Stacking the Ribs

The end of high school swim season brought my annual collapse—the familiar inability to rise from bed, drag myself to workouts, keep appointments I'd marked on the calendar weeks before. This year it lasted only a week, mercifully brief compared to the three-week recoveries that followed prior seasons. With help from acupuncture and physical therapy, I've clawed my way back toward normal. I've learned that bad posture and the resulting shallow chest breathing bear responsibility for my lingering back pain and breathlessness during swim workouts—problems I can address, or so I hope. My fifties have not been kind to either workouts or recovery.

The gentleman who administers my PT sent me a video on how to stack ribs over pelvis, accompanied by a loud Flo Rida song that made my husband execute a comic double-take. I'm attempting this rib-stacking, though decades of bad habits render the practice a chore. The will to improve gets fortified by long hours standing on concrete pool decks and such painful morning stiffness that I hobble to my dresser as a way station en route to the bathroom—a journey that shouldn't require strategic planning.

As I lay prone one day last week, willing my back to release and reflecting on my fleeting energy reserves, I stumbled across Lisa Miller's essay "How I Learned to Love Lifting Heavy" in the New York Times. Miller reveals she lifts heavy weights for the anxiolytic effect, a term I had to look up. "Anxiolytic"  describes several classes of drugs that reduce anxiety, but I love its application to weightlifting. Exercise has served as my preferred method of reducing stress and outrunning anxiety since I was thirteen, before I even had vocabulary for what I needed to escape.

In recent years, I've embraced lifting heavy. I've wandered in and out of weight rooms since high school, though usually with ill-conceived routines and less than ideal target weights. When I was coming up in swimming, we operated under the philosophy that swimming massive yardage would make you faster. While this approach might work for the 500, I never found it particularly helpful for the 50.

My son and daughter educated me on form, maxes, and exercise combinations that translate to pool performance. They learned from their club coach—with whom I now work—then refined their knowledge in college. With my daughter spotting me, I hit a lifetime best on bench press recently. I felt immense pride—followed by immense exhaustion. The exercise routines I'd been using to manage the stress of coaching  had been drawing from the same limited energy stores, precipitating the inevitable collapse.

My healers help immensely, as does rest. Today I learned a new practice called "sweeping," developed by Buddhist monks, which focuses on mental release rather than physical manipulation. I need to practice this technique before describing it in full or recommending it—I've tried it only once—but I'm intrigued by the possibility of putting my mind as well as my body to rest. Spring and summer wait just beyond the corner, and it's time to emerge from this mini-hibernation, ribs stacked, breath deepened, ready to meet whatever comes next.