The 2012 Olympics are all wrapped up and put away and though there were myriad accomplishments to find inspiration in--the Spanish Synchronized Swim team, Michael Phelps, Lithuania making the US basketball team WORK for their win, Usian Bolt & Shelley-Anne Pryce, seeing Shalane Flanagan hit the ground after crossing the finish line and realizing that she had just give EVERYTHING she had to make it there--what most inspired me was Oksana Chusovitina, the 37-year old, 6-time Olympic gymnast. Most gymnasts' careers are over by their mid-twenties at the latest, similar to dancers and football players, due to injury, extreme training, pushing the body to the breaking point and then still demanding more of it, without much chance to heal. Chusovitina competed with women who weren't even born when she first started competing on the international level.
Most gymnasts and many athletes begin to bow out of professional competition beginning in their mid-twenties through their thirties but the average person feels these changes, too. Often, my pilates students complain of 'everything going downhill after thirty,' or 'age catching up with them' as they become aware of how they take longer to recover from workouts, get injured with more frequency and notice that they don't heal nearly as fast.
I always laugh and tell them to watch their beliefs--I for one, have never felt better. I also know my body so much better and have much more control and precision in how I move and an incredible breadth of knowledge and resources to pull from when I need to heal. I dont think that it's age as much as most people have never had to watch their bodies with care and so haven't taken the time to learn that they need to treat themselves differently as they age to still do the same things that they have always done. I also think that part of what we call the aging process is the accumulation of restrictions built up over a lifetime of activity and which were never taken care of so the accumulation finally causes imbalances and discomfort and sets us up for injury.
To see Oksana perform with girls two decades younger than she was inspiring, yes, but what really resonated with me was to read her say that she "never thought of quitting a sport she said comes more easily to her than it used to."
At 40, Jordan Jovtchev is also an older Olympic gymnast, but when he talks about competeting now, he talks about pain: "It’s very, very difficult for me now because my body is falling apart if I practice hard...Ugh, you get the pain and then you start moving a little bit and then you get used to it, like an engine getting going — chug, chug, chug."
I can't get behind performing in pain. I mean, I get it in Jovtchev's instance. To perform at the level that he does and to have spent his entire life in gymnastics and to reach yet another Olympics? I would, too. For sure. But for the average person, training in pain really doesn't make sense. I have in the past and I understand why people do, but I have finally learned how to allow myself to fully rest and recuperate over weeks instead of a day here or there. We get stronger when we rest. It took a decade of treatment for chronic illness for me to learn this and I learned it mostly through others. I have trained people extensively, people who were training for a major event and were also seeing a personal trainer and doing their own scheduled workouts and they'd plateau and the thing that would move them to the next level was always rest. A full two weeks of eating a lot and not even thinking about working out. Our bodies heal and develop strength when we rest, not when we work out. They'd come back and were suddenly doing work which they'd only been approximating previously.
Chusovitina's coach only lets her train an hour and a half a day, which she admits is difficult for her, but she also says that she knows her body better now and I wonder if she also knows the exercises so much better that she requires less effort and time working on them? I mean, if she has a full two decades more practicing the same exercises, she must do them more efficiently now than she used to and also, probably owns them in a very different way than the young girls.
The body changes as we age, but I think that if we pay attention and modify how we approach all things in life, we can feel strong and powerful, move with ease and keep doing the things we have always done without detriment.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
running distractions
I woke up this morning as the sun was rising and my first thought was, I need to go run at the beach! A half hour later, there I was, decked out in wool hat, leggings and warm jacket. The morning was white. Seriously. The fog was so thick this morning, I could only see about ten feet around me. It dulled the sound of the ocean and I felt insulated. Quiet.
I love mornings like this. I love running into the fog and feeling so alone. Just me and the beach and running.
And yet. It's been months since I woke up and the first thing I wanted to do was to run. Part of it was injury but a lot of it was joining a running club and setting training goals for myself. All of a sudden, I was quantifying my running.
When I first ran competitively, in high school, I didn't really care about my stats. I was running track mainly to get faster for my soccer game. Kinda like some students took Latin in high school so that they'd score better on their SATs. That was me and soccer. Just trying to get faster, quicker, better.
I kept running after high school, but for general fitness. I ran in the Berkeley and Oakland hills in college and then afterwards, ran around Central Park, using my runs as an escape from my urban life. I ran when I was diagnosed with Lyme's Disease and still ran, that first year that I lived with my parents, even though my life had become a merry-go-round of doctor's visits and utter illness. I ran simply because I was in denial that I was sick, that I should rest, that I could no longer do this thing that I'd let come to define me.
Only after a year of treatment, with my memory still shot and my mind still groggy and out of focus, did I stop running. My Lyme specialist told me that every time I did cardio, I opened the blood-brain barrier and let more of the Lyme bacteria move into my brain. That was enough to set me straight: I could deal with the pain and the fatigue of Lyme, but I hated feeling disoriented and unable to understand the world around me.
I started taking long walks in that time and never even considered lacing on my running shoes. Five year later, I started running again on a lark. I felt wobbly and silly and it was hard! Mostly because I live on a hill and run out the door and up a hill for a good mile and then it loops around and down and flattens out and then I run back up for another mile or so to get home. Such is the nature of living in San Francisco though.
When I started, I'd have to stop and walk frequently. I didn't really mind it and either began running when I was ready to again or walked the rest of the way home. For the rest of that year, I put on my running shoes often and soon ran much faster and further than when I began (obviously), but I never judged myself if I had to walk the whole way. Or cut my run short. Or run further and easier than I had planned. I just loved everything about being outside, in motion, and enjoyed watching the pink sunset light up the houses on San Bruno and the the fog rolling in from the ocean. I liked looking at the houses I ran by and thinking about who made the wooden planes and hung them from a tree or crammed three fountains into an entryway the size of a shoebox or what the view must be like from the house on stilts on the side of the hill. I checked out my neighbor's poppy garden (so friggin' beautiful) and watched another neighbor's squash vines slowly work their way along the sidewalk, the flowers shriveling and the squash filling out.
I ran or walked to simply be present, to take note of the world around me, to move. It was the one part of my life where I was easy with myself, utterly without judgement and completely present with the state of my body. I ran when I was able to, slowed when I needed, walked often and would take days off when my body clamored for rest.
And then I joined a running club. Which I loved for the companionship and the other runners' knowledge and experience . But I also immediately made a running schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays were my running days. And I now had to commit one of them to a long run and I needed to keep track of that run and know how far and how fast I went so that I could increase it according to a schedule.
I started evaluating my runs and forcing myself to complete them according to schedule. I burned out. Running wasn't fun anymore, it had become another place in my life where I needed to perform to certain standards. Along the way, my ITB's knotted up as did my peroneals and posterior tibs.
Now that I had a running schedule, I stopped listening to my body and pushed it to complete the scheduled runs (silly, I know). To keep out there, I started getting weekly massages and shifted the focus of my monthly acupuncture sessions to my legs. Until finally, I stopped.
After months of running rest, today is the first day I woke up with running on my mind as this thing that I get to do.
This morning I ran a couple of miles north. They felt good. The fog lifted by the time I reached the north end of the park. The shoreline was packed with runners and walkers and birds. I watched some seagulls rip apart a crab and a paddle boarder moving out to sea. I took off my shoes and waded in the water and then started walking south again. I waded in until my knees were covered and walked back to my car, wishing I was wearing a suit to swim. I saw the sun break through the fog and checked to see what the fishermen had caught.
I was out on the beach for nearly two hours and only ran for the first thirty minutes of it but I had such a wonderful morning and know that I'll be waking up again soon to head out on a run.
I love mornings like this. I love running into the fog and feeling so alone. Just me and the beach and running.
And yet. It's been months since I woke up and the first thing I wanted to do was to run. Part of it was injury but a lot of it was joining a running club and setting training goals for myself. All of a sudden, I was quantifying my running.
When I first ran competitively, in high school, I didn't really care about my stats. I was running track mainly to get faster for my soccer game. Kinda like some students took Latin in high school so that they'd score better on their SATs. That was me and soccer. Just trying to get faster, quicker, better.
I kept running after high school, but for general fitness. I ran in the Berkeley and Oakland hills in college and then afterwards, ran around Central Park, using my runs as an escape from my urban life. I ran when I was diagnosed with Lyme's Disease and still ran, that first year that I lived with my parents, even though my life had become a merry-go-round of doctor's visits and utter illness. I ran simply because I was in denial that I was sick, that I should rest, that I could no longer do this thing that I'd let come to define me.
Only after a year of treatment, with my memory still shot and my mind still groggy and out of focus, did I stop running. My Lyme specialist told me that every time I did cardio, I opened the blood-brain barrier and let more of the Lyme bacteria move into my brain. That was enough to set me straight: I could deal with the pain and the fatigue of Lyme, but I hated feeling disoriented and unable to understand the world around me.
I started taking long walks in that time and never even considered lacing on my running shoes. Five year later, I started running again on a lark. I felt wobbly and silly and it was hard! Mostly because I live on a hill and run out the door and up a hill for a good mile and then it loops around and down and flattens out and then I run back up for another mile or so to get home. Such is the nature of living in San Francisco though.
When I started, I'd have to stop and walk frequently. I didn't really mind it and either began running when I was ready to again or walked the rest of the way home. For the rest of that year, I put on my running shoes often and soon ran much faster and further than when I began (obviously), but I never judged myself if I had to walk the whole way. Or cut my run short. Or run further and easier than I had planned. I just loved everything about being outside, in motion, and enjoyed watching the pink sunset light up the houses on San Bruno and the the fog rolling in from the ocean. I liked looking at the houses I ran by and thinking about who made the wooden planes and hung them from a tree or crammed three fountains into an entryway the size of a shoebox or what the view must be like from the house on stilts on the side of the hill. I checked out my neighbor's poppy garden (so friggin' beautiful) and watched another neighbor's squash vines slowly work their way along the sidewalk, the flowers shriveling and the squash filling out.
I ran or walked to simply be present, to take note of the world around me, to move. It was the one part of my life where I was easy with myself, utterly without judgement and completely present with the state of my body. I ran when I was able to, slowed when I needed, walked often and would take days off when my body clamored for rest.
And then I joined a running club. Which I loved for the companionship and the other runners' knowledge and experience . But I also immediately made a running schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays were my running days. And I now had to commit one of them to a long run and I needed to keep track of that run and know how far and how fast I went so that I could increase it according to a schedule.
I started evaluating my runs and forcing myself to complete them according to schedule. I burned out. Running wasn't fun anymore, it had become another place in my life where I needed to perform to certain standards. Along the way, my ITB's knotted up as did my peroneals and posterior tibs.
Now that I had a running schedule, I stopped listening to my body and pushed it to complete the scheduled runs (silly, I know). To keep out there, I started getting weekly massages and shifted the focus of my monthly acupuncture sessions to my legs. Until finally, I stopped.
After months of running rest, today is the first day I woke up with running on my mind as this thing that I get to do.
This morning I ran a couple of miles north. They felt good. The fog lifted by the time I reached the north end of the park. The shoreline was packed with runners and walkers and birds. I watched some seagulls rip apart a crab and a paddle boarder moving out to sea. I took off my shoes and waded in the water and then started walking south again. I waded in until my knees were covered and walked back to my car, wishing I was wearing a suit to swim. I saw the sun break through the fog and checked to see what the fishermen had caught.
I was out on the beach for nearly two hours and only ran for the first thirty minutes of it but I had such a wonderful morning and know that I'll be waking up again soon to head out on a run.
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