These feet were made for walking

Fitness in Midlife

Hi Beautiful Friends,

This summer our family traveled to Europe where we visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, Salzburg, and Vienna. In twenty-one days we explored five different cities mostly by walking and walking…and walking. Averaging over ten miles and 20,000 steps a day for days on end was a great reminder that we, as humans, are designed for walking.

Over-Training

On the fourth day of our trip, Dr. Peter Attia released a newsletter about how even though his recent travel had caused him to miss workouts, upon returning to his routine, his “performance” had actually improved. He wrote about how over-training not only hurts measurable outcomes but also impacts things I deeply care about like sleep and mood. This particular newsletter came at the perfect time to curb anxiety about taking a break from my routine, which some (e.g., my husband) would call over-training. Instead of missing out on exploration and family time by trying to stick to my workout schedule, I decided to go with the flow (a necessary midlife practice I’ve been enjoying). I became curious about what would happen if I replaced all my yoga, rucking, zone 2, heavy lifting, weight resistance, and VO2 max workouts with just walking. Mind you, a lot of walking.

Not enough walking, however, to slow down our Energizer bunny. My eight-year old son was still running, jumping, and throwing anything he could get his hands on after covering miles and miles made longer by his inability to walk a straight line. He comes by it honestly. I too, am a mover.

I’ve always been very active. I figure skated as a child, ran cross country in middle school, competed in track and field in high school, and in college I rowed and played water polo. Never awesome at any of these activities, I was more drawn to the sheer effort (which I falsely equated to my worth) than to mastery. Hard work and thinness, highly rewarded in our culture, were deeply reinforced in my family of origin. With a lot of hard work I found that typically I could achieve better than average. The exception being the insanity known as water polo. Heartbreak led me to the masochistic death-wish-sport that nearly drowned me on the daily. In the pool I could cry fifty per cent of the time and no one would notice because my face was underwater, often unintentionally.

This summer, at the end of each day of our European travels, my husband (the heartbreaker) and I would compare steps on our watches. Even though we’d done essentially the same route, I would inevitably have taken more steps. I don’t remember a time without the need to be in constant motion. Beyond nature, there were aspects of nurture (used loosely here) that likely contributed to my unusual output.

The Dangers of Willpower

It’s not lost on me that others might see the problem of over-training as a non-problem or an inauthentic complaint of a privileged, able-bodied, white, thin person. A humble brag. People have envied my “willpower” to exercise, exclaiming that not everyone can be so lucky. Yes, and, “willpower” has killed many an anorexic.

According to the American Psychology Association, “willpower” is defined as:

“The ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals. The capacity to override an unwanted thought, feeling, or impulse…”

This definition sounds an awful lot like the ability to ignore your intuition, to stop listening to messages from your body when it asks for food or rest. Willpower is not always advantageous. In fact, it can be outright dangerous.

Before we judge how people use their bodies, let’s try to remember we cannot see their internal experience. I’ve often envied those who sit comfortably in their own skin for hours (or even one). I wonder what it would be like not to feel an edginess steadily build so that by three pm on a day with no physical intensity, a feeling of complete disconnection, of being lost and irritable takes over.

The Illusion of Privilege

Do I experience privilege in the world because I’m able-bodied, thin, white, and have resources to support a regular training routine? One hundred per cent. Do these privileges always move me towards optimal health? Definitely not.

In his 2019 book Dying of Whiteness, which is based on his extensive sociological research, Jonathan Metzl MD, PhD demonstrates how racist ideology, or what James Baldwin coined “the lie of whiteness,” leads to detrimental health impacts for the population of white voters being promised advantage by voting for policies that actually harm them:

“…because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of U.S. whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.” (Metzl 2019, p. 9)

Metzl would be the first to acknowledge that within the US, those suffering the most from racism are not white people, just as I acknowledge that skinny white girls are not the ones suffering the most from fat phobia. I’d argue instead that we all suffer from privilege, and it’s not what we think it is. Privilege exists, and it is a lie.

Exercise: Both Therapy & Trauma

I often exercise to move my feelings. Sometimes to feel better, but often just to feel less. You might call it “numbing out.” The addiction to endorphins began early for me as a result of a nervous system that required intense physicality in order to settle, almost as though the maximum exertion exorcises stress from my body through reaching total fatigue. The intensity would often come at the price of injury.

REDs

Rowing in college led to tendonitis in my wrist, vomiting after erg tests, and losing my period. Culturally at the time, amenorrhea signified a hard working female athlete and was worn as a badge of pride. Now I know that I was suffering from REDs or relative energy deficiency in sport, a result of under-fueling. With the right nutrition through childhood, adolescence, and frankly up until very recently, I would likely have fared much better in sport and in life, period.

It wasn’t until I found yoga in my early twenties that my relationship to exercise and its relationship to my mental health evolved from pure masochism to a deeply introspective journey. I took my first bikram (hot) yoga class in 2003. There was space within the practice for inevitable self-reflection while I was forced to look at myself in the mirror for the ninety-minute duration of class. Try surviving a regular practice of self-criticism while watching yourself struggling, melting, and contorting for an hour and a half. Self-compassion becomes survival. I began looking at my body for what it could do, rather than the shape it was, and it’s been all roses and loving-kindness ever since. Yeah, right. It’s a process.

My Friend, Little “t”

When I was little I had this idea of soulmate as someone who would finish my sentences, like all the same things I did, and just adored everything about me. Basically, a narcissistic dream. When I watched the movie Good Will Hunting, I heard a new definition. A soulmate is someone who challenges you. Mind blown. This gradually became my new working definition. I don’t see trauma exactly as a soulmate or even a bestie, but a friend nevertheless, who has been with me through the hardest times, who knows me intimately, and who challenges me to become a better person.

Another point of personal privilege: I managed to escape big “T” trauma. I don’t pretend to know what a relationship to that looks and feels like. Little “t” is something the majority of us can claim. Making friends with my little “t’s” has been some of my most fulfilling and productive work.

Yoga as CBT

In the yoga room is where I first began to hear the things I was saying to myself, and how unhelpful, even cruel, some of those things were. I’ve often compared my yoga practice to cognitive behavioural therapy. While intensity had been a problem, it was actually the intensity of bikram yoga that broke me down and demanded a self-compassion I didn’t know I had, while simultaneously encouraging physical, emotional, and mental potential I hadn’t imagined. In that space, I found my way to spirituality, to a sense of something beyond me, to a sense of the big “S” self (with all the C’s), as it’s known in the world of IFS (internal family systems).

Breath

Yoga also taught me to breathe. Looking back I realized not only had I not been fueling with proper nutrition but I also had not been fueling with breath. I had done four-and-a-half minute skating programs and seven-and-a-half minute boat races while holding my breath. No wonder I felt so shitty afterward. I used to hyperventilate before skating tests from the nerves of having to go out there and perform alone. I didn’t yet understand why being me might make this context a bad fit. I didn’t know that breath is an excellent reflection of the state of the nervous system and that mine was screaming disregulation.

After five years of sweating it out in stinky, packed studios in Brooklyn and Manhattan where I bounced around washing mirrors and doing laundry in exchange for classes, I went to bikram yoga training, which in and of itself is a whole book, which I feel has already been written and not by me. Benjamin Lohr, a Columbia University graduate wrote the book I wished I could have written. Hell-Bent was the first book that compelled me to start reading again from the beginning as soon as I finished the last page. If you want to know what it’s like inside the world of bikram yoga, that’s your book. Everything you may have heard about Bikram, the man, is probably true. Kinda crazy that my nervous system became the most regulated in the presence of that complicated piece-of-work human, but I owe that outcome to my beautiful mentors who trained me from the beginning to separate the yoga from the man. My stance on cancel culture likely stems partly from this experience.

The Pains of Walking

Given the long distances we covered during our European travels, I was prepared to receive physical and psychological pain in the form of complaints from the fifty percent of the family who are fabulous sitters — my husband and fifteen-year-old daughter. But the opposite happened: The four of us became addicted to walking, spurred on by the promise of beautiful, not-yet-discovered streets, and the fact that it just felt really good. In fact, after finishing our last meal of the day, we’d often walk the last two miles “home” rather than take public transit.

We even walked home in the rain one night after an exquisite production of The Secret Garden in Regent’s Park’s open air theatre in London, which we got to see with my cousin and his fiancée currently living there. Thanks to rucking, I was able to carry my travel backpack through airports and from city to city hands-free, as well as piggyback my son when he’d finally hit a wall, as he did that night during the last mile home in the rain.

Back pain happened more for the grown-ups and more often after travel days where sitting or standing were required. Any back pain dissipated instantly with stretching the circumference of the hip joints: outer and inner hips, quads, hamstrings. Here’s the short series I learned years ago from my yoga mentor, Jason Crandell, that works wonders to relieve lower back soreness instantly.

Plantar Fasciitis

With all the walking, my daughter started to feel some pain in her heel, which I suspect was the beginning of plantar fasciitis (coincidentally, one of the more common ailments, like frozen shoulder, that crop up in perimenopause due to loss of collagen from declining estrogen). Given some other indications, at age fifteen she may also be suffering from low estrogen. Calf strengthening and stretching alleviated her pain, and we carried on.

All the Things

Current noise on exercise and longevity consists of conversations about: zone 2, VO2 max, weight resistance, heavy lifting — all good things that I do regularly. (Fitting in protocols from leading experts in health and longevity can be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and more on this later.) I was worried that replacing my training program with walking would lead to loss of strength and lean muscle mass and a decrease in cardiovascular fitness. I was happy (or as happy as I get) with the way I looked heading into the trip. I worried I would look different after the trip, especially because not only did I abandon my normal exercise routine but I also went on the “see-food” diet. I ate anything and everything I wanted to: pain au chocolats, baguette, fish ‘n chips, giant stroopwafel covered in chocolate, and an Austrian dessert called Salzburger Nockerl:

(a massive mound of sugary, delicious egg white — essentially a giant, glorified marshmallow). I also drank more than two drinks per week (as per the new Canadian guidelines for alcohol consumption) that had become my new perimenopausal habit.

When I returned, I didn’t notice any real change in my waistline. More importantly, like Dr. Attia, I was able to pick up workouts pretty much exactly where I had left off. I hadn’t lost strength, power, or cardiovascular fitness. And most importantly, I began sleeping like my old self. Finally.

Podcast Recommendation

I know he’s been under scrutiny, but if you haven’t seen the hit-piece in New York Magazine on Andrew Huberman, I recommend either trying to separate the content from the man, or just reading it yourself before canceling him. There are many male-hosted podcasts on health that fail to bring in female guests and therefore fail to cover the physiology of a little over half of the population. Huberman at least makes the effort, and his recent podcast with Dr. Stacy Sims, a PhD expert in physiology, researcher, and trainer of high level female athletes, is an example of trying to sort out the differences between men and women. Do some of the things Sims says contradict things I’ve heard elsewhere? Sure do. I certainly agree with her closing statement:

“We’ve been inundated so much with socio-cultural rhetoric and so much external noise that women have forgotten what it means to listen to themselves and their bodies.”

She wishes for “a magic wand” to have:

“Every woman understand what their bodies are saying and what their cycles are saying…to intrinsically understand what their body is.”

Overall, she seems to have a molecular understanding of the relationship between physiology and endochrinology, and how the female body responds differently to the same external stressors. She explains the impact of different types of exercise, some of which help women build strength and resilience into older age, and some that might drive up cortisol in ways not helpful in perimenopause and beyond. Worth a listen with a grain of salt.

Polarizing Training

Sims encourages polarizing training, meaning doing intense cardio (much more intense than your average Orange Theory or Soul Cycle classes) and heavy lifting, balanced with low intensity exercise such as some types of yoga or walking. I listened to this podcast while fitting in a zone 2 session (something Sims argues shouldn’t be the focus of women in their 40’s) in a water park in Austria where clothing is actually prohibited in the adult sauna and pools area. We decided to make one of these spas part of our trip after reading an article on how the European attitude towards the naked body is perhaps healthier than puritan views still infecting American culture. The spa delivered on the promise of improving body image by mere exposure to many real bodies of various ages and stages.

Often when we see improvements in some aspect of our lives it’s almost always multi-factorial but we tend to link the outcome to one specific change we made. I don’t know if my new standard dose of estradiol is finally settling in (I’m reaching the three-month mark), or if it was the polarizing of low intensity walking to balance all the intense training I had been doing, but it was during our travels to different time zones and strange bedrooms that I began sleeping consistently, seven-plus hours a night. Since I’ve been back, more often than not I sleep closer to nine hours a night. I feel and look more like myself pre-peri than ever, including the return of libido, which I have conflicting thoughts/feelings about (surprising, I know). Is a desire something we miss when it’s gone? It’s like the tree falling in the forest question. I didn’t feel like I was missing it, but now that it’s back, I’m glad.

Training for Healthy Longevity

If you care about healthspan and want to live a strong marginal decade (your last ten years), there are protocols you might want to check out. I will write on this, but I don’t love giving people prescriptions for how to move their bodies. That’s personal. Perhaps that makes sense as a yoga teacher who constantly reminds people to take care of themselves. I believe yoga class, for the most part, is a container or space for self-instruction with suggested guidance from a teacher. Years of training with Jason Crandell have taught me to let go of ego as a teacher and just help people feel good in their bodies. Again, all roses and loving-kindness. Yeah, right. A process.

Baby, we were born to walk!

One claim I feel entirely comfortable making here is that walking is good for you. If you like to sit, there might be a fabulous bench not too far away that’s got your name all over it. There’s one way to find out. Whether you are an over-trainer who needs to polarize, or a fabulous sitter who needs to move, for most, walking has vast benefits with little to no downsides. There is a large body of evidence that has found:

“Walking decreases the risk or severity of various health outcomes such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cognitive impairment and dementia, while also improving mental well-being, sleep, and longevity.”

Even after swimming in the North Sea in the Netherlands or watching the sunset from a fortress on a hill in Salzburg, not many sights match the beauty of the westward view of San Francisco Bay, with the city skyline and Golden Gate on the horizon. For those of you who are local, all you have to do is climb a hill to see it, especially in Oakland. We’re blessed with hills! Did you know that in regions where people live the longest, healthiest lives, labeled blue zones, there is typically a culture of daily walking (and gardening — a low intensity exercise great for polarizing)? Blue zones also tend to be hilly, so we live in an area naturally conducive to longevity.

If you can, walk. Up a hill, with a coffee in hand, with friends, with a dog (adopt one!), to the post office, up a tower, in the woods (Redwoods if you’re local), through a city, around the block, inside a building, up the stairs, listening to your favourite playlist or podcast. Walking can also be a great device-free meditation.

Bruce Springsteen is right about most things, but maybe he got this one wrong.