Friday Book Review: Margot Fonteyn

I think that ballerinas are bad-ass.  (Male dancers are, too, of course, but that is not as relevant to the current topic.)  They have to be both incredibly strong and incredibly flexible.  They need to balance in improbable positions, maintain a strong sense of musicality, and make everything nearly impossible look essentially effortless.  Also, they get to wear satiny shoes and tutus.  In this context, it is no surprise that when I ran across a copy of Margot Fonteyn’s Autobiography for $.99, I bought it.

Her prose is deft and her story interesting, although I get the impression that she liked pretty much everyone, or at least had good enough manners not to say anything nasty or competitive.  She certainly had amazing opportunities created by her hard work to see the world and meet many powerful people.

I admit I am a little obsessed right now with the question of the responsibility of public figures in sports/entertainment/arts when it comes to social issues.  Given that, I was dismayed at her account of her decision to perform in apartheid-era South Africa and by her adulation for Imelda Marcos.  However, I have the luxury of forming an opinion after history has spoken.

The photos are breathtaking.  Then again, I could look at dancers all day.

If you are looking for a fairy tale, this book is up your alley.  (Do fairy tales ever happen in alleys?)

Little by little

Let’s talk about the small stuff.  Sometimes it is harder than the big stuff, but here are five small things that can create positive change in our lives.

Change the chair.  Desk time happens for all of us.  If we swap out the chair for an exercise ball for even some of the day, we will notice the difference in our posture, our core control, and our stress level (because who can sit without bouncing every once in a while on a giant ball?).  If that’s not an option, try standing, or at least stretching in place every hour.

Trade in the drink.  Substitute a glass of water for any one other beverage during the day.  We can save calories, reduce our caffeine levels, increase our hydration, and enable our bodies to flush out the bad stuff.

Embrace the tofu.  Maybe not literally: that would be messy.  The fewer animal products we consume, the better the results for our health.  One day a week, go veg.  If that’s too much, try one meal.

Go the long way.  When we come back from the store with all those bags of groceries, we can make lots of trips back and forth to bring them all in.  We can alternate upstairs and downstairs chores.  We can choose the lunch spot based on walking distance rather than cuisine.

Breathe.  In.  Out.  Repeat.  Nice and slow, nice and deep, all day long.

This is one of my favorite pictures of my kid

Often, I think, there is a sense that mindfulness is serious business.  We have to concentrate, darn it!  That’s true, but also incomplete.

Sometimes I find it helpful to recognize the silliness of things.  (Fine.  Most of the time.)  When we are moving mindfully, we open ourselves to the possibility that we are graceful, but also the possibility that we look like contorted frogs.  In the latter case, laughing makes sense.

Holding the body in continual tension causes us lasting discomfort.  Nothing breaks up that tension (or works our abs!) more than cracking up.  Let’s tune in to the funny side of things today.

Look! A pretty flower!

I personally like the change back to standard time from daylight savings.  I get up really early, so it is nice to have the light when I’m trying to wake up.  I realize this is not a universally held opinion and that many people find this time of year a struggle because of lack of light.  Which brings me to today’s cheerful topic:  depression.  Really, the topic is how working out helps depression, which is cheerful.

First, endorphins.  Exercise stimulates our bodies to produce them.  They make us feel good.  I could elaborate on how studies show this or that or whatever, but the short version is:  move, move often, and move quickly.

Second, hydration.  When we work out, we have very little choice but to hydrate.  Dehydration causes all kinds of nasty stuff to happen, including general irritability.  Drinking lots of water can make us into nicer people who feel better!

Third, efficacy.  One of the worst parts of depression is the lethargy.  Accomplishing anything (really, anything—getting out of bed counts!) can help.  Managing to exercise, which has so many positive repercussions throughout our lives, is accomplishing things for bonus points.

For more bonus points, we can work out outside where the light can get to us.  Go play.

Monday Workout: Yes, you will be using your abs today

This week’s workout has slightly fewer exercises in it, so let’s shoot for four or five cycles!  And yes, burpees are back.

1 min cardio
back lunge with knee raise	20
mountain climbers	20
tricep kickback	20
chest press with tabletop legs	20
pretty princesses	10
burpees	10

Friday Book Report: At the Water's Edge

Carl Zimmer writes beautifully.  He has a science brain and a poet’s vocabulary, which makes for lovely, lucid prose.  His book At The Water’s Edge:  Fish With Fingers, Whales With Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea, in addition to having a very long title, traces the very long story of the evolution of evolutionary thinking, among other things.  Yes, it is about whales and fish and hippos and sea monsters, but it is also about Darwin, and Owen, and their many descendents in the history of ideas.

Complex ideas abound in this book; there is plenty to learn here.  At the same time, it is a pleasure to read because even the most complicated problems are elucidated with intelligence and humor.

I read the book as a fitness book not because of Darwin and his fitness survival program (which would mean something entirely different to him than to those of us in what we call the Fitness Industry), but because it lays out embryonic development.  Embryonic development has a lot to say about how our bodies come to be and why they move as they do.  Some theories of body rely heavily on the organization of embryos and development to elaborate how we learn to sense ourselves, relate to our environment, and, finally, move around.  The book didn’t turn out to have a lot to say that was directly relevant to my kind of fitness concerns, but I learned a lot and that is good and useful.

Short version:  if you like fossils, marine mammals, and smart writing, this is a great book for you.

Because we all need some Bill and Ted

Socrates, philosopher and savior of Bill and Ted (“He loves baseball…”), instructed us to know ourselves.  He probably wasn’t thinking about fitness at the time, but you never know:  the Greeks did invent the Olympics.

With Halloween behind us and stress-inducing holidays ahead of us, Socrates’s words might come in handy as preventives.  We need to think about how we handle all those celebrations.  Not how we want to, not at first, but how we actually do.  This might mean facing the fact that we are likely to eat half a pie furtively hiding in the kitchen doing dishes to avoid the home movies.  Or that the most important item on the grocery list for the family gathering is vodka.

Then we get to think about what we get out of whatever coping technique we have chosen.  In the first example, we get both escape and clean dishes.  In the second, what we get might range from boldness to forgetfulness to assault and battery.  Some of those things might be more desirable than others.

Finally, we get to apply what we know about ourselves to figure out what alternative coping techniques will get us what we want, like, for example, getting the kids to do the dishes while we head outside for a nice long run far from yet another movie of younger selves waving in uncomfortable clothes.

We can survive.  We can even thrive.