Lessons relearned
Some bodies need to wear themselves out screaming in order to be heard. Mine, for example.
My body is talkative. It is clear in its demands. Yet for as long as I can remember, I have ignored its loudest cries. When I was a runner, I ran every day, without taking days off. I ran headlong into overuse injuries. I did this time after time, injuring my IT bands, my Achilles tendon, my hamstrings. I always ended up having to take months off from running instead of the weeks it would have taken to heal had I listened to my body’s first protests.
When I began training for the New York Marathon, I followed a training regime in a book. It insisted on at least one day off. I obeyed. On Mondays, I walked instead of running. But it wasn’t the same. I hated Mondays. I hated resting. It made me anxious and restless and irritable. I couldn’t wait to move again.
I only stopped running when I injured my hamstrings too badly to ever heal. Not immediately. First, I ran the New York Marathon on those beleaguered hamstrings. After that, I did rest, in my way. I walked miles and miles before breakfast and faithfully practiced physical therapy exercises, but my hamstrings did not get better.
Losing running plunged me into more than a decade of despair. Of years of doctors’ appointments. Running wasn’t merely movement, it was writing. Throughout graduate school, I wrote most of my stories in my head while I ran. That was the only time ideas suddenly arrived, fully formed. I wondered if losing running meant I would also lose writing.
I switched to swimming. It was harder to write in my head while swimming because swimming required more of my brain. I had to remember when to turn my hips, how to lift my elbows, when to breathe. But I loved being in the water. I grew up swimming in ponds and lakes. I swam every day until I developed tendinitis in both of my elbows. The hours I spent writing every day aggravated this, causing carpal tunnel. I wore forearm and wrist braces to my work as a journalist. When swimming hurt too much, I switched to Jivamukti yoga, working on harder and harder poses until too many headstands caused serious nerve damage to my neck. I knew what I was doing but I couldn’t stop. I could learn the lessons, but not apply them.
I could not figure out how to apply them. I had to move. My boss at The Week once asked me how I found time to exercise every day. “Because for me it is not optional,” I said. I have always needed movement. I cannot sit still for an entire workday. Or even for an hour. Many of my best writing ideas come to me when I am walking up a mountain. Giving up these routines felt like giving up part of what made me a writer. What would I have in their place?
It took cancer and chemotherapy for me to learn. You try to run up against chemo’s toll on the body and you fall. Every time. Now when ballet makes it painful for me to walk in the mornings, I do yoga instead. If yoga is hurting me, I do Pilates. If Pilates hurts me, I go for a long walk. If a long walk exhausts me, I dance. If I fall asleep on the sofa in my offie after lunch, I let myself stay there until dinner. It’s all a work in progress. I still require movement. It is still not optional. But I try harder to tailor it to my body.
If I could have discovered this in my twenties, if I hadn’t been so hellbent on running or whatever my current passion, I would still be running. I would still be swimming. I want to go back in time to talk to my younger self and explain the longterm effects of what I was doing. I want to tell her to relax, crosstrain, try yoga. But knowing her, she probably wouldn’t listen.