The Garden, one post of what will be many

The ground has thawed.

The snow is 85% melted away.

We broke ground on the site of the garden.

J got two four-foot-square cedar raised beds, with little trellises. We needed first to remove two shrubs, and turn all of the ground where the raised beds will go. This meant I spent a great deal of yesterday shoveling and hacking at heavy plant-things.

After I ran over a mile in the morning.

After doing heavy deadlifts and presses at the Y the day before.

I … feel perfectly fine.

I think there’s something to this entire “fitness” thing one hears so much about.

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The hex bar is my friend

So, a while back, I stopped doing barbell lifts because they had given me incapacitating tendonitis. I switched over to kettlebells, dumbbells, and body-weight exercises.

I like all of those, but I missed the satisfaction of a nice barbell deadlift — of just hauling that damn weight off of the floor.

Yesterday I remembered that my YMCA has a hex bar. This is exciting! The grip, as you can see in the image, is different. So yesterday I tried deadlifts with the hex bar.

I was very pleased to see that I have not lost any ground on my deadlift. I could lift about what I could a year ago! Now I can try to advance further, without destroying my arms.

\o/

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April 17 2013

1. The puppies are growing quickly. This is all to the good! In a few weeks they will not need to be fed every four hours, which will mean that we can stop feeding them in the middle of the night.

It’s like having infants again. Or, no, it’s like toddlers.

Okay, no, it’s like that window of time in which K was a toddler and M was an infant, and we could not take our eyes off of either of them for an instant and they would split up and take off in different directions.

Yes. It’s like that.

2. I am working on plank variations in my workouts. Elbow plank, arm plank, one-arm plank, one-leg plank, plank with feet up on a bench, plank with one of my kids sitting on my back.

3. The Eisner Award nominations have been announced. Congrats to all the nominees!

As I mentioned on Twitter, this is truly a golden age in comics — because of the vast number of deserving works that did not get nominated. Comics these days are so good, so wonderful, that there are just not sufficient awards to recognize them all.

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Renegade Rows

I took a couple of months off from running in order to give my knees a rest. This has worked out well from a knee-related point of view, and I look forward to resuming my running now that the weather is nicer.

Nice-er. Nice-ish. It’s 33 F right now, but that’s warm enough for snow to melt.

During my running break, my time at the Y was spent doing more swimming. On days I swam, I did not also lift weights. So my weight-lifting took a bit of a break this year as well. But I’m getting back to it, and am pleased with the results.

(For those recently joining the party:

I lift weights. I love lifting weights. It makes me feel like a total badass. I used to focus on the Big Three barbell lifts, but they totally bork up my wrists and elbows. These days I lift with dumbbells, kettlebells, and body weight.)

Because I am fat, there are weird irregularities in my lifting. I can bench press a pair of 35 lb dumbbells, but cannot do a single pushup, not even on my knees. I can do lat pulldowns at 110 lbs, for reps, but cannot do even one pull-up, not even a negative, not even assisted. I cannot do split squats, not even at body weight, without leaning on a bench or wall. But I can do renegade rows, and I am REALLY DAMN PLEASED about this.

A renegade row begins with you holding a plank — toes on the floor, arms extended like you are about to do a push-up, body perfectly straight — with your hands not on the floor, but each holding a dumbbell. So you are doing the plank on the dumbbells. Then, one at a time, you pick the dumbbells up off the floor and pull them up to your shoulder. While holding a plank on one arm. Doing each arm once is considered one renegade row.

I can now do three of these with the 10 lb dumbbells.

I expect I rather look like a beached walrus doing pushups in the sand. I am absolutely okay with this. I love being strong enough to hold a one-arm plank, to lift weights while doing so. Regardless of how I look, I feel like an utter badass.

Renegade rows. I do love them.

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Working out while fat

Yesterday morning I went for a jog in my neighborhood, as I now apparently try to do at least once a week. As I went past a bus stop, an elderly gentleman smiled at me and said, “way to go!”

I smiled, nodded and kept jogging. I know it was a compliment, I know it was well-intentioned.

Yet, we live in the culture we live in. And in this culture we live in, I am completely unacceptably fat.

Lindy West writes Weighty Matters at Jezebel. Recently she posted a piece, Hello, Fellow Gym-Goers, Look at My Fat Butt. In it she makes a point which occurs to me with some frequency. When I go to the gym, I’m “entering a building where you know that every person inside is working toward the singular goal of not becoming you.”

That’s fascinating. It truly is.

I can’t know what everyone at the YMCA is thinking, of course. But I presume that the vast majority of them have accepted some portion of the dominant cultural narrative regarding weight. That fat is life-threatening. That fat is moral weakness, a failure of will. That fat can be avoided and removed or reduced by simple effort. That thinness can be achieved by anyone, and maintained by everyone. That thinness is always desirable over all things. That fat can never coexist with fitness.

These are, really, the mild forms of the fat messages. These are the positive forms those messages take. The best thing for me is that, while I have failed at life and am fat, I can fix it! I can remedy my pathological condition by dint of willpower and effort! How fortunate for me!

When I work out, when I jog by, I therefore am being a good fat person. I am trying to fix myself. I am trying to repair my moral failure and my unsightly bulk. I am a role model for other fat people.

Except, I’m not.

I’m not trying to get thin.

I am trying to be strong. God knows, I pine for strength. Some part of my head is very confused on what I actually look like, and thinks that I can have shoulders like Vin Diesel. This is impossible. But I still keep trying. (Windmills and Shoulder Presses and Push Presses and Cleans and — ) I keep checking to make sure I can deadlift my children, in case they are ever dangling off a cliff and I have them by one hand and I need to pull them to safety. They are growing, so that means I need to keep getting stronger. I keep making sure I can squat my kids, because if they were hurt in the woods and I needed to carry them out to civilization, I would have to get them up on my shoulders first.

I want to be strong. I want to be powerful. I do not intend to be thin.

I am trying to endure. I am trying to increase my ability to be active to for longer periods of time, at higher intensities. I jog. I jog on the hills in my neighborhood. I run laps at indoor and outdoor tracks. Next year we’re planning a trip to Guatemala, and we’re planning a trip to Ireland the year after that. I want to be able to walk up and down the mountainous roads, I want to be able to climb up the pyramids and castles. I want to clamber up the cliffs with my kids to look at the sea. I want to enjoy these things with my family and I do not want my endurance to hold me back.

I want to last. I want to endure. I do not intend to be thin.

I am trying to eat better. Vegetables, so many damn vegetables, vegetables I cook for myself. Fruit. All the fresh fruit in the kingdom. Home-cooked food made from ingredients I can pronounce and identify the origin of. Eating more food like this has changed my ability to taste. I can taste food now beyond the simple fact of whether it’s salty or not. Some food is too salty, a thing that has never happened to me before. I drink a lot of tea, a hella lot of tea, and try to avoid beverages containing ingredients I struggle to pronounce.

I want a digestion that works. I want an immune system that works. I do not intend to be thin.

When I work out, I work out as a fat person. When people smile and tell me “way to go,” or “good for you,” or “That’s it,” I nod and smile. I do not, after all, know what they mean by it. And, honestly, jogging two miles is hard enough as it is. It’s not made easier by carrying seething resentment along with me. I nod, and I smile, and accept their remarks as if they mean, “I support you in your fitness efforts, whatever they may be.”

Which, who knows? That might be what they mean. But, Lindy West says it well:

“At the gym, as a fat person, you encounter a few different types of people: The majority are, most likely, indifferent. They’re focused on themselves. They’re just there to work out, like you. Some are scornful. They eye you with disgust and you can tell. They are jerks. Whatever. But then, possibly the worst, are the condescending dicks who treat you like animatronic inspiration porn. Like you’re theirs. I can’t tell you how many times women—strangers!—have come up to me at the gym and said some variation of, “I see you here all the time, and you just work so hard. It’s so inspiring for me! If you can do it, anyone can!” Maybe they cluelessly think they mean well, but it’s code for, “Hey, fatty! Congratulations on doing your public duty to become not-you! It really makes me feel good about my membership in the Not-Being-You Club!”

But the thing is, I’m not doing it to not be me. I’m doing it because ME WANTS TO. And I love me.”

That’s just it. I’m not working out in order that I might stop being me. I’m working out because being me is pretty decent, and I want to continue doing so.

So I will keep jogging, and lifting, and walking, and cooking. And I will enjoy the body I have and what it can do. I will enjoy being me.

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November 28 2012

1. Because it’s a Christmas movie, I rewatched Die Hard. In no particular order:

– McClane smokes a cigarette in an airport.
– McClane carries a gun on an airplane.
– No-one has a mobile phone.
– Alan Rickman is young.

I …

I am not sure I am ready for the movies I grew up with to be historical fiction. There you have it, though.

2. So, I was reading The Violinist’s Thumb, Sam Keen’s latest book. (He wrote The Disappearing Spoon.) And there’s a bit in there about Vitamin A poisoning. The severe effects are totally disgusting and lethal. So I went and looked up how much Vitamin A is toxic.

…

…

Let me say, the internets are vague and contradictory on this point. A great deal of close reading indicated, however, that what most people were talking about was overdosing on supplements. I am eating about 2-8 times the RDA of beta carotene in my food, which is absolutely not at all the same thing, according to the NIH. According to the NIH, there is no risk whatsoever to eating actual real foods naturally high in beta carotene and other carotenoids. (Vitamin A fortified foods are a different matter.) You will eventually turn orange from eating too much, but that’s still not near [description of vitamin A poisoning redacted].

Which is what happens when you eat polar bear livers.

Do not, for the love of god, eat polar bear livers. They will kill you dead in twenty-four hours.

3. We ordered a physical copy of A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor, as the next history book for the kids. We’ll be finishing up the current American History text in a couple weeks. Time to switch back to the world.

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Organic preferences

Here’s the thing about Food. Everything you eat is a choice you make. But there are multiple and frequently contradictory axis on which to make choices. How many pesticides are on my food? How much does it cost? How were the workers who harvested this treated? How much diesel fuel was expended to get the food to you? How does that food satiate your hunger? How many nutrients does it have? How gets the profit from the food you purchase?

There’s a lot going on, is what I’m saying. There’s not perfect choice that is the best answer for all questions. You make the decisions that work for you.

I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that it is summer here in Minnesota, and I live near a very nice co-op. Said co-op stocks a great deal of food that is either organically grown, locally cultivated, or both. In the various reading I’ve done about food, and fitness, and eating habits in the last few months there’s a lot of push for organic foods. So I’ve tried some, and here are my thoughts on what works or doesn’t work for me.

First off, it’s all bloody expensive. There is a lot of back and forth conversation in “healthy eating” circles about the cost of food. Some people argue that a secret tax on the poor is that healthy food is too expensive for working class budgets. (In the U.S., I’m discussing. I don’t know anything about the rest of the world’s food economies.) Others argue that this is not true, that anyone can eat healthy at any budget above the poverty line. A lot of this discussion hinges on what we’re counting as “eating healthy.” But everyone seems to agree that organic fruits and vegetables are, unless you are growing them in your yard, more expensive than other sorts.

So the conversation I’m having with myself is, which of these are enough better — for as-yet-specified values of better — that I want to pay the cost?

Tomatoes. Yes. Oh dear sweet crickets. Locally grown, organic tomatoes are nothing like the commercially grown and shipped things. I will happily pay more money for local, organic tomatoes.

Oranges. I do not like organic oranges. The ones I’ve tried have been woody and flavorless. This may well be because I live in MINNESOTA, not known for its lush orange groves.

Asparagus. On the other hand, organic asparagus, locally grown, is amazingly good. Sweet and tender and flavorful and I love it.

Onions, garlic, scallions, shallots. I don’t have strong opinions about these. The organic shallots were good, the onions I couldn’t tell at all. I grow scallions in the back yard. I eat too much garlic to really want to pay organic prices for it.

Stone fruits. I don’t like most stone fruits, except for cherries. But I tried a bunch of pluots and apricots to see if I liked organic more. Not really. But locally grown organic cherries are the BEST.

Apples. We grown a crapton of apples, here in Minnesota. In the fall and winter we have a lot of varietals to choose from. Organic matters a lot less when they are all local, fresh, and specialty.

Bell peppers. I can’t tell the difference between commercial and organic bell peppers. But I do like buying the weird little heirloom sweet peppers.

Cruciferous vegetables. Organic kale is AMAZING. Almost totally different from the commercial stuff. Broccoli and the rest are fine, but I don’t see too much difference between commercial and organic.

Cheese. Like the apple situation, I live in a place that is already brimming with local artisinal varieties of cheese. Some are organic, some are not, all are interesting and good.

Eggs. Organic, locally-sourced eggs are an entirely different thing from the commercial free-range organic eggs we already get. I might splurge from time to time to get the co-op’s eggs, though they are twice as expensive.

This isn’t meant to be a definitive or conclusive survey of organic foods. It’s where I’m at right now on the Food Choice and Industry situation. I expect my decisions will evolve through the year, as different things come into season.

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A return to weight training!

I have tendonitis in both elbows, have had it for the last year or so. The last six months were particularly bad as the tendonitis started to impede the use of my hands. So I quit a number of things, like shooting in my trap league, using the rowing machine at the Y, and weight training. I went to physical therapy, I monitored my ergonomics, and I did the stretches and exercises as proscribed.

Yesterday I resumed weight training!

(I say I have tendonitis rather than I had tendonitis because it’s the sort of thing that, once you get it, it lurks. Like a trick knee that you blew out playing volleyball at age nineteen, or a disc that slipped once five years ago and sends alarming twinges your way when you stoop to retrieve a shoe. I’m now at-risk for elbow and wrist pain, and will always have to be on guard.)

For those of you new to the blog, I love weight training. Or, weight lifting. I like hoisting massive hunks of iron around, and especially from the floor to above my head in one smooth motion. (The clean and press. I love it. The only weightlifting move I love more is the deadlift.) I also love the rowing machine, and I have come to love jogging. But weight training is my favorite.

Yesterday’s workout was very tentative, very cautious. I lifted for fifteen minutes only, lighter weights. No barbells. I think I have to give up barbells. My wrists and elbows just don’t approve of heavy barbell lifts. But that’s okay! I can do dumbbell and kettlebell lifts with proper wrist-elbow alignment. I can start over, basically, with lighter weights, and make sure my form is excellent.

I ran a bit yesterday, rowed for five minutes, did weights, and then did fifteen minutes of the bodyweight and mobility exercises I’ve been doing for the last three months. Watching my daughter’s summer gymnastics class (during the two months off from circus there’s a special gymanstics class for circus kids who want to stay in form) is especially inspiring on the bodyweight exercise front.

No, wait, not inspiring. The other thing. Soul-crushing.

Well, no, actually, I’m kidding about that. It is inspiring to watch them. As long as I firmly recall that I am thirty-nine years old and weight three hundred pounds, and I will never in my life be a twelve-year-old gymnast. Which is an easy thing to keep in mind.

So I do planks and supermans and hollows and leg lifts and my daughter times me and says encouraging remarks, and then she practices her contortion moves and works on her handstand push-ups while I time her and make encouraging remarks. We share the experience of working out together, while we have different goals.

But, ohhh, I am so happy to be medically cleared for weight training. I love the measurement of it all, the specificity of goals and accomplishments. I went back on Fitocracy for the first time in months, so pleased to have lifts to record. And, I just love being this fat no-longer-young woman who walks into the free weights and begins slinging a kettlebell around. It’s visible strength, visible power. I like having that.

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July 13 2012

1. I did go see Amazing Spider-Man. I essentially liked it. I was, however, watching it in a very blinkered way, i.e., I was watching Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield be awesome in their parts, and I wasn’t really looking at the plot.

2. The two movies I saw in the last week both had trailers comprised exclusively of movies with themes of vigilantism.

The Watch
Dark Knight Rises
Total Recall
Bourne Legacy
Premium Rush
Lawless
Gangster Squad
End of Watch
Here Comes the Boom
Jack Reacher
Wreck-It Ralph
Django Unchained

3. I stated watching the Red Riding trilogy on Netflix. A few observations:

The sound quality of the streaming films is terrible.
I cannot understand a Yorkshire accent
Andrew Garfield is fantastic.
Garfield’s character has a sex scene with a character played by Michelle Dockery, which makes my head write Peter Parker / Lady Mary Crawley time-travel fic.

4. The first appearance of the new Captain Marvel was this Wednesday, in Avenging Spider-Man #9. This is the Carol-Danvers-is-Captain-Marvel Captain Marvel. The comic is a delight. I highly recommend it.

5. I have spent my days off Editing All The Things. I really like what the contributors to #nextanthology are doing with their pieces.

6. I don’t have to go back to physical therapy! The therapist and I agree that I have a plan, I know how to implement it, and I am motivated to do so. So now I spend a year working on said plan.

I’m thirty-nine years old. Nothing on my body is ever going to Just Get Better All On Its Own again.

7. I received more postcards from my kids!

\o/
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\o/

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July 10 2012

1. Important things first, I have now received FOUR postcards from my children while they are on vacation without me. This is the best thing ever, except for the part where I cried when I read them.

Well, that part wasn’t terrible. I love them, and I miss them, and we are in an age of constant communication and updates, and I am used to knowing what’s going on with them all the time — and I don’t have that. It’s tricky.

2. On the way home from work yesterday I stopped by the pet store to buy chewies for the dogs. Guilt-related chewies, for leaving them alone so much this weekend. The chewies would perhaps have been more useful had I gotten them before the weekend, as dog-entertainment, but I didn’t think of that. So they are apologies instead.

Not that the dogs care.

3. I started a new mystery series, the Nell Sweeney books. Victorian-era Boston, a woman confined to a wheelchair and her lower-class Irish-born female servant solve crimes. I am intrigued by the concept. If, as Scalzi puts it, being a straight white male is playing life on the lowest difficulty setting, then this character premise seems to be at a higher level of challenge. I want to see what happens.

4. I made the Oatmeal Raisin cookies from The Joy of Cooking, substituting in mixed dried fruit and coconut for the raisins. The result is … very hard to stop eating.

5. Yesterday I worked out for the first time since before CONvergence. Ow. Ow, I say.

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