Twelve Chin-Ups

Twelve chin-ups, today! Four years ago I couldn't do one. So that's cool. I look pretty silly when I'm doing them, because I wear a knit cap so as not to scrape my bald spot on the rough ceiling when I bump top.  A superannuated sailor-man.

Possibly more exciting than the number (though there is a deep, childish pleasure in getting a new number!) is the control. I don't swing or sway or wriggle or lunge. Up I go, like I owned the place.

Resistance training is the most gratifying thing in the world: if you do the work and avoid injury, making better numbers is pretty much guaranteed, and -- in sharp contradistinction to the way most of the rest of life works -- the rewards are greatest right at the start. The payoffs come really fast, when you're starting out.

My whole home gym probably cost me $75.00. My dad gave me some old dumbbells, and a barbell, and a few weights. I had to buy a few more plates, over the years, as I got stronger. For a chin-up bar, I bolted a grab-bar that I bought for $3.50 onto a beam in the ceiling. I splurged and bought a nice band with handles. That's it. A towel and a pillow play supporting roles, but I already had those. On an ordinary day I'll have two or three exercises on my to-do list, which I fit in whenever I feel like it. (Today is chin-ups, leg scissors, and shoulder raises). No big deal: ten minutes here, fifteen there, when I'm sick of screens and books, and feel like my brain could use a power wash.

Since I yam what I yam, it involves spreadsheets and meticulous tracking, of course, and a elaborately-worked-out 14 day cycle. But a normal person could skip that part.

Three Months

It's three months now.

I have become the world's most boring person. In the morning I weigh myself and measure my waist, and enter the numbers in a spreadsheet; in the evening I conscientiously fill out my food journal. When I wake up I lie in bed for a while, solemnly considering my shopping and exercise plans for the day. I have become a self-contained system, a zero-sum human being: all my energy is subsumed in my own maintenance. I feel a bit lonely, a bit ridiculous. Stupid thing to be doing with my time. Was it for this?

The hardest part of all this is realizing that – while many of the constituent parts of fixing how I eat and exercise are in fact easier than I expected – in aggregate, it is simply a large and never-ending project. The most damaging of all my many damaging fantasies about this was that, if I only succeeded, it would become easy and automatic. At some point, I thought, the boat would hydroplane. It does not: at least, it does not within three months. It simply goes on thrusting through the water. It requires a lot of energy. Period. This is not going to change.

Why do I keep doing it? Sheer cussedness, for one thing. But also, in this as in so many other areas of my life, I am tired of living beyond my means, tired of the ominous sense that I am only getting along by storing up trouble for myself. I want a pay-as-I-go life, not an indebted one. So far this is – just barely – worth it. I like getting stronger, quicker, livelier. I like being unashamed.

But it also makes me feel old, vulnerable, ordinary, mortal.

I will learn what everything costs, says Dorothea Brooke. Well, it all costs quite a bit.

Sleep

 

William Dement, a sleep researcher at Stanford, convinced me with this book of the importance of light hygiene. I do not sleep well if there's any light in the room. The modern world is full of light sources: clocks, power strips, computers -- even when they're supposedly off, our myriad electronics have little LEDs glowing, red or green or yellow, little eyes in the dark. Real darkness is not a matter of turning off the lights. It's a matter of blacking out your windows and covering up all those little eyes. Dement demonstrated in the lab that even these little increments of light disturb people's sleep: although they're unaware of why, they sleep less soundly and wake more easily in the presence of even very little light.

Sleep gets its own entry in my "whupping the food thing" series for two reasons. First: sleep is the great restorer of oomph, and everything about whupping the food thing rests on oomph. To eat right I need to plan ahead, to not always take the easy way, to throw myself into the fight with some vigor and enthusiasm: above all, to keep out of temptation's way, and to occasionally resist temptation if my planning fails. All those things require oomph, and if I start the day with a meager supply, chances are there won't be enough when my trough times come. If I'm exhausted, grieved, discouraged, and out of oomph by mid-afternoon, the odds that I'll be gorging on ice cream and potato chips before the end of the day skyrocket. I can't afford not to get a good night's sleep.

The other thing sleep does is relieve persistent pain. I'm not sure if it does this by actually encouraging the repair of tissue, or more subtly by somehow resetting the brain's pain responses, but the effect is striking. Most people my age or older are navigating their exercise around some pain or other, their "bad knee" or their "tweaked back" or something: we're working the trade-offs between the benefits of exercise and aggravating some pain or other. The catch-22 here, of course, is that to really get a good night's sleep, you have to exercise. I have clients in whom this has spiraled down to an almost sleepless and completely pain-filled life, getting around by motor-chair because they can't walk on their excruciating knees, unable to drive because they fall asleep at the wheel, unable to sleep because their body is desperate for exercise, and unable to exercise because everything, everything hurts. Trust me: you really, really don't want to go there. And the simplest intervention in this vicious cycle is a remarkably easy one. Block every single damn light source, block it completely. If you want to get fancy, it also helps to quit using televisions and computers for an hour or two before bed. Those are both powerful light sources, and you stare straight into them. I've never managed to do that: I'm too fond of dinking around on my computer in the evening. For me, it's enough to make it dark dark dark. Blackout curtains, clock hidden under the bed, duct tape on the power strip light. Really dark.

What does avoiding pain have to do with whupping the food thing? Well, exercise turns out to be critical for a normal metabolism. Whatever goes wrong with modern metabolism, and disposes us so disastrously to type II diabetes, cardiovascular deterioration, and cancer, study after study shows that exercise militates powerfully against it. I believe there's much more to it than the simple fact that exercise burns calories: the human body is designed for activity, and a whole slew of things begin to go wrong when it's sedentary, a cascade of ill-effects and metabolic abnormalities. My guess is that almost nobody with disordered eating regulation is going to really fix it without becoming active: and that almost nobody sedentary is going to become active if it's painful. So we come back to sleep. Protect it, cultivate it, defend it fiercely. Sleep is your friend.

Other posts on Whupping the Food Thing

Climbing

Rose at six and walked down to Montavilla Park to look at their play equipment. I want something I can climb on. It was mostly, of course, lilliputian. There was a rope I could climb a couple feet on, with my feet braced against ribs of wood: but I couldn't get through the space at the top that let you onto the platform. And some vertical and near-vertical poles: but not above ten feet tall, and anyway, I'm not strong enough yet to climb hand over hand. It was quiet; nobody in the park at dawn. The cold of the metal sank into my hands and throbbed.

So, failure, in a way: I was looking for something, somewhere, that I could climb for free. The monkey-bars that I remember from my youth, which were probably just this lilliputian. Taking my own advice, remembering what joyful movement used to mean to me. I always, always hated running, but I loved to climb. I'm mulling over bolting some metal pipe to the beam in the erstwhile garage, that I could hang from and pull myself up to. Wondering whether any of the trees in our yard could bear the weight of a climbing rope. How did I let a capacity so central to my identity – that of being able to scale ropes, trees, anything that afforded hand- and foot-holds – disappear?

Failure, in a way: but still, my hands have had a workout – they'll be a little sore tomorrow. So it's a success, really. I've worked a little more on reclaiming my ability to move myself. And I walked briskly back, going back and forth along the odd little terraces between 86^th and 83^rd Avenue: I think it counts as half an hour of exercise.

The Spring Rains

The spring rains continue, the real Oregon spring rains: cold, obstinate, and unhurried. No need for theatrical downpours or thunderstorms. These aren't piddly little continental rains that throw a tantrum and cry themselves out: these are rains that have settled in for the long haul. They have the whole Pacific Ocean to draw on, and months before the less-rainy season arrives: there is really no particular reason that they have to stop before July. They usually do, from time to time, but it's a matter of grace, not of necessity.

Deep breath. So accept the rain as a given, and go on. I don't usually bridle at it this way. Usually the rain makes me happy. But I'm off-balance, wanting to ride to work, but not wanting this head-cold to flower, wanting to change my life so that I live in the bright sunlight, convinced that if only the sun was out my will would work properly. I'm one of the least superstitious people I know, but my life is riddled with superstition.

Suppose that I lived somewhere the rain never stopped. I wouldn't pound my head against the wall this way: I'd simply accommodate it.

Tomorrow is my birthday: I'll be 54, which is a pleasing if rather large number. It means I've lived 9 six-year lives, or 6 nine-year lives: it means I'm twice as old as when I had my first child.

All my life before I had children is vague, hazy, unreal to me. I confess that sometimes childless people strike me as irresponsible and clueless, not really grown-up. What they do has consequences only for themselves, or for other people who – supposedly at least – can look after themselves. It's not an attitude I foster, but it's one I can't always avoid. Childless people aren't really any more in control of their lives than we are. it's just a little easier for them to pretend: to pretend that they make their own schedules and choose their own pastimes. But every adult has at least one wayward helpless person for whom they're held accountable.

The rain goes on. I keep an ear cocked for my cell phone. The cold is getting into my bones: I can feel the chill in the radial and ulnar bones of my forearms, and in my shoulder joints. It's as if my body was framed up with scavenged wire from freezer shelves: stale, icy and slow to move. The cold seems to come from the inside out. I huddle my coat over my shoulders and scowl. The warmth is grateful, but I'm moodily aware that I'm cold, not because it happens to be raining, but because I'm deconditioned. Sure, I have yet another plan for getting myself back in shape – this one predicated on eternal rain – but I more than usually acutely aware that this game of aging is one of losing one's conditioning and getting it back again, phase after phase, over and over, until finally the phase comes when you can't get your conditioning back, for one reason or another. And then you're truly old. And a bit after that you die.

Well. That's a gloomy point of view, and I can comfort myself with the fact that my father is not yet, by that reckoning, old. And if I'm counting properly, he's 27 years older than I am. And even my mother, miraculously, is still alive and well, though she is truly old, and has been for decades. So apparently I'm built of sound genetic timber. Still, I yearn to be back in shape. I hate this. I hate having to stock up on oxygen with a couple deep breaths before I can tie my shoes: I hate the faint lurch I detected last night when I was rising from my knees during a massage. I should be able to breath even when I'm bent over, and I should be able to rise from my knees as easily as a ferret lifts its head.