Just Do It #4

Quick, throwaway "motivational" phrases can be helpful, especially when you're exhausted and your body's drenched in adrenalin, and the buffer zones of carefully-constructed cognition are crumbling in the face of your inner waaah that just wants to give up and go home and, incidentally, eat a large plate of biscuits, or possibly ALL THE CHEESE.  So this tag series is for those small pre-fabricated tools that help me get the chuff on with it.

So, my lovely mattress has given up the ghost.  This, along with a dodgy, cheap pillow (below the expensive, super-supportive one), are helping neither the Neck/ Shoulder Injury of Doom™ nor my already crappy sleep quality.  In the course of following up on what happens when you Google "best mattress for hypermobility" (turns out I got it spot-on with the Wondermattress - go my instincts, go!), I came across this blog:

http://www.lifewitheds.com

The author has way more invisible conditions than I have (including some I'd never heard of), but had documented her search for The Perfect Mattress (for, among other things, hypermobile joints), so I was intrigued to read (along with various forum posts) about how difficulty getting exactly the right sleeping posture is very common among those with HMS and EDS.

Scrolling down, on the right, I saw this:


Do what you can, when you can, while you can:

Seemed to pretty much sum it up for me.

Reach for the Stars

I think it's fair to say that the sponsorship effort is going pretty well for The Walk.  As you know, I beat my original target and raised it.  And then I beat that and raised it again.

And now I'm close to beating that.  Blimey. People are lovely.

Raising attention for this has meant stepping outside yet another comfort zone, one that came up in conversation last night as my mate and I stumbled home for 2½ hours from a gig in a London location so outer that it didn't even have a London postcode. She was being quite... insistent... on helping me with my (large, but not as large as usual, and on wheels, okay?) case.  She was lovely and patient and helpful and non-patronising, but letting her carry my case was a bit of a mental struggle for me.

To say that asking for help doesn't come easily to me is a bit of an understatement.  My first phrase, apparently, as a child was: "I do it myself".  (My mother used to say that my first word was "No".  Hard to say how accurate that is...)  So it's been a fairly overwhelming characteristic of mine since, basically, early cognition.  My ingrained dedication to self-reliance is not about to change with ease/ at all/ ever/ overnight, is what I'm trying to say.

I'm getting better at it.  For example, I'll accept help with much more alacrity these days.  Not quite the same as actively seeking assistance (and I've always been someone happy to go seek information, being more than willing to accept that there's always someone who knows more than you do about, e.g. where the condensed milk lives in this shop, how to open the car bonnet of the car I'm driving, ou est la gare, etc.) but, you know, a start.  A big part of the last three years has been accepting what I physically just can't do and persuading myself that I'm worth getting it done well and not hurting myself in the process.  At some level, Being Able To Do Stuff is enmeshed with my feeling of self-worth.  And yet, as with my complicated perception of the desirability of dieting, I don't judge others by what they can't do...

This is echoed in my sometimes desultory attitude to publicising my own events/ merchandise, etc.  The best way to persuade myself to request assistance is to remind myself who else suffers if I don't.  So having a goal where others will benefit if I do well is über-motivational, and this has got me pushing mention of my sponsorship drive around the shop. And now that everyone and their monkey know that I'm doing it, I can't bottle out. And if I'm definitely going to walk six miles in a go, I'll need to get the tools to be able to do it without breaking myself and returning to the place where I need to ask for help.

Ta-da! Fay-logic circumlocuted! I win out over the apathy!waaah, and Sport Relief get a bag of cash to help people in need.  Oh, and the people who give me the money get to feel good about themselves too... :)

Thanks! :D

Painful Progress

I suppose you'll want to know how my neck/ shoulder is getting on.

Ow.

Okay, it's less ow than it was, but it doesn't like:

• Carrying things
• Putting the handbrake on
• Changing into 2nd gear
• Stretching out and lifting/ pulling things with it
• Sharp neck movements (try not to surprise me from the side, eh?)
• Me lying on it
• Me lying on the opposite side to it (huh?!)
• The inexorable passage of linear time (presumably)

So it's not going all that well, but thanks for asking.

I can feel myself slipping back into bad habits of "I'll do that later" and "Oh, it doesn't count if I skip a day, right? I'm so tiiiired..." etc.

So I'll go to the gym tomorrow, even if it's only to pound on the stationary bike and avoid looking anything else in the eye.

I'll make a plan about walking in/ home on either Wednesday or Friday.

Hey, thanks for listening, this has really helped.  You're difficult to make excuses to, but you don't judge.  Go you. :)

The Shape of Desire

Part of yesterday's conversation with the physio was her questioning why I'm doing the (upper-body) exercises that I'm doing.  Why am I lifting weights, doing press-ups, etc.?

In particular, she was concerned that these exercises were a bit, well, male.  She covered, elucidating, saying there was nothing wrong with that per se, but that she was wondering: was I wanting to be a body-builder [cue hunched shoulders and loosely-raised fists]?

Well, there it is.  Why am I doing this?  Why am I pushing muscles in my upper body that were not designed by nature to be massive (due to HMS and, well, a lower testosterone level than the average bloke) to build?

Several answers, not all of which may be either wise, feasible, or even the whole story:

1. In October 2005 I had a six-pack and could lift sofas without much effort.  I also had the kind of lightly but defined muscular physique that made both women and men go "hmmm..." and "ooooh...!" with a little reaching-out gesture. (Yeah, baby...)

a) Being strong felt good physically - my wobbly joints were much more secure.

b) Being strong felt good mentally - being able to rely on myself and feel comfortable (even superior) in my body was rather nice.

c) My personal vanity is, perhaps, a little odd.  The resources needed to conform to many elements of acceptable Western femininity feel like way more trouble than they're worth, to me.  However, I revel in decking myself in a certain way as I move through the world.  I want people to see me, at a glance, as very much my own person, as attractive in an unconventional sense, and blending elements across genders.  I also like to look healthy.  So a little ripped (again)? Yes please! :)

(I felt right at home in Cambridge really quickly.  Wonder why...)


2. I gave up on that level and type of healthy after several things happened:

- motorbike (okay, fine: scooter) accident that made Borked Shoulder the way it is today (February 2006).

- massive (they took photos for a medical journal!) benign tumour;

- recovering from the surgery that removed it (vertical 5" abdominal incision - wasn't allowed to pick up anything heavier than 5kg for, well, a while - September 2007);

- the knee-based accident (and all the other, less easily pointed-at elements) that propelled me into the Year of The Stick (September 2011); and

- subsequent slow recovery from that.

I started feeling old.  I let myself become dispirited by the constant setbacks (I tried building in strength in 2006; scuppered myself lifting furniture; tried getting fit again 2010-11, not as hard as now, but cycling everywhere... then Stick Year... and then again in the summer of 2013...); I rationalised it as "I'm not meant to be fit", I think. And yet clearly this other model of me persisted underneath the whole time, because now I'm thinking: screw old, there are people who take up marathon running in their 70s.  I want to take this body as far as it can in terms of healthy, fit, and strong.


3. I don't want a male physique, I want a strong female physique, and I don't think I'll get that purely from physio exercises - I'll need to challenge myself, not just maintain myself.  I'm also pretty sure it would take more effort, time, and calories than I would consider worth spending getting perturbingly "bulky".


4. Up until now, not one single person (male or female) has told me that I shouldn't do press-ups, etc.

My dad (the very one who's struggled with my gender queerity in recent years) showed me how to do them; and a recent boyfriend showed me the variations on the theme.  We did them in school, and we were expected to do them in the few martial arts lessons I attended.  They're part of my model for "becoming fit and strong".


5. I enjoy doing weights, press-ups, planks, etc. Not only do I think they're fun (look, I'm a bit weird, just give up and go with this), but I enjoy being able to do them well (possibly in a tomboyish, showing-off-physically kind of way).


So here's the thing I'm going to try to find a way to say succinctly to the physio: this is the kind of body I want to aim for.  It's not unfeasible, and it's not toxic, so please help me get to a point where I can make that happen.  Ta!

So, unless anyone's got any better perspectives, that's The Plan.

Body Blow

I walked out of the physio's this afternoon, clutching my hat against the wind and squinting against the sunlight, muttering certain anatomical terms.

The news had been mixed.

The good news first:

1. I'm doing a lot of things right.

2. The general prognosis isn't as bad as I'd assumed from what she said last week.  I may, after all, be fine as I get older.  Nothing is certain.

3. That dumb move is a) unlikely to have done much damage, b) not beyond the realms of possibility for me to do in future.

4. The Walk is still on.


Bad news:

1. Something's clearly gone wrong and The Dumb Move only exacerbated it.  The thing that's gone wrong is cerebro-spinal.  Hence the pins-and-needles, numb patches, and other weird symptoms that have been plaguing me with increasing intensity since December.

2. I've been doing some things wrong - who knew I should change up weights for different muscles?  Oh, you did?  Nice...  I'll ask you next time...

3. No upper-body work for, well, a while.  A really vague while but the phrases "you're not going to be pleased about this" and "longer than you'd like" have been bandied about.

So no free weights, press-ups, rowing-machine, weights machine. I didn't ask about planks.  I suspect that since the repsonse to "does it put stress on your shoulder and neck" is "yes", I've got my answer.


And we talked more about HMS and agreed that, while yes - constant pain is dispiriting and draining, and damn-near-inevitable injury in the course of working to make yourself less prone to injury is demoralising - it could be a lot worse, and - bar Dumb Moves - I'm doing pretty well.

I know people who have been made pretty much housebound by this or similar conditions.  I know people who sublux and dislocate at the drop of a hat. I've met people who're in their 20s and far more debilitated and in pain than I am on a daily basis.  I'm not sure whether that makes the pain I have to cope with any better, but it does put it in perspective.  It's worth managing it, and keeping on doing the right things, and learning from (and not punishing myself for) setbacks.

In other words: everything I said in that poem last night.  So well done me.

Pome #1

I wrote a poem last night (not unusual, after all, but I've not been finishing them lately), which started on the way home from a gig when I realised I wasn't feeling the pain I'd been feeling all day:

Glimmer

And, to accompany this, a picture courtesy of a generally more physically-inclined friend, who's clearly been reading these (hello!), saw this and thought of me:

Dumb

Oh hey kids, here's some advice:

When you're getting bored with your exercise routine and decide to "spice it up" by looking for a new move on your gym app (which you've barely ever used, at least partly because it's full of animated pictures of terrifyingly ripped people doing incomprehensible things with unlikely equipment), don't pick the one you think "Hmm, I bet my physio wouldn't approve of this..." and then "try a few out" and forget that you're full of endorphins so won't feel yourself bugger your Borked Shoulder.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the "Dumbbell Scarecrow":

Yeah, the irony is not lost on me...

Note to self: if an exercise is described as "Medium" difficult... you're not ready for it.

P.S. OW.

Just Do It #3

Quick, throwaway "motivational" phrases can be helpful, especially when you're exhausted and your body's drenched in adrenalin, and the buffer zones of carefully-constructed cognition are crumbling in the face of your inner waaah that just wants to give up and go home and, incidentally, eat a large plate of biscuits, or possibly ALL THE CHEESE.  So this tag series is for those small pre-fabricated tools that help me get the chuff on with it.

I ran into someone at work who's doing the Sport Relief Swim - very cool! :)  Her partner's doing the Six Mile run (run!) and they've both been getting into getting fitter generally since the New Year.

They told me a brilliant phrase that the runner's spinning instructor calls to them when they're mithering:

"What's sweat?!  It's just fat crying!"

I love it... :D

The Secret of the Pyramids

We have a shorthand in my household when people are emotionally up against it: "Maslow?"  It's even become a verb: "What should I do?" "Well, to start off, Maslow it."

What are we talking about?  I used to teach this as part of my A Level Psychology course, and I figure (despite its limitations), that it's a good tool:

Here's the thing - it's really hard to do that brain stuff that you need to do when you're hungry, tired, thirsty, or scared of basic stuff.  So if you're suffering from low brainwidth, deal with a couple of the lower rungs of Maslow first.

In a brain-flap? Drink some water.  Right now.  Get some water in you. Okay, now you've dealt with that, how do you feel about carbohydrates?  That's good news - here's a cookie^*.  Right, now we've dealt with that, what do you need to do next?  Is this an emergency, or can it wait until you've had a nap?  Okay, well, have another cookie^* and let's work out the rest of this.

In other words, you need all the resources you can actually get hold of (instead of punishing yourself for feeling bad, coz that works excellently well as both a long- and short-term strategy...) in order to deal with brain stuff.

I am crabbit at the moment, partly because my sleep is off and I've been in an amount of pain (though better today due to yesterday's interventions), partly because Everything Happens At Once seems to be one of those things.  I'm feeling overwhelmed, in short, and I'm going to write a poem about it full of emotive symbolism and all but, in the meantime, I'm going to deal with what's in front of me so that I can deal with things a few steps away.  And this may also mean telling Everything Else to back off a couple of steps, thanks.

I will eat lunch shortly, and go to the gym tonight. I will then eat well and early and I will sleep, by all the gods, because the world's a more dangerous place when I haven't.

And now, just to cheer you up, a picture of a crabbit (alternate definition):

__________________________

^* substitute dried fruit/ banana/ boiled egg/ whatever works for you at this point.

Bleh

Today is a Bad Joints Day.  Not only the usual suspects: Borked Shoulder, Particularly Bad Knee, Grinchy Neck Section, Dodgy Wrist, and Whingey Lower Back, but pretty much everything else as well.  The knees feel swollen, and everything is particularly clicky, achey, or twisted.

Yay.  No gym for me tonight.  This, combined with general increase in clumsiness and fine motor control near-absence today and yesterday leads me to conclude several things:

1. Sleep deprivation is a major key in pain perception/ management

Sleep has been very absent lately, especially over the last two nights.

2. I need to drink more on busy days

Like way more.

3. I have entered the "secretory" phase of my menstrual cycle

O hai progesterone, come to make a fuss, have you?

4. Standing around lots really does knacker my knees, especially when carrying heavy stuff

Seriously.

5. There may be some other factor that I'm not figuring in that is pulling everything else out of alignment

e.g. diet (sugar? acid? protein? calcium? something else?), the actual weight carried while walking/ standing, emotional stress, etc.


One of the things that worries me about, well, all of the above, is that the weekend of The Walk is a busy one, and that's got some real implications for stamina/ injury/ enjoyment on the day and recovery afterwards.

The day/ evening beforehand is a choir concert.  Judging by last time, this means: lots of standing; not much fluid intake (you don't want to rush to the loo in the middle of the gig); and a late night finish, which includes eating late.  Boo.

On the evening of the the day itself is a poetry gig that I run.  Judging by, well, every time, this means: a fair amount of standing; lots of heavy lifting (including up and down stairs); not much fluid intake (as organiser, you find yourself forgetting); and a really late night finish, which includes eating late. Double-boo.

And both will involve a fair amount of emotional stress, of different types, as well as likely to be taking place during the same less-than-ideal phase of my menstrual cycle.

Oh dear.

The Big Day is five weeks away and I have, as yet, to do any of the long walks necessary to check my ability to walk the increasingly long distances on the graph on the way up to six whole miles.  I just typed the phrase "Things keep getting in the way." and looked at it in disappointment and a measure of horror.

Oh deary me.

So the next five weeks are going to see:

1. A new sleep strategy (and set of tactics to match)

Don't ask me yet - I need to work this out.

2. A dry run of "drinking more and standing around less" for the next poetry event

Can't hurt...

3. More physio advice

She offered something I was tempted to take her up on.  Now that looks like a Very Good Idea Indeed™

4. Cracking on with the nutritionist advice

Any suggestions for good ones in Cambridge?

5. A new mattress

Mine is completely scuppered; time to spend some money.

6. Actually doing a long walk

No excuses.

7. Reading up more on hypermobility

There must be more I could be doing that I haven't thought of yet...


So watch this space, basically.

Syncopation

I only remember when it was because my brother had been given a copy of the book of Labyrinth, and I'd been given something... forgettable, and - to my mind - infinitely inferior and unfairly girly.  I suspect it was Boxing Day.  We were bundled into the car with little explanation and yet - surprisingly - my mother was driving.  My father's tolerance for other people driving, especially a car with him in it, has never been what a body might describe as capacious.  This prompted questions that were shut down abruptly, so I sulked back into Anne of Green Gables, or Little Women, or whatever it was I'd been gifted.

I have to assume that this made it late December 1986 or 87.  I was definitely adolescent, and inclined to question my parents on pretty much everything anyway.  I don't have a clear memory of when it became apparent that we were heading to hospital; it kind of jump-cuts to my dad in the hospital bed, bare-chested, strapped to a bunch of machines that went beep.

As an aspirant doctor, I was intrigued.  As a person with an annoying book and a low boredom threshold, I was doubly so.  I appear to have refused to get worried about my dad.  I left that to afterwards.  It's been a pattern I've maintained and established for most of my life - deal with the thing in front of you, then freak out when it's safe to do so.  So I asked many questions and watched everyone's expressions, and learned about ideal electrocardiograph patterns and cardiac dysrhythmia, and how to make the best of the terrifying frustration of abruptly-drawn hospital curtains, and medical staff body language. Also that there's no way to persuade my brother out of a book he's got until he's actually read it.  I have a similar disposition, as it goes, so I can't blame him...

Happily, my father was discharged a day later (I think), and came home (where he still is) with some stern advice from fellow-doctors (I imagine that's particularly difficult to take!) about diet and exercise.

Research indicates that "Type A" personalities (competitive, time-driven, impatient, pro-active workaholics possessed of covert free-floating hostility) are more prone to cardiac incidents (I suspect that part of this is being prone to pushing through physical symptoms as signs of weakness...) than the more chilled dudes occupying the Type B category.  All of this is over-simplistic, but does appear to have a reasonable amount of basis in the results.  The key thing here, though, with regard to my unnecessary 12-hour-shift-working, impatient, explosively-tempered father is that Type A personalities are way less likely to re-infarct than their less competitive brethren. i.e. if someone sends two people home from a cardiac incident: one Type A and one Type B, with the same advice (exercise more, cut down on fatty foods, eat more oat bran (this was the 80s)), the Type B presumably says "eh, I start all that tomorrow; I'll just chill for now." The Type A, driven little bugger, is likely to go "I will be the best at not getting another heart attack!" and duly goes on to lose the weight, do the exercise, and eat oat bran like a boss.  Behold, that - oddly enough - works and Type As, surviving the first one, are less likely to die prematurely of a heart attack than Type Bs in a similar position.

Why this combined Fay Family History/ classic psychology text summary?

My dad was only a couple of years older than I am now at the time. This factoid impacts on the resolution made later in this post. We share many phenotypical expressions of our genes (more than you might imagine, at first glance) and a fair number of personality traits, including - probably most significantly - stubbornness...

None of the chronic conditions I've lived with all my life - to the best of my knowledge - are degenerative.  Manage them well and asthma, allergies, etc. will just bimble along without scaring you too much.  Oh except when they won't:

Apparently, I can only really look forward to the chronic discomfort of Hypermobility Syndrome (HMS) getting worse as I age, especially after the menopause.  This... was a bit of a shock, and made an already-annoying Thursday just that bit more fun.  And it only properly struck me some time later, so today's exercise was accompanied by a crushing sense of "what the hell is the point if it's all just going to get worse anyway?!"  Yay motivation!

But I plodded on through the physio moves (not well, but I did) and onto the mat exercises.  I carefully did the leg raises and didn't push them into Bad Pain.  I moved onto the press-ups and thought "You know what? Sod it.  I'm not that high on the HMS scale as it is and I'm going to be the best at being a muscle-bound person compensating for HMS that there is." Like many other things, being entirely pain-free and comfortable is something that will belong in memory and I will celebrate the relatively good days when they come and treat myself kindly (but not over-indulgently) on the bad days. Because a life lived in fear of pain - of anything, come to it - is pretty spectacularly rubbish.  (Obviously I didn't articulate this all in the middle of press-ups, but the "sod it" bit definitely came across...)

I've lived that life before, because that was the only model I was given and - you know what? - it sucked. I am occasionally extremely bitter about the waste of my life due to that inherited pigswill, but - looking back - you can see that I was always trying to break out of it (despite this, historically, leading to a good kicking by those holding the fear-reins), and to many people's eyes I'm sure that it's long looked like I did.

The post I had originally been going to write this morning about the "oh, hey, your condition will only worsen" news was far more maudlin.  Instead, I had a 4-hour "nap" (answering my body's actual need rather than "pushing through" needlessly), and then did my pre-planned exercise and ate well.  I feel ferociously better and am writing this so as to have a touchstone for that "well, if this is the best it's going to get, I'm darned well going to extend this for as long as possible" resolution.

Fit that on a motivational poster...

Just Do It #2

Quick, throwaway "motivational" phrases can be helpful, especially when you're exhausted and your body's drenched in adrenalin, and the buffer zones of carefully-constructed cognition are crumbling in the face of your inner waaah that just wants to give up and go home and, incidentally, eat a large plate of biscuits, or possibly ALL THE CHEESE.  So this tag series is for those small, pre-fabricated tools that help me get the chuff on with it.

So my latest auto-Tweet sharing this blog got favourited by @Inside_Tracker. I went to have a look, and they have some doozies of those cheesy inspirational bon mots that I implicated in my last post on this tag.

Oh, some of them are pretty good, don't get me wrong: 

"It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop."

and

"It's never a question of can you, but will you?"

which, okay, has some grammar issues all its own, but is reminiscent of that Ayn Rand quote that I have up on my desk at work, in its Zen Pencils form:

"The question isn't who is going to let me but who is going to stop me."

Quite a flawed individual, that Ayn Rand, but that doesn't make her statement any less true, or any less useful to people who've suffered from a form of training that leads them to expect to need permission to follow their ambitions.

Anyway, there are some properly silly quotes there too:

"There is no elevator to success; you have to take the stairs."

which is patently a lie (cronyism, inherited wealth, nepotism, blackmail, etc.), and:

"Training is the opposite of hoping,"

which is madness, because surely you need hope to start and persist through training. Surely "wishing" would work better there.

My favourite, though, is:

"Clear your mind of can't."

because I want to remove the apostrophe and send it back to them.

:)

Got sent some great links to motivational phrases by Theodore Roosevelt (among others) in the wake of the last post in this tag. Ima check those out and see if any can turn into tiny "come on, one more push"-type tools and will - of course! - share if they do.

Any of you got any more for me?

Extra

So, most of you probably know that I'm working up towards walking 6 miles in aid of Sport Relief on 23rd March.  What you might not be aware of is that we recently smashed the original £300 donation goal.  I'd frankly wondered if it was too ambitious at the time.  Now I'm seeing what happens when you set your goals high and keep pushing towards them...

Obviously, what I've done now is set a new target of £500.  And if we hit that in the next three weeks (we're less than £100 away from it now), I'll raise it to £750. And so on. (Well, sensibly enough so that I'm not setting myself up for failure...)

Yesterday's wall was (probably) as a result of a lot of emotionally-wearing stuff happening in quick succession to a body and brain that are already being deliberately challenged, pushed, changed, and demanded-of. Pretty sure I can't spreadsheet that, but I can keep track of, e.g., quality as well as quantity of sleep.

Pyramus

Or, contrariwise, Thisbe.

I appear, Gentle Readers, to have hit a wall. I don't know if it's The Wall, but I do know that today I'm not tired: I'm exhausted.

Really? Yes, really: I'm hungry, teary, confused, panicky, utterly uncoordinated, and pretty much all out of juice.

Today was going to be about how I'm managing to balance work, poetry, home life, and exercise. Whooo! Instead, it's going to be more along the lines of: lots of things went wrong over the past ten days, and I coped with them, Doing Everything as I did so, until I could no longer take on any more crap, and broke.

Oh walls.

I suspect that there's a lesson to be learned here (about who, when, and how to ask for help, and how and when to say No), but - until I've slept like a child whose fever has just broken, I'm not going to be able to grasp it, let alone share it coherently.

In other, more positive news: my physio is impressed with me, and has a solution for the pins and needles in the Arm of Doom (otherwise known as the left one - it's doubly sinister... haha! Help me, I need sleep...). Happily, this does not include stopping using free weights, which is what I'd assumed she'd say.

Right, I've now eaten a crapload of mashed potato, bacon, leek, cheese, and whatever else was in that lovely meal. I've had my final Gold Bar (none left in the house now - I made them last for well over a month), and now I'm finding my Kindle and going to bed.

So goodnight unto you all.

There's no place like...

... this:

http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/04/19/5-fitness-buzzwords/

It's as if the whole site was made for people like me.  Oh, it is.  Wonderful. :)

(I'm not saying that it's perfect, but it appears to be deeply sensible, and people-focused. And they're looking to promote, encourage, and guide towards the kind of fitness I'm after. Bonus!)

Just Do It #1

I’m lucky enough not to work in a place that has motivational posters.  They’re smart - they know we’ll all - at best - sneer at them.

But quick, throwaway phrases can be helpful, especially when you’re exhausted and your body’s drenched in adrenalin, and the buffer zones of carefully-constructed cognition are crumbling in the face of your inner waaah that just wants to give up and go home and, incidentally, eat a large plate of biscuits, or possibly ALL THE CHEESE.

So this tag series is for those small pre-fabricated tools that help me get the chuff on with it.

This first is from a somewhat unlikely source: Neil Gaiman.  One of the earliest solo novels that this mop-haired literary skinnymalink produced, American Gods, introduces a first-time convict character, Shadow:

“One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don’t do anyone else’s time for them.

“Keep your head down. Do your own time.”

I find myself using this phrase a great deal in the gym - when looking at the bigger weights, higher resistance, or faster speeds that anyone else is doing nearby, projecting judgement.

Do your own time, Roberts.  Okay...

Anyone have any other little gems for this tag series?

Challengers

It’s time to talk motivation. Okay, again, but this time I’m not talking about goals, but some of the things that got me started on this path, and one of the means by which I keep myself going...

The first time I did Sport Relief (March 2012) was because of a friend I wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for The Stick and Twitter. I struck up a conversation on a bus with someone using a crutch, after I got involved (I can’t not get involved - can’t decide if it’s a Welsh thing, a my family thing, or just a me thing) to clarify to her that yes, this bus would get her reasonably close to where she needed to go. We talked only a little before getting off at the same stop, but - on alighting - she dropped the spoons shibboleth and we nattered rapidly before getting to my house and exchanging Twitter handles.

I then took her up, via Twitter, on an invitation to meet up with a bunch of people at a wheelchair-accessible pub after work. At this point I had no idea whether I’d ever ditch the stick and, while used to the vicissitudes of invisible disability, was resigning myself to the fun bits of more visible disability. Years before, the person who’d brought me to England had conceded to a wheelchair, so I was used to a lot of a crap surrounding that second-hand. Being the direct object of horrified pity/ confusion/ penetrating curiosity/ terrified revulsion was yet another brick to carry around in the growing arsenal of This Sucks, never mind the practical considerations, weird shame, and increased expense on top of physically feeling like crap. Meeting some people who could help me shape/ share/ laugh about this was an alluring concept.

I met a bunch of lovely people through a series of nights out, and have roughly stayed in social media contact with many of them. However, one of them was more persistent, and I got to know him better.

Nearly two years ago, he mentioned that he was going to help out with his school’s Sport Relief Mile (he’s a TA), but that doing a mile in an electric wheelchair capable of 8mph felt underwhelming, somehow. He then got a brainwave - he would do it backwards. Suddenly, when taking a heavy machine backwards over grass when you have limited neck movement, a mile feels a lot longer.

I’d been feeling low and sorry for myself. It was coming up to my first birthday with The Stick, and - while I was making a little progress with physio - I wasn’t convinced that this wasn’t as good as it would get, and all these images of sporty and otherwise celebrities doing things like dancing and cycling - two things I dearly loved - when I couldn’t was bringing on butthurt in large quantities. I was getting emails about sport (I support Comic Relief, so was getting the SR emails), seeing posters about sport, TV programmes about sport, the Olympics were freaking everywhere in 2012, and I was filled with waaah.

And here’s my mate, who doesn’t feel like life is challenging enough, so he goes - literally - the extra mile to raise some money and support his students.

What could I do? I signed up for Sport Relief a few days before the event, got some sponsors, had a birthday party, and set off - horribly hungover (my birthday is one of the three times of the year I drink alcohol) - into the muddy sunshine of Milton Country Park to hurple a pained and shaking mile (with an even more heroically hungover partner by my side).

So there’s one of my motivations - the idea that, despite the many challenges life might hand you, there’s little more satisfying than fulfilling one of your own, despite/ because of them. Pretty much all of my personal heroes are friends who haven’t let the terrible crap life has dealt them stop them pushing themselves to new horizons - often ones that are of direct benefit to lots of other people. When I’m feeling particularly butthurt, thinking of him, or any of those other many generous, striving souls I know puts me back on track.

This post was going to go to some other places, but I think we’re good here for now...

Blood, sweat, and tears

So. My knees still hurt. If I sit or stand still too long it’s like the last two years never happened and the poor, puffy things make squeaky noises. (Metaphorical - I can’t get my ears that close these days...)

It’s not all tragedy and the painful consequences of pushing myself too hard too early. I forgot to mention some other bits of progress:

Sooner than I would have anticipated, my heart-rate at top exertion, if the gym bikes are to be believed, is 10 bpm slower. Since this matches symptoms (chest feels less crushed, doesn’t hurt, none of that unilateral jaw ache I associate with a scary level of blood pressure), I’m choosing to trust this assertion.

(It’s now in the 170s rather than 180s. Yes, I know that’s still problematically high.)

My muscles feel... well, actually, they feel quite achey, truth  be told, but also... Look, I don’t want to say that they’re bigger, because I’m not convinced that four weeks will see that much difference, but they do feel more present, somehow. And, of course, I appear to be trusting them more, which is nice.

My waistline appears to be no different whatsoever. This is disappointing but, again, being nigh-on 39, only having done this for four weeks, and, having made little change to my diet in terms of fat and carbs, I don’t think I can expect anything too spectacular in visual terms yet.  Mind you, when I tense them, the wall of abs feels more dense.  Under the spare Fay, that is.

Sensible suggestions for reducing abdominal fat and statistically improving my lifespan odds (apparently) would be gratefully received!  If I see no change in the next month, I’ll talk to a nutritionist.  You know - a proper sciencey one, not a Gillian McKeith-style opinionated random.

Another bit of family history for you: pretty much all my antecedents are Celtic/ Nordic.  My blood family hail from South Wales, Central and Northern Scotland, Ireland (that bit’s all a bit vague), the West Midlands/ North Wales, and Denmark.  Why’s this important?  Well, I’ve already been exploring what it means to be me, in this body, and understanding my genetic inheritances (limits and advantages) could prove useful. Anyway, while my brother looks like a strong mix of the dark Scot and Black Welsh (brown hair, brown eyes, tans at the snap of a finger), I take most strongly after the Northern Scottish/ Danish side, with enough of the Midlands/ North Welsh sprinkled in to keep it interesting (after all, recessive hair and eye colouring has to come from both parents...).  I have blonde hair (though not the white-blonde of my early youth... mind there’s enough silver springing up these days...!), blue-green-grey eyes, and couldn’t tan at gunpoint.

My mother’s cousin was invalided out of the army while serving in India - I’ve seen a small, black-and-white headshot of a blonde man with my chin and cheekbones; have imagined him, hair bleached white, gasping and scarlet, unable to sweat off the heat, stretchered to the sea.

Sharing this interesting genetic weakness (I also picked up the asthma - dad’s side (skipped a generation), eczema - mum’s side, extra-bendy joints - both; mind you, I skipped the short-sightedness and got the curly hair, mimicry, persistently looking-younger-than-your-age, and stubbornness, so it’s not all bad news) makes for funtimes in the gym.  Now I’m getting to a point where I can exert myself more on the cardio apparatus, I’m overheating.  In fact, I seem to feel generally warmer (a blessing while the heating was broken!) the rest of the time.  This feels like a nice return to “who I used to be” - i.e. someone who was always feeling too warm, as opposed to the person who has spent the last few years shivering and trying to find comfort in the fact that she overheats less in summer.  I am starting to become slightly damp (my equivalent of dripping sweat) at the gym after cardio especially, which is something I’ve had to train myself in the past not to automatically treat with alarm (the only experience I’d had of perspiration was during fever).

I carry a towel in the gym because we’re told to, but I use mine - when I do - to soak surreptitiously with cold water in order to provide myself with fake sweat on my face and to rub away the strange, stinging stickiness.

So, short version: experiencing body changes (and returns) in some ways and not in others, and have successfully muntered my knees with overdoing stuff (also my shoulders, but we haven’t discussed that yet).

Bad Poet, No Biscuit

My dietary shifts are generally going well - I’m eating a lot more vegetables, especially raw ones; I’ve been ensuring that I drink at least two litres of fluids a day every day; and am being more punctilious than ever in making sure that my grains are whole (where available).

I’ve also largely cut out refined sugars, choosing to eat dried fruit in their place, or just go without.

And yet biscuits. Mmmh. They are a major weakness in this otherwise annoyingly virtuous pattern. Somehow, last night, I persuaded myself that an “emergency” necessitated biscuit- and crisp-eating. That said emergency could have been obviated with some planning and organisation on my part was by-the-by. At least they were hobnobs, I suppose...

Last night’s literal running-around saw not only a little victory or two (“snack food before the show? Why yes, I’ll have a wrap and a smoothie, thanks...”) but several little disappointments. I have not been listing them (getting taxis, not losing weight, days when I say “screw salad, I’m having bacon!") as I generally just get dispirited when that happens - historically ingrained memes leading me to say: “Yes, you’re right - I’m worthless, let me prove that to everyone, especially me...” I discovered, all too late in life, that saying “well done, you cycled into work once this week!” works better than “lazy git, you caught the bus four times this week - shaaaaame...” That’s not to say that stick doesn’t work for some extremely short-term goals, but I’m clearly more of a carrot person.

If that’s even a thing.

It was a healthy evening for lots of other reasons, though - the only cab taken was at the end of the night, when buses had vanished; I had lots of social contact (including hugs, random jabbering, and positive strokes from people who are good at sharing that kind of thing); I got to holler admiration at one of my spoken word idols; and then there was the dancing.

Wednesday was supposed to be a rest day, so no physio, gym, or mat exercises. Instead I ran, walked fast, stood around for ages, and then bounced up and down periodically, flailing as much as space would allow while shaking my head. Hmm...

I brought the stick with me. I still have to do that for prolonged standing, and even its shooting-stick charms couldn’t obviate my knees hurting like bastards today.

I have a feeling my physiotherapist would not approve... Especially considering that I went to the gym today as well.

Maybe I need to revisit that whole “rest” concept.

Little Victories #3

I’m trying to make a lifestyle change here, and that means changing habits of thought as well as upgrading physical function. This tag will record those little moments of triumph that make me proud.

Part of what I’m doing with this project is giving myself gifts. I don’t remember that enough - sometimes exercise and salad just feel like a chore to feed the spreadsheet. Moments like earlier are a great reminder:

I realised that, running late, I had a wider choice of buses these days and, seeing one that was running a little behind schedule that stops quite far (but walkable distance now) from my house, I decided to try it.

It had overtaken me, so I started to run towards the stop. And I ran. And kept running. Holy crap, I wasn’t running out of breath or breaking my legs. I had to pause to let someone pushing a bike by in the opposite direction, and trotted the few yards after that at a fast walk, grinning all over my face.

Of course, the next bus heading to where I’m now trying to get to is stuck in traffic, but that’s a different story...

Back on the Wagon

In the end, I had five days with no other exercise but walking, and even then not much. I'm disappointed, if truth be told - while I chose wisely not to for the first three days, the other two were littered with excuses and bad planning.

Oh well; changing patterns of thought are unlikely to happen overnight. I shall look on this as a learning opportunity...

In other, more positive news: I got back into things while staying over at my family's at the weekend, and felt the better for it, though my abs kept saying really?! I missed the chance to get a long walk in, though, which was a shame, but visiting my mum's grave with my dad (the first time we've done that, it suddenly occurs to me, since her funeral in '99) took precedence.

Anyway, a week later than anticipated (planned, that is), I went for the "Walk all the way home after work" goal.  Some numbers for the stats heads, according to my Google Tracks app:

Distance: 2.6 miles

Putative Calories Burned: 273

Total Time: 41:40

Average Speed: 3.74 mph

(There's all sorts of stuff about moving time and average moving speed, which seems confusing to me, but hey...)

All of which is rather positive, I think.  Good speed, didn't stop for any significant amount of time except at a pedestrian crossing, during which I kept my legs wiggling, like a very slow, over-dressed jogger.  I didn't hurt too much during the walk itself, and I even stretched out when I got home.

Today my legs are so very far from fussed I'd almost forgotten I'd done it.  Well, I say that.  They weren't during the day, but now they're grumbling, especially in the knees, and I can't help but wonder if 2.6 miles at a fast trot followed by fairly intensive sessions on the stationary bicycles the next day was entirely wise.

Heigh-ho.  You'll be wanting a progress report then?

Diet (as opposed to dieting)

I'm eating well, enjoying food, and stubbornly substituting dried fruit and more water for biscuits and flapjack.  Tonight I sat there, in our currently freezing kitchen, after an extremely satisfying meal of home-made stew with potatoes and fresh bread, and wondered what was wrong.  I started externalising the conversation I was having sotto metis in my head to highlight to myself how ludicrous it was:

"But I want a biscuit."

"You've eaten more than enough, you're just tired."

"Biscuits! I can see them!"

"Sorry - no biscuits for you..." etc.  It seemed to work.

(Although I'd quite like a biscuit right about now.  Maybe I'll go to sleep instead.)

Sleep

I've got to do something about this.  I'm more tired from physical exertion, so my sleep quality's better, I just need to work on the quantity. Dammit.

Physio

Apart from the blip (it was a blip!) that was last week, doing well on this score.  It's getting a tad easy, though, which means that, presumably, I run the risk of getting bored by it and not doing it.  Doing it first thing in the morning keeps it more difficult (laxer muscles to overcome), and I can do that time-wasting reading the news thing that I would usually do slumped on the sofa when I arguably should be getting ready for work...

Mat exercises

Going very well.  20 reps is almost easy now, and my planks (even the repeated ones in later sets) are more reliably 60 seconds (or close) at a time.  So I've started adding in some new ones (wide-arm press-ups!  Yay! Holy damn that's difficult!), and will continue to do so (I foresee flying press-ups - where you swing one arm up at a time after coming back up - scissor kicks, and - in a month or so's time I suppose - gym ball gubbins; that'll keep me occupied...)

Gym

I failed to consider that doing longer sets of the endurance stuff (bikes, rowing machine, etc.) would mean that I spend longer overall at the gym.  That tiny miscalculation (and missed bus) aside, this is going pretty well too.

Up to 16.5 minutes on the bikes (the magical 20 minutes is almost within sight!), with variations of difficulty to - again - keep me from getting bored and doing it wrong.  I'm also listening to music and reading the Kindle app on the phone during the "flat" stretches.  And watching the man who does Epic Lunges down the length of the cardio part of the gym.  Luckily, I am too breathless, generally, to shout "Why so serious?!"

Maximum reps on the free weights is starting to get easy.  I think next week I go up a whole 0.5kg!  Onto the Big Girl Weights, where they have textured chrome bars and black hexagonal ends!  Yay! :D

I'd forgotten how ace rowing machines are.  I'd also forgotten that people are as crap at putting the handles back to the right slot for the next person as they are re-stacking their weights.

Oh hell - I'm turning into a gym bore!

No, no, it's okay - I'm allowed/ supposed to on here.

I saw a lot more people that I know in the gym today.  Tuesday appears to be People Fay Knows Day at that particular grunt emporium.

And no, I still haven't got used to the guttural gasps emitted by men with weights, the higher-pitched, sobbing exhalations of women at the end of their sets.  This, I have decided, is why people wear earphones - not to distract themselves from the boredom of repetitive exercise, not to dedicate themselves to their fitness in aural isolation, but to prevent themselves from getting needlessly aroused by the sounds of the others around them.

There's a poem in that, I'll wager...

And that's it, I reckon.  This weekend I'll need to walk 3.5 miles to be up to the mark; I'll let you know how that goes!