thedeadparrot

There was a good thread about gender performance in sport, how the way sport are constructed itself can limit certain types of women's (generally queer) bodies from competing and thereby limiting the ceiling of what female athletes can do. It wasn't a bad thread, really, but what irked me was the way it kind of glossed over just how difficult it is to be female-bodied and athletic, just on a biological level.

I understand why not, because men like to pretend it makes them superior. Blah blah blah, the best women's teams can be beaten by high school boys. There's a lot to be said about how sport itself is constructed to be advantageous to male bodies on top of how much more support and encouragement boys get from the early stages of life.

But I think of every time a dude has said to me, "oh, before I started working out, I could only do one pull up," and I want to punch him in the face.

I can kind of do one pull up. It took me over two years to get to this point. I can't do it that consistently. If I skip a week of training it, it can take me weeks to get it back. Maybe at some point, I'll get two in a row. I'm not super super dedicated to the training or diet parts of getting and maintaining it. But that's the point. I have to put in way more work for my body to build and maintain the muscle mass, for my body to get to the right body fat percentages, in order to make this as possible for me as it does for many of the men I know who have it without even trying.

One thing that gets obscured in this conversation is what sorts of training and work and sacrifices women have to go through in order to even perform at these levels even before we talk about the sociological issues. One thing that female athletes is that dropping your body fat will fuck up your hormonal cycles until you lose your period and then mess your bone density. Not to mention that your hormonal cycles themselves can have a big impact on your athletic performance, to the point where many scientists don't even study female athletes because of the extra work needed to control for where they are in their cycles.

Anyway, the point is: fuck the patriarchy, but fuck biology, too.

I went to a parkour workshop today, and it was super great. My back and arms are sore because I went to class yesterday, and I have an ugly bruise on my right knee from screwing up a jump (which is exhibit D of a future post entitled 'Athletes have disgusting bodies'). I do have a longer post that I would like to write about why I love this sport so much, but I have not had enough time to gather my thoughts.

The rest of my weekend will probably involve sitting on my couch, working on a third fic that I will write and never post, and hunt down authors to bid on for fandomtrumpshate. (There's a very long list of people offering things if you want to try to skim it to find authors you might recognize.)

I am thrilled that I have the cash to actually bid for things in one of these big fandom auctions. I'm eager to get into bidding wars over some of the ones that I've already bid on (so yeah, if you are at all hesitant about hurting my feelings by bidding against me, I am actually really excited to tangle with you).

And I dunno. If I'm feeling mostly recovered by Monday, I might go ice skating. That could be fun. Maybe I'll even learn how to stop like a real skater instead of just running into walls.

So, it's been kind of year since I started going to yoga classes. I thought it might be a good time for me to reflect on it.

( discussion of food, bodies, weight, exercise to follow )

Woke up last night at 4:30 from a bad dream. It was unpleasant, but I usually get up at 5:30 anyway, so I just stayed awake and played video games.

This was actually kind of nice because I managed to drag myself outside at 6am to go for a walk, playing through the first mission of Zombies, Run!. It was pretty damn pleasant, considering how hot it got up to during the day, so I think I'm going to start the Zombies, Run! 5k edition tomorrow. Working out at home has gotten a little stale, and it's nice to have both variety and a specific goal to work towards.

(My strength training goal is 'be able to do a full push up'. Little to no success on this yet.)

I was looking into local 5ks, and I think I found one that might work as a fun target, though it lands around week 7, so I'm not sure if I want to sign up in the 'Walking' or 'Running' category. Decisions are hard. Ask me again in a week.

Speaking of cardio, I also looked up local Parkour classes, and there's one that miiiight work on Fridays. I'll check it out this Friday and see how I feel about it, though it might make me too sore to go to yoga on Saturdays. I'm in TRY ALL THE THINGS mode right now.

One of the reasons why I'm doing so much and thinking so much about it is because I'm doing better at -- either through yoga or meditation or both -- of feeling connected to my body and feeling pleasure in making it do things. It hurts, and it sucks, and I'm awful at pretty much everything right now (and I am discovering the pleasant shade of beet-red my face turns whenever I get my heart rate up), but it's kind of awesome, too? My body does things? I can make it do things?

I read an essay today by the head writer of Zombies, Run!, Naomi Alderman, that really captured that feeling of it: There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person and Made a Successful Fitness App. There's a lot here that's good, but I'm going to spoil some of it by posting the part that really spoke to me:

No, what happened was better: I started to enjoy being in my body. I felt better. I felt good. It is a very different feeling to be in a fat body that is moving a lot to one that hardly moves at all. It feels like love. As simple and as joyful as that.

This week was really awful. Getting into the details of it is more than I can or want to deal with right now, so I will not do that. It's at the point where I've semi-abandoned my weird experimental fic in favor of stress-writing terrible other fic because other fic is easier to think about and work on. I can just spew words into this document, and it's almost kind of soothing.

But on the other hand, I've started doing cardio, and I think I've found cardio that I don't hate? Zumba wasn't really fun per se, but I enjoyed it more than the other cardio I've done before? I didn't feel like throwing up at any point. My lungs didn't want to crawl out of my chest. There were plenty of breaks where I could stop for water. I was terrible at any of the parts that required actual dancing skill, but I managed to keep up with the footwork for the most part. Or worked really hard at trying to keep up with the footwork, which is pretty much what I'm there for anyway.

I think the key things for cardio and me is that (a) I much prefer working out more than one muscle group when doing it and (b) I need someone else to set the pace for me and guilt/encourage me to get through things. I think I push myself too hard when I try to do things like running, and then I just feel awful at the end of the workout instead of energized. I get side stitches, and I can't breathe, and yeah. Bad place.

I found some home cardio videos that I liked well enough. The first one that I saw offered up low-impact alternatives to the moves they were using, and halfway through, there was a water break. Even though I haven't done cardio in forever, it was still pretty doable. I usually end up gushing sweat at the end of it, which is the goal, I think. I also get a nice pleasant buzz, which I'm guessing is the mystical runners' high that I've heard so much about but have never experienced in association with running. I might go hunting for other videos to see if I like them better, but even if I don't, then I at least have these to fall back on.

I am slightly worried that it's not cardio 'enough' and am tempted to get some sort of heart rate monitor, though I think that's the internet talking and not me. Ugh. I'm not in this to get to my peak physical condition or lose a ton of weight. I'm just in this to maintain a decent amount of mental and physical health. I guess we'll see how I feel about keeping up the routine going forward.

This is on top of the daily yoga that I've been pretty good at maintaining, even when I was sick earlier this week. There are yoga videos for when you are sick, because there are yoga videos for everything. Just finished Day 26 of 30 Days of Yoga, and it's been good. I like the variety that she presents. I've been doing once-a-week classes, which are good for pushing myself harder and also for inducing bile in the back of my throat when I push myself to hard.

So. I guess I'm now someone who does exercise on a regular basis. I'm someone who talks about the exercise I'm doing on a regular basis. Gross.