Does this bias make me look fat?

I don’t like to drink my breakfast.  No, not because whiskey is not an acceptable breakfast.  I just like chewing better.  I am sure that I could happily and healthily live the rest of my life without drinking a smoothie, but I find it instructive to challenge my biases as often as possible.

Looking at the blender this morning, however, I almost bailed out.  It is cold and dark when I get up.  A nice cold drink was really not what I had in mind.  A nice cold drink full of seeds and nuts and fruits?  Crazy talk.  But I did it.

Guess what?  I lived to tell the tale.  I even feel good.  I’ll do it again tomorrow.

Your biases might be different than mine are.  You may feel that salads are not meals, or that vegetables should never be orange, or that whoever decided that peanut butter is not a food group unto itself was wrong, wrong, wrong.  Trying to stretch past that bias may not change anything (I keep trying to like olives and have not yet succeeded…), but then again, it might.

Eventually, we may find that we are happy without some previously treasured foods and with some new and different ones.  What have we got to lose?

Dance dance dance...

(OK... I had technical difficulties.  This is the video I wanted to put here:  https://youtu.be/CdvITn5cAVc)

Last week, I went to see an amazing dance production put on by the Destiny Arts Center and the Laney College Theater Arts Department.  Sitting in a theater doesn’t count as exercise, but it did give me exercise thoughts, two in particular.

First, every kind of body can exercise.  There were big dancers and little dancers.  Men, women, boys, girls, and all genders in between and outside danced wonderfully.  The careful little box of What Dancers Look Like blew up into a thousand pieces of gorgeous confetti.  No excuses.  We can all dance—or swim, or play soccer, or whatever gives us joy.

Which is the second thought.  The joy of the dancers seeped into everyone in the audience.  While we are working on some particularly sticky bit of training, we might forget that we are also exercising our joy muscles, but we are.  We are enabling our hip-hop selves to leap higher, our track star selves to feel the wind in our hair rushing ever faster, our yoga selves to fold more beautifully.

Go play.

Wheels Go Around

Most of the time, I am in favor of baby steps, the small, incremental gains that come from regular practice and achieving little victories.  Sometimes, however, going for the giant step makes the journey more interesting and fun.  Admittedly, the big steps scare the pants off me, but in a good way (no, not because I end up without pants afterwards—that would be bad).

The weekend after next I will be riding my first century.  One hundred seven miles in one day.  I’m not sure I can do it.  My previous best distance in one day is 80 miles, after which I promised to kill the friend who told me I could do it.  She said I’d have to catch her first, which means she is still alive and well.

I’m training.  I have a purpose with my spin classes and rides.  It turns out that when I give myself the challenge to go farther and faster, I find out that all that incremental stuff has paid off.  I can do it.

We can all use the knowledge that our work is, well, working.  Let’s rise to our challenges!  After all, if I go 81 miles, I have still gone farther than ever before.

Duck's Weekend

Duck needed a cold beverage on the way to So. Cal.

And then, of course, Duck needed a pit stop.

He had to stop at the bank for party funds.

Aaah... at last!  The pool!

But wait!  Duck's partner in crime needed a suit!



Duck!  You know what happens when you drink!  You start checking out the girls!



...And then you head out to find a place to party!

Duck likes Frank Sinatra!

In the morning, Duck woke up feeling like Godzilla.  So he headed to the golf course to devour some golfers!

By afternoon, he felt like relaxing some more by the pool.



After the drive home, Duck visited the car wash.

 All tucked in for a good night's sleep!  Great weekend, Duck!

Bend and stretch. Also Duck begins an adventure!

Remember the sit and reach test?  It was one of the yearly tortures of the President’s Physical Fitness Test (discontinued after the 2012-2013 school year apparently, and replaced with a new program with healthy living goals).  That may have been the last time we were actually evaluated on our flexibility.  Peeking around at the other people in yoga class doesn’t count; that is not an objective measurement (or helpful). 

Many people find working on flexibility to be about as fun as grocery shopping with a screaming toddler, if not as loud.  The good news is that toddlers eventually stop screaming, and so do our muscles when we get used to stretching them.

The better news is that flexibility helps us keep range of motion so that we will still be able to tie our shoes, walk, and scrub our own backs when we are old.  There is some evidence that flexibility helps prevent injury, but it isn’t conclusive.  Relieving tension, however, is always a good goal and stretching does help with that.

So even when we are pressed for time, we need to remind ourselves to do at least a little stretching.  Our bodies will appreciate it.

In other news, my duck has decided to go on vacation with one of my clients.  Here he is planning his trip to Palm Springs:

And here he is trying to find the car keys:

Rolling along

Sometimes it seems like it is all going wrong.  We catch a cold.  We miss a workout or two.  We want macaroni and cheese more than anything else.  It is okay.  It is temporary.

Every morning we get a chance to start again.  Maybe it takes until afternoon, for some of us, but every good choice we make builds our power to make more good choices.  We can do it, just maybe not all at once.

Breathe.  And then choose the next good thing.

I no longer need to find 7-Eleven in Sweden or anywhere else

When I was a kid, I thought crutches were incredibly cool.  I was not the only one.  Anyone who had a pair and happened to be sitting was besieged with requests to try them.  We would take turns swinging and hopping around on them.  Then I ripped the ligaments in my right ankle and got my own pair.  Not so fun or cool then, navigating stairs, having to wear both straps of my backpack (which was Not Done at my school), chafing under my armpits.  At home, I did a lot of hopping without them, choosing to crawl up and down the stairs.

Crutches are temporary necessities.  We do not want to use them all the time.  I am, of course, talking now about our metaphorical crutches, the caffeine, the cigarettes, the secret brownies, the second drink, the fourth hour of television.  It is not easy to give them up, even if we are better.  When my cast came off, I had an atrophied calf and an ankle I was afraid to put weight on.  The crutches kept me from the pain of walking, but to truly heal, I had to stop using them and go through the discomfort of rebuilding muscle and balance.

I recently gave up caffeine, again.  I always joke about Coke and Diet Coke (we call them crack and diet crack at my house) being easier to get than sleep.  I’ve spent the last week realizing how sleep-deprived I really have been and giving my body the chance to heal.  Now that the caffeine headaches are gone and I’ve taken several million naps, I feel much better.

Let’s always be on the lookout for our crutches.  Let’s ask if we really need them or if we are choosing not to grow or heal by using them.