The month of November has given me not one, not two, but THREE visits to the hospital. The first came when Krista’s father had emergency double bypass surgery. We walked in one evening, two days after his surgery, to find him sitting up in bed, mostly naked and complaining about feeling hot and claustrophobic. I could see the giant scar on his chest where they opened him up, and the equally giant scar on his leg where they had removed an artery to upgrade the factory-installed artery. The scars looked like big zippers; the parts of the steel teeth were played by the staples the surgeons used to close him up, and I could just imagine them unzipping him to fetch the forceps they had accidentally left inside.

Watching this kind, gentle man suffering a panic attack through a haze of morphine, I remembered my own post-surgical week from last year, where all I could focus on was accessing the basic bodily functions most of us take for granted. I recalled what it was like to be completely dependent on Krista as I covered her father’s forehead and feet with cold washcloths to cool him down.

And it was then, right then, that I promised myself that I would NEVER put myself in that position through my own action or inaction. Our bodies are remarkable systems, but they’re not invincible. Eat garbage, sit on your butt, and the body starts to stage minor riots. Keep it up and we’re talking full-blown Parisian suburb riots with looting and burning cars.

If I’m going to have a heart attack, it’s because I will have gone 20 minutes in the Abu Dhabi finals with Kyra Gracie, not because of my problematic fondness for those gross Ruffles Sour Cream and Onion potato chips.

A few days later I competed in the 2007 Joslin’s Canadian Open Grappling Championships. Wanna see?

(I’m in the pink gi.)

Twelve seconds into this match, when she flipped over, I felt and heard my shoulder go “POP”. I knew something was wrong, so I grabbed her arm, took a deep breath, and calmed myself down. She rolled away from me instead of into me, which was a big mistake. I thought quickly about setting up an armbar, but reconsidered and took her back instead, finishing the fight by rear naked choke 37 seconds after the POP.

I got off of the mat and told my instructor about my shoulder. It hurt pretty badly, but I seemed to have full range of motion, so I foolishly made the decision to continue. My next match was against my teammate Doris:

I took her right down and started to pass her guard, but I noticed that I couldn’t exert pressure with my left arm. I wouldn’t say that it hurt; it was more like my body wasn’t doing what I was telling it to, and I wasn’t used to that. After she spent several seconds tugging on my arm, the pain was unbearable, so I had to let her sweep me and I tapped. My friend and instructor Steve rushed me to the hospital after dire predictions from the EMTs who checked me out on site. The apocalyptic diagnosis of shoulder dislocation was pretty upsetting, and I didn’t feel much better when I got to the emerg and they suggested it might be a broken collarbone.

After the remarkably efficient emerg staff dosed me with morphine (highly recommended; rather than groaning in agony, I spent the first five minutes of my post-morphine experience laughing my ass off) and took some x-rays, they diagnosed me with a Type I shoulder separation and sent me home with a recovery prognosis of 4-6 weeks. The drive back to Toronto from Hamilton was pure torture: every little bump made it feel like somebody was stabbing me in my shoulder.

I’ve still been going to jiu-jitsu class every day, but instead of participating, I sit on the side of the mat and shoot video for our instructor. It’s incredibly frustrating to not be able to do something I so desperately want to do, but I know that if I jump back in too early, I’m going to regret it. Luckily, though, I was there one week after my own injury when one of the other students had his shoulder dislocated in an armbar-gone-wrong. Krista diagnosed him and told us he needed to go to the hospital, calmly saying, “I think we should probably get him to the hospital” rather than doing what I would have done, which would have been running around the studio screaming, “OH MY GOD, HIS SHOULDER IS DISLOCATED! DEAR GOD, SOMEBODY CALL THE AMBULANCE!” So we piled him in my little smart car and I drove the 2km to the nearest hospital, where they got him right in and cut his shirt off. I could see right then that something was horribly wrong: the shoulder was, erm, definitely not where it should have been. My instructor arrived a few minutes after me, as did the guy he had been rolling with, who felt terrible. After they gave my teammate some of his own morphine, they asked us to leave the room, sedated him, and popped his arm back into place.

Unlike me, he left the hospital feeling MUCH better, but his recovery time was 9-12 weeks. As miserable as I was about being out of commission, and as badly as I felt for him, I was grateful that mine was only a mild separation.

Well, it’s now four weeks later and I am back to full strength. My recovery has been described as “incredible” and “miraculous”. I’ve been pain free for five days, which is a full two to four weeks faster than everybody predicted. I think a lot of this is because I did something really simple: I ate right, got a lot of sleep, and performed the rehab exercises that Krista gave me with a religious zeal typically reserved for fanatics.

Like the visit to the hospital to see Krista’s dad, my two subsequent visits to the emergency room taught me some lessons. The first is that severe injuries can happen quickly and unexpectedly. Every sport carries with it some risks; we have to be vigilant and careful. In martial arts, especially in class, we shouldn’t execute techniques with which we are not completely familiar, and certainly we must exercise restraint.

It is an understatement to say that I am not patient; I left patience behind so long ago that it is a ghostly memory to me. My time off the mats has taught me the importance of patience, of looking at my activity as a long-term project. Taking an extra week off is far better than coming back a week too soon, re-injuring myself, and spending an additional four weeks away.

Probably the most important lesson I’ve learned, though, is to know when to quit. The idea of working through pain is bullshit. I’m not talking about the “the last three squats in this set are really hard” pain; I mean the kind of pain that makes you go “oops, that’s bad” when it happens. The right thing to do would have been to resign after my first match.

Next time, I’ll know when to quit. And then I can come back next time, better, more skilled, and with the same love of jiu-jitsu that I have had since I discovered it.

Oh, and the final lesson? Do everything that Mistress Krista tells you to do. That approach hasn’t failed me yet.

It started innocently enough, as these things do. I signed up for morning classes a couple of days a week and slid into a routine of shuffling out the door at 6:30 am dressed like a martial arts dork, toting a power suit and a bagful of veggies for lunch. Then I wandered into a few evening classes. Then I found myself cruising BJJ boards. Then I got tips from BJ Penn and sweated on by Saulo Ribeiro (I shall never wash again!). Then I noticed about 98% of my conversation with OMGBFF A consisted of BJJ discussions. So enough about me and BJJ, what do YOU think about BJJ? Do you think Bruce Lee could leg lock Superman? Then I found myself taking Intarweeb nerdiness to new levels by generating LOLBJJs. After only a few weeks, I was hooked like a cheap Lysol snorter.

Things were going along smoothly and I was accumulating a lovely selection of bruises. Life was resettling into a predictable schedule of what the French call metro, boulot, dodo, with regular injections of omo, as in plata. My teammates passed around a flyer for a competition at the end of September, but I would be out of town seeing Middle Sister that weekend, so I didn’t give it much thought. On Tuesday Sept 25, MS called to cancel. Suddenly my weekend was free. What to do? On Wed Sept 26 I said to OMGBFF A, “Nah, I couldn’t compete. I’m not ready. I’ve only been training for three months. That would be crazy.” On Saturday, Sept 29 I found myself semi-naked and standing on a scale in a high school girls’ changeroom, thinking, as Stephen King so poetically put it in The Stand:

Whafuck?

This decision — which was really less like a decision implying conscious, careful deliberation and more like taking your eyes off the road to fiddle with the radio while driving and discover upon returning your gaze to the highway that you’re in fact hurtling off the overpass — unlocked the door to Krista’s Childhood Hangup Storage Facility, and boy did shit start spilling out fast.

First was my Fear Of Sport. I’ve written elsewhere on the site about how I began my larval stage as an uncoordinated four-eyed dweeb who hid in the changeroom during gym classes. Perpetually picked last for every team, I could pretty much be counted on to drop the fly ball, flop off the track with a belly cramp or twisted knee, miss the basket by a mile, and generally fail at every sport ever invented, including checkers. Every year in the Canada Fitness Test, I ended up with the “Thanks for coming out” participation award, the lowest of the low, except one year, when I got a silver medal… because I cheated.

This childhood nemesis sportif made a sudden and angry resurgence during one of my first grappling classes run by a guy who, given his “Olympics ’96″ tattoo and bulldog physique, probably held no such fears. He lined us up into teams (teams! eek!) and put us through our paces. I looked around and noticed that I was the only woman, the only thirtysomething short woman standing in a forest of about forty, tall, peachfuzzed males who looked as though they had nothing better to do than skip first year stats and hang out at the dojo. Great. Already my cool quotient was nil.

One of our first tasks was to somersault then jump up and sprint the length of the room. The class before us had sweated like a bunch of GIs in the shit in Nam, so the mat was greasy and slick. Thanks to a few gymnastics classes in seventh grade, I somersaulted like a Cirque de Soleil pro, but forgot about the temporary loss of equilibrium that going ass-over-teakettle entailed. I jumped up to sprint, got 10 paces, and thanks to the frictionless surface and inner ear traffic controller going MIA, promptly face planted. In front of everyone. The only thing that separated this from a horrible anxiety dream was that I wasn’t naked. My cool quotient approached absolute zero. Nursing a possibly broken foot and a possibly torn calf, I limped off to the end of the line. But I stayed. I stayed. I damn well stayed, looking up at the ceiling because I read somewhere that this eye position turns off the impulse to cry. I waited till after class when I was in the shower and then stood there bawling in anger, embarrassment and pain, watery snot running down my chin like the Blair Witch Project.

Second, I had to confront my Fear Of Frustration. Normally a rather placid Canadian type by nature, I am talented at passing time quietly in waiting rooms, untying difficult knots, and defusing tense negotiations. But some things turn me into a frazzled Type A fussbudget. One of them, fairly reasonably I think, is being trapped helplessly under a 200-lb man while he gleefully turns my arm into a pretzel. (Good for you, champ! You aggressively submitted a 110 lb woman! Hey, I think there’s a seven year old child in the parking lot that you could beat up for a finale! Seven year olds totally can’t take a punch.) BJJ is like human chess played with all four limbs and your neck. As such it’s incredibly complex, and hence incredibly frustrating, especially when everyone seems bigger, faster, and stronger. Half the students could just sit on me and take a nap, and I’d be stuck. By way of encouragement, people would go on about So-and-So Gracie, the champ who weighed 98 lbs soaking wet and didja know he totally pwned some 300 lb dude and blah blah blah well guess what, that works great if you’re a billionth degree black belt but for a two-month white belt who can barely find her ass with her hands, that does exactly jack squat. Back to blubbering in the shower.

Third was my Fear Of Competition. This one was a biggie. I’ve avoided competition all my life. In the first place, much of it is unnecessary. I’ve still yet to understand, for instance, why otherwise rational women compete tooth and reddened nail for the prize of folding some unappreciative male’s socks for all eternity, or why anyone would care what the Joneses think, much less keep up with them. It seems to me like there is a competition for everything, even rock-paper-scissors or (as I recently learned) eating grits. Many humans just appear to enjoy trying to being the best at something, even if that something is ingesting 10 kilograms of tasteless glutinous sand. (“Good old rock. Nothing beats rock.”)

Competition can bring out the worst in people. As soon as people perceive a shortage of something, they go apeshit to get their hands on the scraps. I can think of no other explanation for fistfights over Tickle Me Elmo (or, if you remember the eighties, Cabbage Patch Dolls), or over belching missing links wearing holey NASCAR tshirts on You Stole Mah Man – I Gon Skritch Yer Eyes Out, Bitch episodes of talk shows.

As a gentle soul with a touch of Byronic temperament, I also find competitiveness immensely stressful. Many people find that a little competition makes things fun — for me, competition sucks fun out of my existence like… uh… well, make up your own Hugh Grant joke here. I “competed” in soccer as a child, which basically meant I showed up at games for the free oranges at halftime and stood in one corner of the defensive area waiting for the ball to come to me so I could kick it in a random direction. I “competed” in music as a child, which basically meant some overzealous teacher signed me up to get on stage with a bunch of other firstborn children with domineering parents and plink out Tukka Tukka Ruff Ruff or some similar ditty, followed by me getting Baby’s First Ulcer and a trip to the doctor for industrial-strength antacids.

You get the picture. I am not, shall we say, one of those people who finds competition as invigorating as an autumn morning constitutional.

On Thursday night before the competition I cornered my coach. “What if I hurt someone?” I worried. He assured me that the girls were tough enough to take it. Tough enough? Oh noez! “What if they’re too tough?” Coach didn’t waste time on fluffy I’m OK you’re OK that there’s what it is affirmations. He placed his hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and like a young David Carradine, dispensed wisdom right from a remote Himalayan monastery. “Krista,” he said with great seriousness and deliberate enunciation, “I want you to go in there and Fuck. Shit. Up.”

*sound of gong*

Friday night I slept like a log. Saturday morning, while other competitors paced, I calmly read the newspaper. The women were on last so it was 6:30, nine hours after weigh-in, before I even stepped in the ring. Finally my name was called and I walked into a dream. I was on autopilot. I was Zen. I was the friggin Fonz. I smiled at my competitor and shook her hand. I thought, in some far-away portion of my brain, wow, she is strong. And then I ran at her, as OMGBFF A said, like an angry little monkey.

Everything around me was a blur but my hearing was crystal clear and I calmly followed the shouted instructions from coach, OMGBFF A, and another teammate. Hand here, leg there, sweep, hold. To my complete astonishment and the utter delight of my coach and teammates, I fucked that shit up.

I had no preparation and only twelve weeks of training. My goal was simple: not to get submitted in the first 30 seconds. I thought I would lose. I imagined ending up in some skeletal configuration that would break the laws of physics and humiliate my ancestors. All I wanted was to survive.

I did not get submitted in the first 30 seconds. I did not get submitted in the second 30 seconds, nor all the subsequent 30 seconds after that, all of which were the longest 30 seconds of my life. When I finished, my mouthguard felt like sucking on a brick. All the oxygen had somehow disappeared from the room. But. I survived. I survived! Holy good mother of Jebus Q on a pogo stick, I survived! I stood in disbelief while the ref raised my arm, my lungs somehow re-inflated, my teammates squealed like a bunch of girls, and coach grinned like a Cheshire cat on ecstasy.

While standing around between matches, a little woman approached me and introduced herself as a Stumptuous reader. Pretty cool! We chatted a bit, then went our separate ways.

After my first match, I ran to the corner and shoved about a pound of kamut pasta in my dry mouth. Suddenly, my name got called again, and I ran to the mat, madly swallowing kamut chunks and thinking Oh crap please don’t make me puke on her. And then I saw my opponent. Uh oh, I was going to fight Stumptuous 2.

Long story short: Stumptuous 2 beat my ass six ways from Sunday. She put in such an impressive performance that I hugged her twice afterwards. I was almost as proud of her as her coach. Huge congrats to Stumptuous 2 for a well earned gold medal!

I left that competition with the realization that this sport is, or should be, about building community and working together to share an activity that we all enjoy. I left with a sense of immense accomplishment despite being beaten. I left with new friends and warm fuzzies from old ones. Oh yeah, and I left with a silver medal, but who’s counting?

The morals of this story:

1. Screw your childhood. You’re in charge.
2. Stumptuous works! Perhaps too well. :)

At 7 am the day after competition I woke up thinking, “I’m taking a day off”. At 7:20 am I said, “Hey, I’m going to find a BJJ class.” Onward!

Teammates, OMGBFFA (in pink gi), coach, and moi second from the right. Oh yeah, you may notice we all kicked ass. If anyone in Toronto wants to join us, Kimonogirl rocks! Come play! You don’t need to compete but you WILL have fun.

---

my matches on youtube

Tips and advice welcome, but don’t be one of those armchair Internet expert jagoffs who writes me to say that dropping guard is for losers.

Long boring explanations for the non martial arts nerds in the crowd:

Brazilian jiu-jitsu works differently than regular wrestling. It can
be done in gi (the traditional outfit) or no gi (sorta like what you’d see on Ultimate Fighter, in shorts and shirt), and the techniques are somewhat different for
each. This tournament was gi-only so you’ll see lots of grabbing the
fabric: collars, sleeves, etc.

The goal in BJJ is to either submit your opponent or win on points.
Points are gained for takedowns, sweeps (flipping your opponent from a
superior to inferior position), knee on belly (which you see me do in
the first match), taking the opponent’s back, passing the guard, and
submissions. Unlike wrestling, much of BJJ is done on the back. BJJ
uses “guard” positions which can be “closed” or “open”. A closed “full
guard” is the person on the back with their legs locked around their
opponent’s waist; a “half guard” is legs locked around one of the
opponent’s legs. There are a variety of open guards but they generally
involve somehow using the legs and feet to control the opponent, and
using the arms for leverage.

To someone not used to seeing BJJ it can look as though the person on
the bottom is in a bad position, but this isn’t necessarily so. For
instance, I lose my second match in part because I can’t pass my
opponent’s closed guard, even though she’s on the bottom. One can
sweep one’s opponent from the bottom (ie flip them from the top to the
bottom position) and there are many submissions that one can get from
bottom. It IS bad to be on the bottom and be mounted, ie have the
opponent above your hips, sitting on your belly or chest, and not have
your legs around them in any way.

Despite what you might think, dear reader, this is not the next-day consequence of my love for chocolate martinis. No, for the last several months I’ve become increasingly interested in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), a grappling sport that involves me spending most of the time getting my arm ripped out of its socket or having my ass jammed up my nose. Afterwards, my best girlfriend A and I get together and happily compare bruises. Actually I’m not entirely sure why this is fun. But anyway.

The point is, it’s 7:30 am on a weekday and I’m in a class doing something physical that I enjoy. I’ll do it until 8:30, when I’ll have a quick shower, get on my bike, and cycle 15 minutes to work. I might stop for a Starbucks. They know me by now.

This is a new experience for me because, you see, until early June I was a workaholic wage slave spending nearly 15 hours a week commuting to a workplace in an institution where I fit in about as well as a NASCAR dad at a British finishing school.

For five years after finishing my PhD I’d toiled away towards the Great Academic Dream consisting of a job that would give me even more work for the sole reward of job security. And then one day it kind of hit me. I was trudging towards a goal that I didn’t really want, in a system where I wasn’t really happy; working with other overburdened, stressed-out people who were watching the clock and thinking about how they could take early retirement or stress leave, toiling for the sake of toiling. When we’d get together we’d rarely talk about the cool things we were studying: we’d talk about how stressed out we were, the long hours we were working, and how we’d really like to experience this “weekend” concept. Colleagues were dropping like flies from stress related illnesses. One had a heart attack in front of his students. Overwork became a form of one-upwomanship, almost dick waving: I worked 120 hours last week! I’m teaching 7 courses! Oh yeah, well, I just took a job doing field work in Antarctica! I read student papers with one eyeball while I shower, talk on the phone, and read email with the other eyeball!

We weren’t fun. We weren’t nice to each other. We were paranoid as shit. We were buried in paper and meaningless rituals of bureaucracy. We suffered from impostor syndrome. We were on hamster wheels running towards food pellets dangling just out of our reach. Eventually we got so used to the wheel that our owners just took the pellets away and we didn’t notice. We just kept running, or we fought each other for the last few nuggets.

Our workplace, supposedly a celebration of learning, was being reorganized into a celebration of the corporation. A giant Pepsi banner was tacked up over the doorway to the student centre. Students were referred to as “funding units” or “clients”. I realized at one point, somewhere in between applying for my fourth and fifth grant, that I was spending my paid salary time applying for more money; in other words, the place was paying me money so that I could then work to try and get more money to show I was worth the salary. It was like a perpetual motion machine of paperwork. My coworker, a lovely woman with an MBA, appeared in my office in tears one day after someone accused her of stealing precious paper from the photocopier. You’ve come a long way from the agora, baby.

The itchy little voice in my head started picking away at the cracks in my soul ten years ago, during my comprehensive exams. I loved what I was doing and learning. But the more I learned about the inner workings of the institution, the more my allegiance to its values and practices wiggled loose like a painful baby tooth. Machiavelli started to make a whole lot of sense and not just to the Renaissance literature specialists. The more I learned about the gears of the academic machine, the more I wanted to disinfect my brain for knowing it.

A few years later, during a particularly brutal academic job interview, after being raked over the coals, told that my entire worldview was ridiculous and stupid, and asked to justify my pathetically idiotic and unspectacular existence, the unwelcome thought popped into my brain: If they offered me the job right now I wouldn’t take it. I ignored the thought, and all the rest that followed like a gathering flurry of fat sticky snowflakes as I ratcheted up anxious hours of grading, submitting papers to journals, applying for grants, and generally doing all kinds of pointless busywork. At one point, I applied for a job at a university over 100 km away. I could drive that! It wouldn’t be so bad! Sure, Krista, you jackass, spend your salary on a second car so you can drive 200 km a day on Canada’s busiest highway in a country known for its winters.

Looking back at times I wonder if I lost my mind. (Thank heaven that university didn’t even short list me. That was a serious attack of temporary insanity.)

It wasn’t all bad: I had many wonderful moments with delightful students, I learned many valuable skills, and collaborated in intellectually stimulating ways with clever and interesting people. I talked excitedly with engaged students and faculty about ideas and issues. I asked intriguing questions of myself and others. I had a beautiful view of a little wooded area from my office and over the most recent three years watched a family of rabbits grow up, play, and make other rabbits. I considered naming the squirrels who appeared to have distinct personalities, and eventually got over the heart attack of birds thunking into the window. I published two books.

Yet gradually, the sharp edges of my square peg bumped up against the confines of the round hole. I tried smashing that peg in with a hammer. I tried filing away my corners. I tried several angles of entrance. No dice. As an older and wiser person once said to me, “You can’t polish a turd.”

I felt trapped. What was I qualified to do? Nothing. (This is the problem with knowing more and more: you feel you actually know less and less.) If I left, what would that make me? I’d constructed much of my identity around my job. When people said, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m an academic.” Who would I be?

Then opportunity knocked in the form of a downtown job at an organization I’d have killed (or at least whacked someone a few times with a blunt instrument) to work for. When I was offered the position I nearly peed my pants with excitement. They liked me! They really liked me! Their work practices are sane, even generous. The people are smart and not surprisingly all very relaxed. The work is interesting and valuable – and also not surprisingly, it’s fantastic quality because everyone isn’t frantically putting out fires, busy having panic attacks, or spending 100 hours a week melding their asses with their desk chairs. The commute takes less time than an episode of Robot Chicken.

My father, Professor Pop, worried about me leaving the university. “Surely you have mixed feelings?” he asked. “Nope,” I said, without hesitation. And I quit.

I quit. I fucking quit holyjebushereigoaaaaaiieee!! I shut my eyes and jumped.

Landed on my feet. Started running towards a new, entirely unknown destination. And never looked back.

As coincidence would have it, quitting has been on many people’s minds lately. In his August Function and Fitness newsletter, Jonathan Sabar announced he was quitting to go full time as a trainer. In his latest Aggressive Strength newsletter, Mike Mahler talked about the timing to take action. And just a few days ago, one of my favourite blogs wrote about why you should sometimes think very seriously about giving up.

There is a stigma attached to quitting in our society. We are told to make a commitment, not to change horses in midstream, not to cut and run. Winners never quit! Quitters never win! Hard work is its own reward!

Now often, that’s true. Dedication and effort count for a lot. When I was a little kid, I was a pretty good waterskier. Once I fell down in an icky weedy patch of the lake. I wanted to climb back in the boat. My uncle, the boat driver, said no; get up from there and get back on the skis. I was afraid of leeches and the yicky weeds. I cried. But at his insistence, I sat back down on my skis, poked the tips out of the water, hung on to the ropes, and did it. When I am tempted to quit because things get scary or difficult, most of the time I remember that seven year old self. I poke my skis back up out of the water, and give the thumbs up to the boat driver even though teary snot is running down my chin. (Uncle D is wise.)

But sometimes, quitting is the smartest, bravest thing you can do. If you’re beating your head against a wall, are you really that much of a hero if you just keep on doing it as your cranium turns into a pulpy mess? If quitting means taking a bigger risk than hanging in there, which action takes more courage? I get email from people who keep bench pressing after their shoulder’s been turned into meaty coleslaw; who keep plugging away at activities they hate, wondering why fitness isn’t more fun; women who are gifted with muscular bodies but keep trying to starve them away. What I want to say to these people is: quit. Try something else, whether that’s a new activity or a new way of seeing the world. Don’t be who you aren’t. Find your strengths and play to them. Get off the hamster wheel – whatever that looks like to you.

In July, when I showed up at the BJJ class I’d missed for the winter and spring because I’d been too busy with work, the instructor’s grin of pleased surprise was so wide it almost cracked his face in half. Classmates squealed happy hellos of recognition. (This was a serious warm fuzzy, by the way.)

Over the last few weeks I’ve signed up for morning BJJ lessons. I cycle to work. Piece by piece, the crust of stress that seemed rock-hard has been flaking off me. My butterfly guard is improving (slowly). Before work, my peep A and I hit up the Starbucks; I bought a thermal coffee mug that fits on my bike. After work I meet friends for a half litre of Chilean plonk, spicy shrimp and tomatillo stew, and good conversation in a great Mexican restaurant around the corner from my office. I’m filling recycling boxes with all the crap I hoarded. (My aim is to throw out my filing cabinet.) I’m getting re-acquainted with my garden and the weekend and the kind of focus that comes only from singular attention on one thing for an unhurried, uninterrupted period of time.

Last weekend, me and 150 of my closest friends had the privilege of attending a workshop run by BJ Penn.

Me and OMGBFF A kicking ass and taking names with BJ, or at least in close proximity to him.

Along with his usual spectacular display of athleticism he offered some advice that seems appropriate:

• Don’t forget your base. Always come back to it.
• Your objective is to escape any unsafe situation.
• A movement has to be right for you. If it isn’t, figure out how to make it so. Or don’t do it.
• If you find it blocked, try something else.
• If you have to make a risky move, make sure you’re punching as you go.

Who am I to argue with the champ?!

In a world where life is uncertain, people like to have someplace to hang their hat. Having such an existential headwear receptacle kinda takes the edge off the sense that at all times we are standing on the edge of the abyss as the ground crumbles beneath our toes. For most of us with busy lives, we’re pretty much one crisis away from totally losing our shit.

Thus, it’s understandable that people latch on to leaders and grand ideas. While having a bevy of flunkies to do our bidding is a fine fantasy, in reality the majority of people find it rather bothersome to be in charge all the time, or even some of the time. Leading isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It requires decisions and independent thinking and responsibility and lots and lots of cat herding. And as we corral the meowing lot into the enclosure, we think “Why can’t I offload this job on to some other sucker?”

Enter the guru. The guru – or genius, or visionary, or whatever you want to call it – is a person who seems to have a grand explanation of the universe while at the same time speaking directly to you, the lumpenproletariat. However this grand explanation, often surprisingly, is not messy at all, but tidy and simple and delivered in a few easy installments. The guru strokes your furrowed brow and soothes you with the promise that if you just buy in then things will be okay. Things will be cool. The toddler puke will come out of the Persian carpet. The sales presentation will go swimmingly. Your problems will be like buttah. Your abs will look like the Himalayas made out of broken glass. Your breasts will defy Newtonian physics and end up as perfect, harmonious, luminous spheres as only a medieval astronomer could invent. Your thighs will be so thin that they will be invisible and people will think your boyish hips are hovering magically above a pair of Manolos.

But the gurus often have dirty little secrets. They can’t do their own workouts and they don’t follow their own advice. Their chemically and/or surgically enhanced physiques make Joan Rivers look like the Ivory Girl. Rumour has it that at least a few big names in the fitness biz are, shall we say, purveyors of bovine excreta when it comes to walking the walk. (Rumour also has it that many are the bona fide real deal. I ain’t sayin’ who’s who.)

Now, not everyone can be an Olympic champion. Like milk, certain things have a best-before date. Injuries, age, and the capricious events of life can be cruel. And eventually, sooner or later, they get their way. So, reasonably, nobody expects a coach or a trainer to be the best of the best all the time. After all, if they were the best of the best, they’d probably be quite busy training and winning things instead of yelling at your sorry ass hauling up and down the track.

Nevertheless it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect people to model the behaviour they expect from others. It’s important here to distinguish between coaching sport performance and training a client to manage the demands of life well enough to make exercise and good nutrition a priority. It’s understandable and entirely sensible that a coach might retire from athletic competition. And given my mediocre athletic gifts it’s entirely reasonable for any grasshopper I train to surpass the mistress. But retiring from self-care, especially when exhorting clients working full time jobs and caring for 2.5 kids to hit the gym and eat their veggies… now that’s another ball of wax. Do as I say not as I do doesn’t hold much credibility for me. I don’t do what Donny Don’t Doesn’t Do. Or something.

I had a client once, a big bear of a man, who in the beginning seemed rather dubious about granting me any authority. He insisted he couldn’t do pushups very well. Then he didn’t want to. Hey, we all have to start somewhere, so I didn’t judge this stance. Maybe he had some childhood pushup trauma. You never know. Anyway, he hemmed and hawed about trying it until I said, “Look, if I do some pushups will you do some too? I’ll match you pushup for pushup.” Looking smug, he said okay.

“Gimme twenty!” he barked. Ha! Leetle girl foolish, he theenk.

Foolish like a fox beeyotch. I dropped and gave him twenty. And then kept on going. By the terrifically ugly end of this set, the only thing creaking my elbows up and down was pure contrary defiant willpower. In the stunned silence that greeted this display, you could pretty much hear my muscle cells clearing the lactic acid with little groaning noises. Without a word, he assumed the position and paid his dues. From that day forward I got me some respect.

I never ask a client or a trainee to do anything I haven’t done myself. They aren’t my guinea pigs. I’m my own guinea pig. Nobody gets advice I haven’t endured and triple-tested. If I’ve got some crazy scheme for them to try, you can rest assured that I was the first Frankenstein to my own mad scientist.

Speaking of scientists, I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Judith Beck, author of the Beck Diet Solution, a cognitive therapy approach to overcoming poor nutritional and lifestyle habits. (You can read my full review on Dietchannel.com.) Right off the bat, what grabbed me was Beck’s almost off-the-cuff mention that she had uesd her own strategies to maintain a significant weight loss for a decade. Now she’s got my attention. In a recent interview from strength coach Robert Dos Remedios, he says that you shouldn’t take anyone’s advice on weight training if they aren’t dependent for a living on what they do. I’d go one step further: you shouldn’t take lifestyle advice from anyone who hasn’t, doesn’t, or can’t take their own advice. Because if we’re teaching people to live better and healthier lives, then it’s our responsibility to do the same. How can we expect Jane Sixpack to hit the squat rack and the produce aisle in good faith if we don’t ourselves regularly smell the iron in both metal and leafy green format?

Robb Wolfe of Performance Menu kindly interviewed me for a feature on Stumptuous a few months ago, and he asked me about my best lifts. When I got to thinking about it, I’m pretty proud of a few good lifts, but more than anything else I’m proud of myself for sticking to this lifestyle for ten years. That’s ten years of illness, injuries, working multiple jobs, long commutes, maintaining friendships and relationships, deaths and births, finishing a PhD, buying and renovating a house and trying to keep its cleanliness down to a dull roar, publishing two books, traveling, battling a sumo wrestler-sized appetite, and a hundred more ups and downs. Each and every one of these things could have knocked me off the track. But they didn’t. Out of all the things I’ve achieved in life, that accomplishment alone – often managed not through any glorious motivation but through pure habit, spite, or orneriness – is one of the most pleasurable and satisfying to contemplate. I’ve stumbled through imperfectly but doggedly, always trying to get a little bit better, and sometimes even succeeding.

You see, progress is not exactly a linear onward-and-upward thing. It’s more like a thousand little tiny stops and starts. Even for the so-called experts, life intervenes with multiple pressures to fail. It doesn’t get any easier. You just get better at managing it, problem solving, and coming up with creative strategies to combat it. You get better at saying no to things that rob your of your energy and better at saying yes to the things that are truly valuable and essential. There is no better time. There is no better life stage. All you have is now; all you have is you. These things that seem to impede you – you don’t wait till they’re done then start your life. They are your life.

You can take it from me.

Krista, age 6, checking out a tidepool in Nova Scotia, June 2007. Ooo starfish!

It’s not every day a girl gets to go to her father’s wedding (unless, perhaps, her father is kind of a sleazebag serial monogamist or the male Zsa Zsa Gabor), so for this event I decided to splurge on some new shoes and a skirt. Actual high heels! I felt like such a girl! I adore femme drag when I can do it, but I wish it weren’t so bloody uncomfortable. It took me all of one hour at the wedding before I nearly lost my heels in the lawn and almost ripped my red silk cheongsam doing a fireman’s carry on my nephew. Blame the four year old.

Anyway, buying said skirt, standing in line for the changeroom in a store that catered to angsty teenage girls, their cellphones, and their anguished/bored-as-hell parents/boyfriends, a sentiment I’d read earlier that week in Mighty Kat’s journal suddenly struck me: “In 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.”

Waiting in the interminable Kiev bread queue changeroom line, I observed the young things traipsing in and out, hanging their hopes on this or that pair of pants, the blue top versus the yellow, perhaps Bobby would like me more if I had this dress with the dots, and so forth. I began to be fascinated with the rather grotesque idea that I was standing in the midst of utterly adorable, gorgeous young things who were stunning simply because they were young and enthusiastic about life and still free of gravity’s inexorable might, and probably right now some spottyfaced adolescent male is writing atrocious poetry to them – but they didn’t even know it. Quite likely, every lovely little fresh-faced creature in that store was convinced she was a hideous beast. How many girls went home and cried after the changeroom adventure and mass-sweatshop-produced garments informed them that their thighs were too big and their boobs all wrong and their bodies too short or tall or curvy or not curvy enough? It depresses me even to contemplate. The darling buds of May, as Shakespeare opined, are shaken by harsh winds indeed.

Eventually I reached the front of the line and hit the changeroom. The skirt fell just over my knees, and I gazed at my reflection. It was a cold day and I’d been wearing boots so my feet were adorned with lovely gray wool socks. I hadn’t shaved my legs in a week (Hey! It’s still practically winter in Canada! Gimme a break!). I am short and stumpy at the best of times (at the worst of times you could say I’d make someone a fine childbearing plow-puller). I’m the antithesis of a whippetlike fashion model.

And yet I grinned like a fiend at the mirror. My quads were peeking out of the hem like a pair of playful otter snouts poking out of the water. Hello girls! Great to see you! You’re looking super after all that squatting! The quadladies flexed, as is their way of greeting. Howdy calves! Enjoying the fresh air after being stuffed into pants for 6 months? You’re looking strong – go girls!

What if, and I’m just sayin’, what if we all just loved our bodies fiercely like mother bears loved their cubs? What does body love mean, anyway? Does it mean unconditional anything goes, it’s ok to have this drink because I deserve it, or this smoke because I’m worth it? Or does it mean caring and watering and petting and thoughtfully feeding to make the body hum and purr?

In twenty years I want to look back and feel that I did not waste those possibilities. I don’t want to wait two decades to know that I was fabulous and didn’t realize it. I want to nurture all those possibilities right now, and start by lovin’ my bad self. Who’s with me?

Today I was on the horn with my old lady, a high school principal, and I got to thinking that if anyone knows the minds of younguns, it’s someone who’s been in the business of corralling adolescents for decades.

“Mom,” I asked, “Do you notice kids in your school being more… anxious?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “We’re having terrible problems.”

Great. Well, at least I know that more of the same is coming down the pike.

I’m not an overly nurturing sort but in the last while I’ve been tempted to make the kids a nice pot of soup, knit them all sweaters, and give them big hugs. They seem so much more resilient in some ways, but in other ways so fragile.

What’s causing this? I could opine that the world is a scarier place but it’s hard to imagine a time when the world hasn’t been a scary place – indeed, the world is pants-crappingly frightening for the world’s population still, even folks in North America who happen to have gotten the short economic and social sticks. Why are the wee ones wigging out?

Some time ago, someone sent me a link to a stress test. The little test asked me to reflect on all the events of the last year. Without paying too much attention, I just ticked off everything that came to mind. Tra la la, house purchase, family deaths, major work upheaval, la la la ticky ticky.

Then I clicked “Total”. According to the program, a score of 0-149 was low stress; 150-299 medium stress; and 300 and over, high.

I scored 517.

Holy shit.

Should I be dead by now?

As it turns out, last year was the perfect storm of life events for me. (On the other hand, I could argue that like ripping off a bandaid, if one puts all of one’s trauma into a single year, perhaps it gets it all over with as soon as possible.)

Somehow I survived with sanity and health intact. I now find myself in Q2 of 2007 still mentally balanced, lean and fit, and having responsibility for no major homicides. What’s my secret? No, it’s not better living through chemistry (although I do recommend investing in a good quality sleeping pill occasionally if you don’t want to go mental from stress-related insomnia). It wasn’t daily affirmations, channeling my purple chakra or any of that woo-woo. Bitch please, that positive thinking shit went out the window with my first anxiety attack.

What was absolutely crucial for surviving it was good exercise and nutrition habits. Instead of the ballast that is jettisoned, activity and diet should be like life vests that keep us afloat when the waters get rough. They permit us to survive it as well as possible. We often can’t control external events but we can control, to some degree, our responses to them.

Last year, right at this time, I experienced what I initially thought was hyperthyroidism, but what turned out to be garden variety anxiety. I would wake up at 4 am with my heart rate over 100. It felt like my skin was vibrating off my body. Appetite and sleep habits were totally out of whack.

I learned to manage it thus with a combination of training and relaxation strategies:

1. When I woke up in the darkened dawn almost literally leaping out of bed, I used that energy to fuel my training sessions. I went out and ran intervals, or hit the gym. I found that intense workouts lasting about
   30 min gave me enough of an endorphin rush to temporarily calm me down. When I felt the most energetic, I trained.
2. I also incorporated longer lower intensity workouts along the lines of “walking meditation”. where the body is given a basic task to perform so that the mind can be occupied with other things. Here I
   simply walked or cycled for long distances using that time to be mindful of what my body was experiencing and attempt to digest the things I was anxious about.
3. Daily yoga, making sure to focus on breathing and conscious performance of poses.
4. Relaxation exercises: deep breathing, visualization (a la sports visualization), etc.
5. Outward-aggressive training like boxing was an effective strategy for releasing the extra energy outwards, rather than letting it accumulate inside. I personally feel it is physically impossible to be
   stressed out after going nuts on a heavy bag for an hour.

What I also applied to this problem was the insight gained from training and previous injuries: namely that pain or other sensations are not “reality”. When you do your first set of squats, or your first set of long kettlebell swings, or your first sprint workout, etc. you think you are going to die. You eventually come to realize that you are not literally going to die, you just think you are (or you just want to at that second, to end the unpleasantness). When you have referred pain you come to realize that the pain is simply a signal that may or may not identify actual damage (if long term, there is a good chance that pain is mostly a “body memory”). When you are reducing calories sensibly you may feel hungry but you are not actually starving.

In other words, as part of intense training and other body-discipline projects, you begin to dissociate sensations and symptoms from “reality” and understand that the body’s language may lead you to conclusions that aren’t always “true”. This insight can then be applied to understanding your mental state when feeling anxious. You can observe your symptoms without judgement and attempt to alleviate them with the knowledge that you do not need to respond to them. What they are telling you is out of proportion to the stimulus.

Finally, as part of my strategy, I gobbled any colourful plant product I could lay my hands on. I knew if I started stress eating or what the Germans call Kummerspeck (grief bacon), I’d be screwed and wouldn’t stop till I had a chicken wing lodged in my aorta.

I knew that this course of action that prioritized exercise and nutrition above nearly all else was the only thing standing between me and making the six o’clock news (and not for winning the spelling bee).

Back to the kids.

Time use data suggests that people have less time for family and friends than in the past. Commutes are longer and more frantic. Employer demands are more stringent; expectations of young people are higher and their progress required to be more rapid. Nutrition quality is poor and daily, routine activity levels are at all-time lows. In recent years, health organizations have begun to suggest that for the first time in human history young people will not have longer lifespans than their parents. This weekend I read an article in the Globe and Mail about play dates and the complex etiquette and scheduling that surrounds these rather grotesque bourgeois rituals. When I was a child a play date was my mother growling, “Turn off that TeeVee and get outside! Also we need milk from the store so ride your bike down there and take your sister with you!!” Pretty fancy, but what can I say, I was born with a wooden spoon in my mouth.

Modern life presents us with new challenges. Our ancestors faced all kinds of stress. They survived. They also died young. So how can we learn and adapt?

By guest ranter Gus Sonnenberg

About a year ago I asked Krista to help me find the “perfect” workout. Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Well duh there’s no such thing.” Unfortunately, I’m not as smart as you are, so I went looking for one anyway. Krista, clearly recognizing that I needed to figure it out on my own, kindly referred me to some good resources and sent me on my way. This is the story of my search. I offer it to you during this season of resolutions. Keep it in mind as you set your goal for 2007.

My primary exercise in my early twenties was weightlifting. Nothing fancy, just the run of the mill bench, squat, and curls kind of thing you see most young men doing in the weight room. Well…maybe the squats were a bit unique. Thanks to a bit of commitment and a dash of discipline, I enjoyed all of the benefits the iron has to offer: strength, stress relief, and self-confidence. But then things changed.

In a span of three years I became a husband, lawyer, homeowner and father. All very cool things, but absolute schedule killers. In my struggle to adjust to these new roles I made a mistake: I stopped lifting weights and lost the benefits I desperately needed.

Then one day I’m passing the time by reading an old copy of Outside Magazine. This issue included an article explaining what workouts a man of adventure should do in each decade of his life. “Oh no,” I said to myself, “I’m not doing what I should be doing to stay in shape.” Next thing I know I’m running several times a week, and hating every step.

I’m grateful that the article got me moving, but it also gave me a bad idea: that there was a perfect workout that I should be doing. The Internet just made it worse. There are hundreds of websites, online publications, and blogs written by well-meaning people who strongly argue that their workout is the best and that everything else is a waste of time. Eventually I found one program that convinced my little brain that it would somehow turn me into a superhero. I was hooked.

I found a local affiliate and went to work convinced this was the perfect workout. It featured all kinds of cool stuff: kipping chin-ups, clean and jerks, tabatha squats, and so on. I dreamed about the amazing shape my body would take. So I went after the program full-speed. (A point should be made here: Krista told me to take it slow, I regret to say I did not listen.) In a short time, I got hurt. And not just once, but several times.

During one of these injury timeouts, I did some thinking. What am I doing? What do I want my body to be able to do? What could I do that would help my body do these things while avoiding injury?

Then it dawned on me. I’m a husband, lawyer, homeowner and father. I want to be able to:

1. lift and carry everything in my house
2. rake a yard of leaves and have enough energy to jump in the piles with my kids
3. to carry a tired child to the car
4. sprint across the street to save a child; and
5. do all these things without pulling a muscle.

That and I want the strength, stress-relief, and self-confidence that only come from strength training. I want all of this in a workout that fits into my day.

With a little imagination, and a helping of Krista’s generosity, I created my own workout. It takes 20 minutes and fits snugly in the schedule. I had to be flexible. My work schedule changed and I lost my access to traditional weights. But I gained a park that includes bars for chins and dips, plus a good-sized rock just right for all kinds of odd lifting. I try to workout every day, which enables me to skip a workout without freaking out. The workouts focus on what I consider essential daddy skills: lifting, carrying, and sprinting. Since I set the pace my injuries are down. Plus I take the time to stretch out every night after putting the kids to sleep. It’s not perfect, but it fits.

When you are looking for a workout program to help you meet your goals in 2007 remember: there is no perfect workout. But you can create the best workout for you by taking the time to consider what you want your body to be able to do. Set your goals accordingly. Having trouble picking up your daughter and carrying her up the stairs? Make a sandbag and carry it up your back stairs for 20 minutes. Can’t play tag without wanting to throw up? Wake up a little early and run some short sprints in front of your house. You know what you need. You don’t need anyone’s permission or blessing. Just go and do it.

Happy new year!