous about riding. Could I really end up riding my trainer indoors on the weekends in the summer? I really really hope not. 😨
I love being outside in the summer and I love moving my body. The combination is my favorite thing.
Over the past few years, I’ve worried about the heat that makes riding nearly impossible. I’ve had heat stroke and pretty severe cramping after long, hot rides. And when it’s not too hot, the weather breaks, and we have severe storms.
A gracilis cranp is cramp in the gracilis muscle, located in the inner thigh, is a painful, involuntary contraction or spasm of the muscle. It can occur due to various factors, including overuse, dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, or even underlying conditions like nerve compression.
And “a derecho (pronounced similar to “deh-REY-cho”) is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to the strength of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath. As a result, the term “straight-line wind damage” sometimes is used to describe derecho damage. By definition, if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length, then the event may be classified as a derecho.”
This past week, in my part of Canada, our weather forecast got a new symbol that represents air too smoky to breathe safely. It came as smoky air from forest fires raging out of control, north and west of us, moved south and east. It looked the regular wind symbol but with lines through it.
So between smoky air, heat, and storms, summer is feeling much less bike-friendly these days.
Sarah and I encountered our first derecho three years ago. You can read about it here, Sam’s stormy scary bike ride. We weren’t hurt but we were frightened.
Later that same summer I learned about heat and the effect heat can have on aging muscles. See Heat cramps and Aging.
I’ve started to think that maybe autumn, not summer, should be my big bike season. The weather is certainly better. But weekday riding is tricky in the fall because it starts to get dark before my workday ends. If I were a regular faculty member, I might swap things around a bit and ride during the autumn days and write, grade, and class prep in the dark evenings. The Dean’s job is very 9-5 and not at all flexible. So fall riding is a later in my career option, I think.
How about you? Is the summer heat and our unstable weather affecting your workout routines at all?
This week I was at one of my favorite conferences– the joint conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. Yes, that’s a mouthful. And it’s also a banquet of information from folks in lots of different disciplines, all united by a concern for how we can engage with our food systems in ways that support the people who grow, harvest, distribute, sell, buy and eat food. Oh, and how we can support our earth at the same time. So, not much– just that… 🙂
I learned so much about many different areas of agriculture, cooking, pedagogy and activism this week, it would take another week just to write it all down. And I will (well, at least some of it).
But for now, I have a treat for all of you.
At one of the sessions, we all got to hear about four new books that
…focus on the connections between food, health, and techno-science… With science and technology playing highly prominent albeit contested roles in defining good food, healthy bodies and the future of planetary health, it is time to push the field in new directions… Collectively, [these books] show that notions of food, nutrition, hunger, and appetite are not apolitical but cultural technologies through which governments, institutions, and the public create knowledge, shape how we shall live, and bring worlds into being. (from the conference program)
And the treat is: All of these books are open-access, which means they’re all free! Well, except for one of them. But it’s great too, and all are worth checking out.
Yeah, I know. Thanks Alexander Krivitsky for Unsplash.
Here are the books, with the download links included and a little blurb from their press pages. Take a look and see if any of them catch your eye. I’m planning on reading all of them this summer, so will report on each in more detail.
In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating “real” food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public’s lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public’s concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched “food scientism” in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.
In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.
Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policy makers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy—called the “first 1,000 days of life”—determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that the control of mothering is a paradigmatic technique of American violence that serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. She illustrates the efforts of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers to counter the harms of such mal-nutrition. Their powerful stories offer a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.
This one’s not free, but it’s worth considering, and those of you who are academics might think about ordering a desk copy. Here’s what it’s about.
Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today’s myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system.
The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector’s ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.
So, a few little somethings to add to your summer reading list. Let me know if any of these appeal to you, if you read it, and what you think.
I love boppy songs I can sing along with. Happy words with sunshiny mental imagery are great. Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves is just about perfect.
Catherine
Well, Walking On Sunshine is now firmly entrenched in my head, and I expect will be for some time… 🤪
Martha
My favourite song for Fridays is this one by Martin Solveig featuring Dragonette – Hello. It was used in a Ted Lasso episode where Bear has an after-hours post-game experience. I can’t help but get out of my work chair and dance around like I’ve just won a World Cup football game.
Nicole
This was in my memories today and it feels appropriate to say that Don’t Stop Belieivin” is a good one:
The hotel we were staying at in Vancouver warned us it may be a bit loud the first night due to a private party. When we arrived we found out the private party was a Bat Mitzvah. The front desk suggested we stay out late to avoid the noise. I’m so glad we didn’t listen to them. The sounds of teenage girls singing Don’t Stop Believing on the top of their lungs was a highlight that stays in my memory of the trip. It was really sweet optimism and welcome noise. 🎤🎶🎸
Elan
You cannot help but be inspired to move (or move faster) to the song “Because We Can” by Fatboy Slim, featured in the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, which has a tempo of 140 BPM. Imagine you are a turn of the century can can dancer, or just be propelled by the lyrics, because whatever you are doing, you CAN (can)!
Sam
I don’t normally think of Jeremy Dutcher as Friday afternoon pump up music but I’m so excited that I’m going to see him Saturday night and that he’s playing in Toronto with the TSO for Pride.
Who is Jeremy Dutcher? He’s his bio from the TSO/Roy Thomson Hall website:
“Jeremy Dutcher, the indelible Two-Spirit artist and cultural ambassador from the Tobique First Nation, returns to the TSO! Renowned for his groundbreaking album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, which earned him the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and the 2019 JUNO Award for Indigenous Music Album of the Year, Jeremy merges traditional songs with neoclassical, jazz, and pop influences. Join Jeremy and your TSO for this transcending performance during Pride and National Indigenous Peoples Day, featuring music from Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa and his newest album, Motewolonuwok.”
There might even be tickets left!
Pomawsuwinuwok Wanakiyawolotuwok by Jeremy Dutcher
Many universities have limited space for cars, lots of sidewalks and spaces for students to walk or cycle between classes (and often to residences on or near campus). Generally, students can buy most of what they need at shops on campus or very nearby, and there are lots of third spaces such as parks and plazas where they can simply hang out with friends.
They may be the nearest thing some cities have to walkable communities (sometimes known as 15 minute communities). I have seen arguments that they may be part of what has older adults reflecting back on university as one of the best times of their lives. There may be some truth to this.
This week, I returned to living on campus for the first time since 1980 as I have been at a textile conference out of town. I walked a lot! I’m actually pretty impressed with myself, considering that I spent hours every day hunched over textile equipment.
I’m an analyst at heart, so I checked with Google Maps to estimate how far I would have walked as a first-year student at the University of Western Ontario, when I lived in a residence and walked to the music school every day. I walked a lot then, too: at a minimum, I walked to class, then home for lunch, then back to class and home again. That’s over 50 minutes of walking, even before going out in the evening, or leaving campus, or going to a class in a different building.
This week’s distances were similar, by the time I walked to breakfast, to my classes, home to unload and rest, and then back to the class area for evening activities. There were lots of elevators, and car parking and a shuttle bus for those with disabilities, so there were options for people who don’t walk everywhere.
Obviously, university campuses aren’t a perfect model for walkable communities for whole families or people who don’t work on campus. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could incorporate more active transit, third spaces and housing that is close to where we live and shop?
This third space on campus was quite lovely. It has public art, benches, trees, a pub/restaurant, and a mix of older and very modern buildings. Behind where I am standing to take the picture you will find restaurants, some shops, an art gallery, a church and a hospital, all within a five minute walk.
What would energize me is some good tunes. I have a 75+ minute commute tomorrow, and instead of my great but emotional audiobook story, American Dirt, I might find a pumpin’ Spotify playlist for part of the way.
What would energize me today is some movement. But instead, I have a day full of meetings. If the weather is ok, I’ll bike to work and go for a walk at lunch. Wish me luck.
Sitting outside listening to birds and watching chipmunks. I did that yesterday and it was delightful.
Catherine
Why would (and will, I expect) energize me today is connecting with friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while. Also swimming/hanging out in a hotel pool—it always feels luxurious to me.
A couple of years ago, my friend J stopped by on her way across the country. We’ve both had knee replacement surgery so we competitively showed off our range of motion in the backyard. Oh, midlife party tricks!
On our next visit together, J asked, “So are you taking creatine yet?” I said no, and J told me to get on it. I’ve done all the research, she said, so you don’t have to.
At the same time, I had my youngest kid back at home for a stretch. He’s the weight-lifting gym going child who lives on tuna, egg whites, and protein powder. He also takes creatine. I was intrigued.
I did a bit of reading. It turns out it’s not just good for muscles. It also helps aging brains. Hmm.
But I’m a “check with your doctor before taking anything” sort of person, and so that’s what I did. On my last appointment, I came into his office with a Google doc full of questions. The last one was, should I be taking creatine?
Creatine monohydrate? 5 mg a day? Sure. Definitely. It’s one of the most well-researched supplements out there.
(To be clear, he’s my doctor, not yours, and he’s giving me medical advice, not you. You? You should check with your doctor.)
I’ve been taking the flavourless powder variety and dissolving it in a glass of water in the morning.
Here’s the abstract: Creatine is gaining recognition far beyond its roots in athletic performance. Once seen as a gym-only supplement, it’s now understood to play a vital role in cellular energy, cognitive function, and healthy aging. From boosting memory and reducing fatigue to preserving muscle mass over time, creatine is emerging as a powerful tool for everyday wellness. Despite persistent myths about bloating or safety risks, a vast body of research shows it’s both safe and effective for nearly everyone especially those who don’t get enough from diet alone.
Oh, and yes, creatine monohydrate is vegan. It’s made in the lab from non-animal sources.
Here’s the case for vegans and vegetarians who are strength training to take creatine, over at Meat Free Fitness: Should I use creatine?
I’m not sure why this photo came up when I searched “Creatine” in the WordPress free photo app, but here it is. It’s a white hand painted in red, orange, yellow, blue, green and purple stripes. Pexels.
