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.

Trauma Recovery Handbook

 About a year ago, I went through an experience in which I felt excluded, humiliated and betrayed. It took me months to be able to write about it in a coherent fashion - that first sentence is a product of introspection, many discussions with close friends, and recent work on trauma recovery. Guilt stabs at me for even using the word "trauma" about this experience when other people go through so much more painful and difficult circumstances, but I'm learning that comparing my life history to others' (and feeling like I should feel lucky and blessed all the time) does not work.

A good friend recently loaned me a book titled Trauma Recovery Handbook for Survivors: A Simple Guide to Understanding Complex Trauma, by Rachel Walker, LMFT. The page on Instinctive Defenses in adults blew out the lightbulb above my head. I knew about fight/flight/freeze responses but I didn't know about the variations of each, and it helped to know that other people experience the same range of emotions and reactions. For example, under Fight, emotions and behaviors include 'controlling, full of rage, judgmental.' Yes, yes, and yes. Under Flight, 'lost in fantasy, spacing out, urge to escape.' You mean other people do that, too?  And under Freeze, 'guarded, paralyzed.' Check.

So. my behavior is in the range of a normal instinctive defense for adults, but why was it happening? To the outside world, the triggering event was not such a big deal. I could recognize that fact logically but it made no difference to my body. As it turns out, the feeling of exclusion, humiliation, betrayal - and shame for feeling all of these for "no reason" - was triggering earlier memories of similar experiences.  The most recent event reached back and pushed multiple buttons in my brain, gaining momentum with each successive button. The result was an outsized instinctive, physical response to multiple incidents.

Discovering this took a year, and a conversation with my good friend helped me complete the picture. She helped me talk it back to the first experience I had of stinging betrayal, which happened at a sleepover when I was 12. I had left the room with three or four girls in sleeping bags behind me to go find the upstairs bathroom. When I came back down, quietly, I heard my best friend talking about me behind my back (or around the corner in this case.) Her words were not complimentary. The hurt and shock made it impossible to breathe. I never confronted her about it, just waited a few extra minutes to recover and inhale before re-entering the room and pretending that all was as before.

Obviously that pain exists somewhere in my brain, and that angry, confused and hurt 12-year-old girl lives within me. She got really angry about being re-injured and re-provoked, and was determined to defend me from the people and the situation that hurt me.  I've had to learn to talk to her and explain that we are not in danger, that the threat has passed, and that we are going to be OK. I even thanked her for looking out for me but let her know she can rest. 

I'm grateful for the insights provided by friends and by this wonderful little book while recognizing that therapy might be needed to go any deeper. I certainly don't prescribe my self-reflective methods to anyone else or pretend to know what any other individual experiences in their life, but I thank you for letting me write this out and for reading.

Marathon Angst

"You will not want to watch that movie tomorrow night," said my husband with narrowed eyes. "I've been here for the past few months, remember?" It was Saturday night, our down night for the weekend, and Rob was trying to convince me to watch "Firewall" with him while I bargained for an early bedtime and the promise of a viewing on Sunday night. I had my weekend run Sunday morning and had to wake up at 5:15 to fit in 11 miles before church. Rob knew that my fatigue on run days would overcome my ability to watch a movie - suspect on the best of days.

We failed in the movie-watching department though I got my 11 miles done. The run seemed ridiculously short compared to the 18 miles of a week ago and to the 20 miles that await next Saturday. I have moved into a strange sort of marathon-training Twilight Zone where 10 miles is a short run, bright pink KT tape wraps permanently around my feet, and the study of electrolyte replacement occupies my free time. When Rob comes to bed (an hour or so after me) he finds me with my feet pre-taped for the next morning, covered in my running socks so the tape does not unravel, and ready to jump out of bed at first light to start gathering miles. Not attractive, but far more comfortable than sleeping in a jog bra and running clothes, as I did when we were camping. There is just no way to discretely get run-ready in a tent at 6:30am!

Fashion issues aside, I've been feeling selfish about the marathon. Training occupies a lot of energy, time and mental focus. Nightly I ice my feet and my knees and reflect that I've passed the point of balance. But we only have three and a half weeks of hard training left, and as a friend observed, "This is obviously important to you." It is. I have been blessed with health and good luck so far in the training process, and I want to prove to myself that I can do this. When I tell people about the marathon they often say, "Oh, I could never do that," and I recognize the words and the tone from the times I responded this way. I shut the door, not wanting to acknowledge the possibility....because then I might have to do it. So now that I have opened the door I deeply desire to walk through it. If I can finish this marathon, what else could I accomplish? And how many more folks might realize that they can do it, too?