You know you’re starting to recover when you wake up and think, “Guess I should go brush my teeth” instead of “Oh ye unkind gods, whhhhyyyyyyyyyy?!”
Category Archives: health
Planks for the Memories*
*Am I going to regret firing that one off so early in this project?
A quick recap of the weekend’s planks:
Saturday: 67 seconds and change
Sunday: 82 seconds
Today, I went for 90, with help from my cat.
You guys, I have definitely done a better job explaining things on many occasions.
Edit: I just realized I have also been doing that thing that drives me crazy, wherein someone creates content I would find interesting, but makes it available in video format only, whereupon I encounter it in a train tunnel or somewhere equally unfriendly to streaming media.
Oh well.
In Which Your Humble Blogger Becomes A Humble Vlogger, Because 30-Day Plank Challenge
First, some ‘splaining.
As you may or may not know, there are basically two kinds of people on the Internet: those who love The Plus (that’s Google Plus) for its vibrant, intelligent, interactive community and those who get on the Plus without already knowing anyone else who’s active on The Plus and go, “Um, but guys … there’s nobody here!”
I am a member of the former category: an involved (except when I’m not), active (except when I’m not) member of an extensive network of crazy Plussers who do all kinds of interesting things that mostly revolve around riding bikes, other physical stuff, nerdery, writing, and obsessing over food.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, one of my Pleeps (as we half-mockingly call ourselves) whipped up a little Plus community called “Fitness Challenges” and invited me to join. I’m a sucker for a challenge, so of course I said, “Sign me up!”
Anyway, our first challenge is a 30-Day Plank Challenge. The goal is to plank a little longer each day, with the ultimate goal of planking it out for a full 5 minutes (or longer, if you’re crazy).
For some reason, I decided that this challenge required video.
And then I decided that the video needed, well, a song.
You’re welcome.
In other news, I’m planning (G-d help me) my first recipe for the “Cooking with ADHD” series. The idea is to start with a really simple dinner and work from there. More to come!
Let’s Get (a) Physical, Physical
This week, I visited my doctor’s office — not for an actual physical, but to get a spider bite on my leg checked out (it had been growing more, rather than less, inflamed over the course of a week).
While there, a nurse weighed me and took my vitals.
My weight was down four pounds since my my last “official” weigh-in (which was in … June?); my blood pressure was 110/60, and my pulse — not a resting pulse, mind you, but a well-caffeinated, middle-of-the-day, just-hopped-onto-a-table pulse — was 52.
52!
Makes me awfully curious what my proper resting pulse rate is. I tend not to stay still long enough during the day to take a proper resting pulse rate. I haven’t remembered to check it in ages. Every night, I remind myself, “Check your resting pulse rate tomorrow before you get up;” every morning, inevitably, I forget.
Now, my blood pressure has always been fine, and my weight has been descending continuously* for the past several years (at varying rates of speed — usually quickly from January through the end of summer, then more slowly through the end of the year).
I’m writing all of this not to toot my horn, but to toot ballet’s horn. Even several years of riding my bike everywhere hadn’t coaxed my mid-day pulse rate down below 60. Six and a half months of ballet have done the trick. Simply put, I’ve always been a fairly athletic person, but ballet has transformed me into one seriously fit mofo.
And I cite ballet specifically because it’s been the biggest change in my life in the past year. My diet continues as usual — mostly “real food,” with room for various indulgences (including, apparently, all those pretzels). I actually ride my bike less now than I have in the past four years.
What this all indicates to me, in the end, is the importance of finding a kind of physical activity that works for you, that you love — and maybe one that challenges you to push your own physical boundaries. I love ballet even more than I love riding bikes (there, I said it!).
Ballet forces me to push my body’s boundaries — I can’t just jump around on my legs; I have to use my arms, too. I can’t just do endless amounts of endurance exercise; ballet requires bouts of high-intensity jumping around (and also getting up, getting up, and getting down).
If I really want to improve, I have to be willing to gain some upper-body strength. And if I want to perform some day, which I totally do, I can’t neglect endurance exercise — read any good treatise on physical conditioning for ballet, and in the first chapter (or thereabouts) you’ll discover that class alone doesn’t condition dancers effectively for the aerobic rigors of performing on stage. Dancers who add in some kind of aerobic endurance training fare better than those who don’t.
All of this amounts to the equivalent of (at present) three 60 to 75-minute long high-intensity interval training sessions (with some flexibility stuff thrown in) coupled with the usual assortment of aerobic endurance workouts that I get through commuting by bike.
Overall, it seems to be working brilliantly as a health-maintenance and -improvement plan.
So there you go. Ballet really is good for you.
So go take two classes and call me in the morning 😀
Note
*I should note that continuously descending weight is not, in and of itself, a marker of improving health. You can be healthy and be much heavier than I am. For me, it’s simply an indicator that my body is returning to its own norm, which suggests that it’s “functioning as designed.”
PS
By the way, the spider bite is fine. The doctor who examined it said I should worry if it doesn’t start to diminish in the next few days. That made Denis feel better, which made me feel better.
Not Really About Ballet (or Bikes): A Weighty Matter
Everyone in the United States now lives in a place where being bigger than the “norm” is the norm.
Yet we still also live in a place where fat people (as a non-fat person, am I allowed to use that phrase?) are treated as a minority — and an unwelcome one, at that.
In her amazing blog, Dances with Fat, dancer/Health At Any Size maven/size activist extraordinaire Ragen Chastain recently wrote about how, structurally, our culture still behaves as if fat people don’t exist (for what it’s worth, at least hospitals, medical offices, and movie theaters in this area seem to be “getting it” to some extent, but our cultural prejudice against fat is still rife).
She wrote about how we often, as designers of environment, sacrifice the safety and well-being of a whole group of people – moms, dads, brothers, sisters, friends; real people – and how we feel like it’s okay to do so, because we feel like, you know, they could choose to lose weight.
We could figure out how to make seat belts and bus seats (and other things) that work for bigger people, but we don’t because, in short, we don’t like them. We don’t like them even when, in the immortal words of Pogo, “… they is us.”
I think this is wrong. I think it’s as wrong as choosing not to work on a cure for lung cancer because could choose not to smoke and we don’t like smokers. Our Puritan heritage makes us think that by making better seatbelts or whatever we’d be enabling people, but even that thought reflects an inherent prejudice. Regardless of how we feel about the question of size, big people are here, and they deserve to be safe and happy just like smaller people.
Yet, as cyclist and especially as a ballet dancer, I move in two worlds wherein body size is a constant undercurrent. Even as I talk about Health At Every Size and size acceptance (and the fact that I find people of many different sizes valid, and worthy, and attractive), I am focused on reshaping my own body in pursuit of an aesthetic that I believe will improve my performance as a dancer … and I’ve probably been only too willing to accept praise for the results of my efforts, when in fact effort is only part of the picture.
I know that it’s a bit hypocritical to be like, “You’re fine at your size, but I’m too big for me even though I’m actually kind of small, relative to the current average.” I get that I’m allowed to have my own aesthetic, but at the end of the day that aesthetic is definitely one that is linked, for a lot of people, to some pretty unhappy stuff.
Choosing to become slimmer is, to an extent, very much like choosing to straighten your hair if you’re black or “act straight” (for whatever that means) if you’re gay: you might just be doing it because you like the way it looks on you, but it’s impossible to fully decouple the act from its cultural implications.
Choosing to pursue the classical ballet aesthetic or a bike racer’s lean physique, meanwhile, takes that to a whole new level — both in cycling and in dance one encounters a fair bit of elitism, and body-type elitism is definitely part of the picture. Bigger dancers tend to feel like they’re not as good (in a basic-worth sense) than leaner dancers — indeed, would-be-dancers sometimes shy away from their dreams because they feel like they’re “too big” even as they admire lean and graceful professionals.
Likewise, I am definitely aware that there is more at play here than just my effort – genetics have a hand in it, as does the fact that I was flat-out skinny for much of my life – so I’m not going to go back to thinking everyone can lose weight as easily as I have if they just try harder. But other people might not be aware of that, and might either use my “success” in reshaping my body to shame fat people or might look at me and say “He can do it, so why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?”
I’m not responsible, at the end of the day, for the meanings and feelings other people connect with my actions. I can’t control that.
What I can control, though, is how I act – – not just what I do, but how I do it.
So here’s what I’m wondering: what is the best way for me to be an ally, here? Obviously, inclusiveness and advocacy are important — but what else can I do to let the world know that even though I’m small, I think big people are great, and deserve a fair shake?
From the outside, do my words and actions look like those of an ally? Or am I getting it wrong?
The time the I spent being overweight definitely opened my eyes. For example: I learned that if you walk into a new doctor’s office and tell them that you’ve been skinny for most of your life and now you aren’t and that you’re concerned about that (that is, worried that maybe there’s an underlying health thing happening), they are very likely to assume that you’re either lying or hyperbolizing about the “always been skinny” part. There is a moral judgment that people make about fatness — they assume that you’re lazy and undisciplined* and always have been, and that there’s something morally wrong with that, and with you.
That said, there’s a lot I haven’t experienced, and we are the worst arbiters of our own behaviors and prejudices. So, basically, I guess what I’m saying is this: if there’s something about me that reflects an underlying prejudice that maybe I could work on, feel free to tell me, and if there’s a way you feel like I could be a better ally definitely let me know.
Especially welcome would be any thoughts on how to make sure I’m supportive of dancers if all sizes — because dance is definitely a world unto itself, and one in which the norm is still very much lean.
What prompted this post, in fact, was the thought (which I mentioned on tumblr) that I’m “starting to look like a dancer again” – a perfect example of the kind of thinking that relegates anyone who doesn’t fit a certain aesthetic to the “non-dancer” category, which could definitely make folks feel unwelcome and unwanted and unseen.
Those folks should be welcome. All of them being something unique to the studio, and some of them are great dancers very much deserving of the opportunity to perform**.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep examining my own behavior, because at the end of the day, it’s up to me to not be a jerk, and to learn to see how my words and actions might be jerky and unhelpful.
So that’s it for now. I know this is long and it all makes at least some sense!
Notes
*As a cyclist and a dancer, I find it a bit surreal that the average person in this country might assume, for example, that either Ernest Gagnon or Ragen Chastain is lazy or undisciplined.
We Americans imagine ourselves to be disciplined people, but observation has led me to conclude that we really mostly aren’t.
For what it’s worth, though, laziness is a valuable evolutionary strategy, and I contend that discipline, per se, doesn’t exist – only motivation exists.
**I’m going to go out on a limb here, though, and say that I think we probably shouldn’t crack down on artistic directors and choreographers who tend to select dancers that fit the current dominant aesthetic. Artists choose whatever media suit their particular creations, ADs and choreographers included (that doesn’t mean they should be jackwagons about it, if course).
Instead, we can support both the more traditional modality and innovative ADs and choreographers who work with an array of body sizes and types. After all, we didn’t clamor for the end of oil paint when acrylics and other new media were on the rise – we just made room for the new media, which bring their own merits (and that didn’t happen overnight, either).
I think there’s a place in the world for the current classical ballet aesthetic, but also for other dance “media,” if you will.
Toast, Eggs, Milk, and Juice
By the way guys, sorry about the double post this morning!
Does that sound like a pretty complete breakfast to you?
It does to me (though I’d rather see “fruit” in place of “juice”) – and here’s the funny thing. It seemed that way to me as a kid, too.
I remember seeing breakfast cereal commercials when I was six years old or so that trumpeted about how some or another sugary cereal was “part of this complete breakfast with toast, eggs, juice, and milk” and thinking, “Toast, eggs, milk, and juice? That sounds pretty complete by itself. What’s the cereal for?”
This wasn’t because I was some kind of super – genius (though I’ll halt take that accolade if it’s on offer! :D). It was because my parents had taken time to instill a healthy skepticism about commercial advertisements (and nobody does skepticism like six-year-olds, who are just discovering that how things are and how things seem can be very different). It was because we talked about nutrition at home, in school, and even at church.
Perhaps most importantly, though, it was because I had recently eaten a breakfast of toast, milk, eggs, and juice, and by the end of it, I was stuffed. Where, I reasoned with the irrefutable logic of the very young, was the cereal supposed to fit – literally?
So, in short, I discovered a valuable piece of insight mostly because I loved poached eggs on toast and someone (either Mom or Grammy) made them for me as a treat that morning. I realized that in the “part of this complete breakfast” equation, the cereal was basically extra. The breakfast was fine without it.
I’m not sure, dear reader, what I hope you’ll take away from this post (which is neither about bicycles nor about ballet, though it is about food, which quite literally fuels both of those passions). I don’t mean it as a criticism of individual choices. I suspect you’re probably already the kind of person who makes that kind of connection.
If anything, I see it as the opposite of that – I happened to be privy at a useful moment to a bunch of information that led me to a sort of breakfast – related epiphany: that cereal was the dessert part of a complete breakfast. I was able to apply this idea because my family ate desert maybe once a week or so, not with every meal. I had a context that allowed me to just the information at hand in my own best interests.
It sort of worries me that, as a country, we largely seem to lack that skill (critical reasoning deficits are disturbingly common at school, too – and I’m a university student). It seems a little baffling.
I don’t have any prescriptive advice, here, or anything. I’m sort of just thinking out loud. I’m also wondering how we reached this pass (and I find it interesting that people in the political arena seem to reflexively blame the folks on whichever side of the aisle is opposite their own). Like, I don’t think we’d have stuck around this long as a nation if we weren’t, in years past, pretty good at critical thinking about practical matters (and creative thinking).
I will resume my normal bikes-and-ballet related blathering shortly. For now, this is what’s on my mind, via some experiences I’ll discuss at a later date.
Til then, keep the bottom side down 🙂
On Ballet! — Or, Well, Off Ballet!
…But, don’t worry, not for long.
I woke up this morning feeling kind of generally grumpy, congested, and terrible and by about 2 PM was debating whether going to ballet class was a good idea. Turned out I was running a fever, which is generally a good reason to assume you’re contagious, so I decided to take one for the team and not go rather than infecting everyone in class with whatever kind of schmutz I’ve contracted.
This appears to be some variant of the dreaded Itchy Throat Disease. I do not know yet whether it’s an Itchy Throat Virus or an Itchy Throat Bacterium. I’m hoping for the virus, because those usually go away on their own.
I’m also hoping someone invents a back scratcher for throats, like, soon, because I really need one.
In other news, we have our shiny stuff for PlayThink Movement and Flow Arts Festival pretty much together.
My costuming decisions (note: costumes are not by any means required for this festival; we just like costumes) have been driven by finding a pair of foil leopard-print tights at a ridiculously good price … so somehow, between needing to be a leopard because my tights say so and needing to have wings because we are all going to have wings (my sis-in-law is making Isis-ish wings for all of us!), I have become a winged leopard creature.
A bit out there, perhaps, but hey! It’s an excuse to wear a costume!
In public!
Or, well, semi-public, since it’s not like the festival is in the middle of Louisville or something.
So, anyway, being excited about that gives me something to do while I’m moping about being too sick for ballet class today.
I hope to be back in class on Saturday, and to do a double class, since we didn’t have class Monday, either (OMG, NO BALLET FOR LIKE A WEEK, you guys, I AM GOING TO DIE).
And that being said, I am now going to toddle off to bed, take some Knock-You-On-Your-Keister Night-Time Cold Medicine and, with a little luck, beat this thing in my sleep.
Because sometimes it’s best to take illness lying down.
A Dark And Ill-Lit Place
This isn’t a very happy post, and it’s not about the bike … at least not much. I’m putting it behind a cut, admittedly as much because I’m not very comfortable writing about this stuff as because I’m not sure everyone out there is comfortable reading about it.
I won’t be offended if you don’t read it, and I won’t be offended if you do. I suppose I’m writing it as part of an effort to exorcise my own demons — an effort, if you will, to survive.
My New Secret Weapon: Desi Chana
The other day, I went to the grocery store to look for chana dal — desi chickpeas in their split state.
Sadly, I was unable to find any. I did find the split version of the better-known Kabuli chickpea (more commonly called ‘Garbanzo beans’ in the United States) — but in the smaller, darker, and lower-GI desi, or kala chana, specification, I found only whole chickpeas. They were small and green. I was planning to make hummus from them, and wasn’t sure about the green color: which is to say, I wouldn’t mind, but Denis might.
Not to be deterred, I stood in the aisle at ValuMarket for some time, thinking it over. I like Kabuli chickpeas, but their glycemic index is higher than that of their country cousins, the Desi peas.
Finally, I decided that if Denis couldn’t eat green hummus, he’d just have to starve … or something like that (I wasn’t planning on feeding him nothing but hummus all week anyway). I seized upon a bag of the desi chickpeas and headed to the checkout (okay, I might’ve picked up a couple other things as well).
Boy, am I ever glad I did.
The same day, I put a cup of the desi chickpeas in to soak, so I could make hummus the day after. In the morning, I discovered that upon soaking they darkened from their dry olive green to nearly black! That gave me the germ of an idea.
I made my hummus. Even without tahini (and with lime juice in place of half the lemon juice, because I thought we had more lemon juice than we did), it proved itself quite flavorful indeed — and also great for breakfast. I enjoyed my hummus … but deep in the folds of my brain, the germ of an idea from the other night was sprouting.
You see, I planned on serving tacos for dinner one night last week — and everyone (okay, well, everyone in my house!) knows that tacos are greatly improved by the inclusion of black beans. …And my desi chickpeas were sort of beans, and sort of black.
…So what would happen, I wondered, if I used them in tacos?
Deliciousness, that’s what.
On Wednesday evening, I whipped up a batch of tacos, complete with desi chickpeas boiled in taco seasoning. I had been concerned that if Denis realized they weren’t really black beans, he might dislike them on sight — but in fact it turned out that he liked them enough to mention them specifically.
It turned out that I liked them enough to feature them as the star ingredient in my lunch on Thursday and again today (taco-seasoned Desi chickpeas with corn cakes, sour cream, and salsa). In fact, I liked them so much that, now that I’m out of them, I think I’m going to whip up another batch.
David Mendosa maintains an excellent resource site for folks with diabetes and others who pay close attention to glycemic indices, and he writes of chana dal — the split version of desi chickpeas, remember — that it’s very similar to Garbanzo beans, but “younger, smaller, split, sweeter, and has a much lower glycemic index.” He notes that you can substitute it just about anywhere you’d use garbanzos.
The Desi chickpea and the familiar Garbanzo, it turns out, are simply different cultivars one species — but the glycemic index of the desi strain is much lower. Just as Delicious and Granny Smith apples are cultivars of the same species with some very different characteristics, desi chickpeas and Garbanzos are “one, but they’re not the same” (with apologies to U2).
Mr. Mendosa provides a rather comprehensive list of recipes using chana dal. I imagine that un-split desi chickpeas will work just fine in most of them, given a little extra time to prepare (like split and unsplit dry lentils or peas, split desi chickpeas — that is, chana dal — will cook faster than unsplit).
It turns out there’s also a flour made by grinding desi chickpeas, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities there.
Desi chickpeas seem to offer an excellent glycemic index-to-performance ratio. In other words, they’re great bike fuel: filling, slow-burning, and tasty (you can even make them into crackers to bring with you for on-bike snacking, if you’re feeling ambitious).
Unfortunately, I failed to take a picture of the desi chickpeas I made the other night, so you’ll just have to make do with this shot of the dried chickpeas in their bag:
In Which Your Humble Blogger Admits That He Is Wrong
Last night our housemate, M, turned me on to a blog called Dances With Fat, written by the amazing, talented Ragen Chastain.
Go there right now, scroll down a little (past the picture of Ms. Chastain executing the challenging standing-split pose whose name I forget; past her Top 50 Self-Acceptance Blogger Award) to the video in which she and a former dance partner perform a beautiful two-step routine.
Seriously, go watch the video. I’ll wait.
In fact, here’s a direct link.
Did you see it?
Yes?
Good, because it’s important to a whole bunch of stuff I’m about to say.
So here’s the deal: I’m a cyclist (as you probably know, if you’re reading this blog in the first place). Cycling is a sport in which weight sometimes seems like everything. If you go to a bike race, you’ll notice that — for the most part — the racers get skinnier as the categories get higher.
If you go out on a fast club ride, most of the guys who drop you like you’re hot will be skinny.
In fact, being skinny is so much a part of bike-racing culture that a veteran of the venerable Bike Forums website once quipped, “Cycling isn’t a sport. It’s more like a very, very expensive eating disorder,” and is now quoted all over the innertubes (even here).
Being skinny is so much a part of bike-racing culture that a lot of people think that if you’re not skinny, you shouldn’t even try.
The thing is, they say the same thing about dance.
In America, we conceive of fat people as clumsy, graceless oxen who probably ought to just sit down when the dance music starts.
The truth is, some of them are: but so are some skinny people (including, no doubt, some very good bike racers) — and nobody has the gall to suggest that they’re clumsy because they’re skinny.
When we imagine dancers, we imagine graceful little light-footed gazelles. We imagine that their grace and lightness of foot derive from their slender bodies.
We are wrong.
Watch Ms. Chastain dancing. Watch how she carries herself. Watch as she skims across the dance floor with that apparently-effortless grace, as she and her partner whirl like leaves in the wind, as they glide through moves that, frankly, most of us only wish we could do.
Then tell me fat people are clumsy.
Watch them execute a routine that would get most hearts a-hammering without even breaking a sweat.
Then tell me fat people aren’t fit.
— —
I’ll admit it. I ought to know better — I’ve grown up with a sister who is both big and beautiful, who is above average both in girth and in grace.
I also studied ballet and gymnastics, and I ought to know that grace and lightness of foot don’t come from being small; they come from something else entirely (for some of us, by nature; for others, as learned skills mastered through hard work).
I ought to know that people can be healthy at many different sizes — that weight alone isn’t the problem. I have been desperately unhealthy with a Body Mass Index of 14.4, rock-solid with a BMI of 20.5, desperately unhealthy with a BMI of 19.9, desperately unhealthy with a BMI of 32.5, jubilantly healthy with a BMI of 26.6, and I have been all over the map with a BMI between 15 and 22. Now I am sometimes healthy and sometimes unhealthy with a BMI of 24.8.
Through all of these variations, however, my blood pressure and heart rate — popular indicators of fitness — have always been low to normal.
Yet, even with the weight (no pun intended) of experience on my side, I continue to be wrong.
I continue to assume that lean equals healthy — or, rather, that only lean people who look unhealthy are unhealthy, whereas bigger people are always unhealthy.
I should be ashamed.
In her blog (and in her dancing), Ms. Chastain gives the lie to that notion.
I am wrong. Ms. Chastain is right.
A couple months ago, on the night before my wedding, my Mom and I stood in her kitchen, having the kind of heart-to-heart talk I’ve always wanted to be able to have. At one point, I said, “I still really struggle with my body image.”
Mom answered, quietly, “So do I.”
Somehow, until then, I’d never put two and two together. Looking back, it’s crystal clear that Mom struggled through much of my childhood with body image issues — and that a lot of my sister’s struggles, especially, arose directly from those issues.
We wound up talking about my sister, as well — about our mutual worries about her health. She’s been struggling with some serious health problems of late.
The thing is, at the time, my response was not to think, “My sister is struggling with her health right now. How can I help her be healthier?”
Rather, it was to think, “My sister is struggling with her health right now. She needs to lose weight so she can be healthier.”
That’s the wrong way to think. Period.
— — —
I will state for the record that I’m one of Ms. Chastain’s cited 5% who manages to lose weight and keep it off. I will also state that it is probably a question of my particular genetic endowment (just like my freakishly enormous calf muscles): I have, for the vast majority of my life, been not only lean, but very lean. I’m not back there yet, but my body is trending that way — and, to be honest, it’s pretty much doing so of its own accord, with very little help from me, sometimes more in spite of than because of my efforts.
Chances are very good that I will wind up looking very much like most other competitive cyclists — not, mind you, because I train hard and somehow ‘deserve’ to be that mystical thing we imagine as ‘lean and fit,’ but because that’s pretty much how G-d put me together. Wiry is my native tendency.
Chances are good that people around me will assume that it’s all a question of hard work; that I put in the time and effort to whittle my body down to what, to them, will look pretty lean and mean.
It is a nigh certainty that I will still struggle with my body image. In some ways (beyond the obsession with getting and staying lean), anorexia is a lot like cycling: “you stop when the gorilla gets tired.”
Only the gorilla — that is, the little voice in your head that says you’re fat even when you’re walking around with a BMI of 14, or the hill you’re climbing on the bike — never gets tired.
Ragen Chastain has done me a profound and invaluable service. She’s awakened me to my own hypocrisy; revealed to me the preconceptions I failed to see before.
So to return to a previous point: I mentioned in the beginning that if you go out on a fast club ride, most of the guys who drop you will be skinny.
I didn’t say not all. In fact, though, that’s the truth. I know guys who are heavier than I am and who are better cyclists by leagues: faster on the flats, faster on the climbs, and a whole heck of a lot faster on the descents (I am often a painfully slow descender on the road, though pretty confident in the grass).
These guys work every bit as hard as I do. In fact, the fact that they outperform me tells me they’re working harder: training more, riding more, tweaking their technique more.
They’re not bigger because they’re not trying. They’re just bigger because they’re bigger: for the same reason that some people are taller and some are shorter.
They’re also more fit than I am.
The fact is, weight is a huge deal in cycling because human power tends to have limits, and when we’ve trained our bodies to reach their maximum potential (or, at lower levels, when we’re riding at our current limits), the only handy solution is to reduce the load.
You can only take so much weight off the bike before you start to compromise its integrity, so instead the answer is to trim weight off the rider (maybe we should start handicapping skinny riders, instead — if everyone had to race at a standardized weight of 220 pounds, I’d be toast).
It appears that, for the most part, I lose weight pretty easily. This means I can increase my weight-to-power ratio without greatly increasing my fitness. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m small and fine-boned and that a really ridiculous percentage of my muscle mass is concentrated in my legs. There simply isn’t as much upper body for my legs to carry around as there might be for other guys.
In short, I should, really, climb like a goat and generally ride like a bat out of hell. The fact that I don’t says I’m not actually all that fit (caveat: I should probably point out that I am still a respectable climber and decently fast all around, but nowhere near where I “should” be, given my genetic endowment).
Bigger riders, meanwhile, have to be a hell of a lot more fit than smaller riders to dial up the speed — especially on the climbs. The thing is, getting fit doesn’t necessarily equate to getting lean.
The human body likes to maintain its current specification (we call this tendency homeostasis). Therefore, it makes sense that someone who is “built for comfort,” when working to achieve speed, might gain immensely in fitness without necessarily becoming much, if any, slimmer.
Moreover, I harbor a pet theory that every human body has a sort of ‘sweet spot’ — a place, in terms of anatomy and physiology, where it wants to be, where it’s happiest. A spot where it functions optimally. For some of us, it’s probably that the ‘sweet spot’ is rounder than for others. Given the amazing range of human diversity, that only makes sense.
I have blown skinnier people than myself out of the water on club rides. In turn, I have been smoked by people fatter than I am. I have been dropped on the climbs by guys one and a half times my current size; guys twice my historical average.
All this points to the fact that, when she talks about Health At Any Size, Ragen Chastain is really on to something.
I’ve often given lip service to the idea of the potential to be both big and healthy, but I haven’t really believed it, as my words and actions have shown.
So, in the long and short of things, what I’m trying to say is this:
I’m wrong.
I’m part of the problem.
But I don’t have to be. I can choose to see things from a different angle. I can choose to see Ragen Chastain as the real Normal, instead of as an outlier who happens to be healthy, fit, and graceful in spite of her weight.
I can choose to understand that as someone who was always lean, then gained a bunch of weight, then lost it again, I am the outlier, and that I have no business trying to make myself out as anything else.
I can, as Ms. Chastain suggests, be the boss of my own underpants. I can occupy my own underpants and stay the heck out of other peoples’.
And I can say that I do want to help my sister be healthier, but that weight isn’t the problem.
A world that makes weight the problem, however, is — or is, at least, a big part of the problem.
And I’m not going to be part of that problem anymore.
…
Here, I’m done with this soap box now.
danseur ignoble 