Category: Exercise and Fitness

In 2011 I swam a 10k race in the Applegate lake in Oregon. It was a four-lap race around a circular course of buoys that spanned a big chunk of the lake. Open water races with repeated laps are psychologically difficult–at least, for me–because, when you’re already exhausted, it’s really difficult to rally your spirits and override the morosity of “here we go AGAIN.” I remember finishing the third lap near what would eventually be the finish line–the wind had changed directions and intensified by then, and every stroke was a challenge–and thinking, “if I came out of the water now, who would know?” It was the sort of cognitive miasma that tends to hit, at least for me, at about 75% of the race–though sometimes it takes the form of what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Normal people are just waking up for brunch. Who does this? Willingly? By the time the Oregon race rolled around, I was a fairly experienced open water swimmer (though new to marathons), and I already knew negative self-talk for what it was. When your brain starts vomiting garbage at you during an endurance race, if you know yourself well enough to expect it, you can identify the poisonous thought in your mind, like the Buddha greeting the demon Mara. I like to say to myself, “hello, Darkness, my old friend.” Usually it evaporates right away. Thing is, it would never occur to me–not in a million years–to actually exit the water after three laps of a four-lap race unless I was injured and intended to report as DNF right away. Not because I’m such a virtuous person–far from it–but because what would be the point? Didn’t I sign in to swim 10k? Why would I want to swim 7.5k and claim I swam 10k? what’s to be gained? And how would I look myself in the eye in the mirror later?

A couple of years later, a few of us were chatting over at the Marathon Swimmers Forum, and someone mentioned that he had overheard two (presumably) triathletes at the start line of that same race casually chatting about how they intended to only swim two or three laps, depending on how they felt like. We all found this very jarring, especially given how difficult it is to police open water races as it is. Everyone looks the same in the water with their race caps on, and no one is particularly invested in dogged surveillance of some particular dude, out of hundreds of others, getting out of the water a couple of laps earlier than he should.

This whole incident came back to mind when I read today’s article on Shvoong, an Israeli news source for everything endurance/adventure. Apparently, some guy ran the Ha-Yarkon Park Half Marathon wearing his own bib on his chest but keeping his friend’s bib in his pocket. Since this guy also happened to be very fast–he ran the race in 1:15–the ghost runner who “paced” him aroused suspicion, and the guy ended up confessing.

The interesting bit was that the story went viral in the online running community, and this guy actually replied to the post:

“Hi everyone, I’m commenting here because I think it’s about me. I ran with my chest bib according to the rules. In addition, there was an extra kit for a guy who could’t participate in my pocket. Out of my misunderstanding, I took the whole thing lightly, in perspective, without thinking too much about my ‘crime’. I learned this Friday from veterans in the running community that I wasn’t behaving with sportsmanlike ethics. I take full responsibility for my actions. I certainly learned from this and won’t do it again. I wish everyone quiet days.”

Later on, the same runner answered another commenter and expanded: “I’ll honestly say that, thanks to this incident, I learned a lot from veteran runners about the athletic unfairness, deeply, about what I’ve done… I tried to write something about my mistake/silliness/stupidity without hurting colleagues… I take full responsibility. I admit it was purely wanting to help a friend’s goal, who also did not understand the severity of the deed and I didn’t think it was such “deception” or immoral. The most important thing for me is that I learned from it and understood deeply the meaning of what I’d done. By the way, my results were disqualified as well and I’m glad justice was done.”

I find this absolutely fascinating, both as an athlete and as a criminologist. On one hand, true remorse is rare to find and difficult to identify, and if that’s what this is, then all’s well that ends well. On the other hand, how can a fairly fast runner–someone who finishes a half in 1:15 has (literally!) been around the block many times–fail to fully grasp the fundamental unfairness of what he’s done? Is it not plainly obvious that the concept of a race is that everyone competes under equal conditions? Have we not witnessed decades of quibbling over costumes, shoes, prosthetics, etc., in races to understand how important it is to keep athletic competitions fair? What’s there to misunderstand here?

The story sent me down a rabbit hole and I found out that marathon cheating is extremely common, to the point that a man named Derek Murphy has made it his life’s mission to catch the cheaters. The article expresses the same mystification I have with cheating; the only way to understand someone like Rosie Ruiz, the infamous Boston Marathon cheater, is to assume some form of individual clinical pathology. But the Ottawa Citizen ran a phenomenal in-depth story on marathon cheating, in which Jonathan Lasnier, a University of Ottawa sports psychologist, offers additional possibilities:

“Somebody can be task-oriented, and another can be ego-oriented,” he says. It’s the ego-oriented people who tend to be the cheaters. Rather than run the race for the sake of running it, “they will use other reference criteria to evaluate their competence,” says Lasnier. “They will focus more on the other people instead of themselves, and they will define success as superiority over others.”

Their mentality seems to be this: “when winning is everything, it is worth doing anything to win,” says Lasnier. But surely, not everyone who is motivated by ego and vanity is given to cheating? Surely there are some moral narcissists out there?

Lasnier says that it comes down to more personal factors. “I think it depends on your identity as an individual,” he says. A hypothetical: “Let’s say you’re an athlete and your identity is solely based on the fact that you are an athlete, and you want to perform and want to show competence toward others, because it’s the only thing in your life that’s supporting your identity. I think this can be dangerous, in a way.”

To Lasnier’s analysis I would add that the stakes of any given event are not the same for all people. Open water marathoners swim marathons because that’s what they do. But triathletes, like the two anonymous cheats that my friend overheard at the Applegate lake, probably register for open water races as prep for triathlons, which is the sport they really care about. They might have thought of the race as a nice opportunity to train for the swim leg and didn’t give a shit about the fact that the rest of us swam for time. Is it selfish? Sure. Does it reflect a common sort of solipsism, where you are only preoccupied with yourself and your goals and everyone else sort of fades into the background? Probably.

Similarly, someone who runs a marathon for time–for the sake of that very race–has a very different mentality than someone who runs it to qualify for another marathon (say, Boston). Indeed, one of the ways Derek Murphy catches Boston qualifier cheats is by comparing their qualifying time to the time they actually logged in Boston. This raises the inevitable question whether these people really believe that faking their results would produce an astonishing performance in Boston. To qualify for Boston, a woman my age (in the 50-54 age group) has to run a marathon in 3:50:00. In 2022, I ran the Oakland Marathon in about 5:15 (I’m slow and my knee caved in at mile 19). Wouldn’t it be weird if I qualified for Boston in less than four hours, only to run the actual race in more than five?

Still, if Lasnier is right, maybe the answer lies not so much in psychopathology but in sociology. I’m thinking specifically of Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s classic article Techniques of Neutralization (1958). Sykes and Matza wrote the article during a golden age of scholarly interest in juvenile delinquency, making a revolutionary (for its time) argument: juvenile delinquents do not have some warped sense of values and moralities that are opposed to ours. Indeed, they are on board with “our” (the supposedly law-abiding middle-class folks that Sykes and Matza envisioned as their audience) basic notions of justice and fairness. They therefore argued that “much delinquency is based on what is essentially an unrecognized extension of defenses to crimes, in the form of justifications for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large.”

Sykes and Matza identify five such justifications: denial of responsibility (e.g., “it was an accident!”), denial of injury (e.g., “I just borrowed their car, what’s the big deal” or “they have insurance”), denial of the victim, (e.g., “that shop owner had it coming!” or “he had no business coming on to me at the pub”), condemnation of the condemners (e.g., “rich people steal all the time by evading taxes”), and appeals to higher loyalties (e.g., “I had to help my mom pay the bills.”)

The article itself is not based on empirical evidence, but rather on secondary observations of other people’s research, which are not without their flaws. Sykes and Matza do not consider, for example, the possibility that the interviewees might have actually held opposing values, but chose to explain what they had done in terms that they thought would appeal to their interviewers. And even though it is easy to see that these techniques of neutralization are framed in a way that does lend them persuasive purchase (after all, the question of damages, for example, is central to the disposition of tort cases, and the question of higher loyalties is fundamental to the necessity defense), it is not entirely clear why different people draw the line in different places on what seems to be persuasive. The Ha-Yarkon park runner, for example, relied on some of these: “I didn’t intend to” is a denial of responsibility; “I didn’t think anyone else was harmed” is a denial of injury and victim, and “I wanted to help a friend” is an appeal to higher loyalties. It doesn’t seem that folks bought his rationale, and his contrition does appear to reflect a sense of deeply buying into a set of norms that were, previously, extrinsic to him.

This is quite a sobering week to think about this stuff. First of all, it’s quaint to consider that, in 1958, a major innovation in criminology would have been to argue that delinquent teenagers are “just like us,” holding similar values and feeling guilt and shame, on a week in which the American people have voted for a man who still holds fast to the 1980s superpredator theory of juvenile delinquency (and who still openly and proudly espouses that the emblems of that flawed theory, the Central Park Five, who were exonerated by DNA evidence years ago, were guilty; they are suing him.) I have my own theories and opinions about the election, but the last thing we all need, I think, is more tiresome punditry about that, so I’ll keep it to myself. But in the spirt of “what is old is new again,” it’s interesting to consider that Sykes and Matza were writing against the grain of many delinquency scholars of their time in arguing that we share values in common even with people who appear to be doing things we all oppose, i.e., crime. Most people in the field at the time might as well have thought that folks of a different class and subculture lived on a different moral planet. I’d like to think, like Leonard Nemoy’s Spock in Star Trek, that there are always possibilities, and the coming years will provide ample opportunities to explore them.

I’m a month and a half out from the beginning of my HRT journey and it’s a good time to review my health and fitness scenario. Many reasons to despair of the world, but I’m trying to keep as upbeat as I can through it by pursuing sources of inspiration. One of these is David Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky’s fabulous book Venus with Biceps, which offers a 200-year history of muscular women and strongwomen and their exploits through art and photography. Another has been the marvelous Team USA Gymnastics; my family and I went to see the Gold Over America Tour last night and marvel at the feats of athleticism and grace.

My personal favorite in this astounding group is Brody Malone, whose miraculous comeback from a horrific knee injury in time to be a massive contributor to the MAG USA team’s heroic bronze medal was an incredible tour de force of spiritual fortitude, discipline and grit. I’ve had to come back from far smaller setbacks–shoulder tendon things, broken toes, and sprained ankles–the latter only four months before I ran the Oakland Marathon, and remember well how grueling that was, so I am filled with awe. There are a lot of other reasons why I admire this guy so much–in the current, aggressively polarized state of this nation, it’s no small thing for a guy from a small town in Georgia to spend formative college years at Stanford and handle the culture clash with such grace (Brody, if you’re reading this, I would love to meet you! You and your family are welcome in my home anytime, and also, we need to have a conversation about animal rights). But everyone else in this group is phenomenal as well, and we had a wonderful time reveling in the breathtaking routines and delightful choreography of the whole thing.

It’s to the credit of the new HRT regime, as well as some newfound room to breathe while on research leave, that I owe what seems to be an upswing in my fitness. I’m improving in the weight room in ways that surprise me–not only in adding weights and reps, but also in being humble sometimes and staying with the same weights until I see better form. My benching and squatting have improved and I’ve noticed that my deadlifting gets a huge boost from listening to cheesy encouraging music when I add plates. I’ve also thrown in some olympic weightlifting sets on occasion, inspired by the remarkable Olivia Reeves. Really grateful to coaches Karina Inkster and Zoe Peled for their no-BS advice and coaching in the weight room and in the kitchen.

Things are looking up in the swimming pool as well, and although I’m treating this as the beginning of a comeback, I’m not yet sure what I’m coming back to. Maybe other parents of young children manage to somehow weave marathon swimming and training into their day, but our rhythm at home will not come close to allow me to spend the kind of time in the pool that I did when I trained for Tampa, the Sea of Galilee, or even something shorter like the Thames Marathon. Technique takes one only so far, and for serious marathoning one has to swim big volumes, and those take time. So maybe I’m looking at racing only within the 6-to-10-mile range. I’m not sure yet.

There’s one thing I’m doing better than when I was racing, and that’s cross training. I was, and still largely am, a disciple of Terry Laughlin and Total Immersion, and a big part of that was swimming races and long sets with a very slight two-beat-kick. The idea was to keep the quads, which eat up a lot of oxygen, for later, but “later” never seemed to come, and I don’t think I ever learned to kick properly. The difference is that I used to spend all my workout time in the pool, whereas now I spend half of it at the gym. Putting in the effort to build leg muscles in the gym is paying off in the sense that I have muscles I can now recruit, and this is going to be what I rely on to bring my times in the pool back to where they were. I still have several months of work to shave some seconds and minutes off my time, but I’m already seeing some times that I wasn’t expecting, so this addition of a small and fast six-beat-kick is already paying off in the second half of each interval. I’m still benefitting a lot from the months I spent working with coach Celeste St. Pierre on this and from her sage advice on stroke refinement and on midlife in general.

To give you an idea of what things look like these days, here’s an overview of my week. I’m now doing some form of cardio and some form of strength almost every day, and the combination seems to work well. Things do change some from week to week, because pool and gym proximity can be an issue and OW is getting cold (I’m more of a wuss than I used to be). Thankfully, San Francisco has lots of fantastic stairways, and choosing a different one every week to do some repeats is fun.

Add to this the fact that I commute by e-bike, and I think it’s a pretty active week for someone who turns 50 in November and is just beginning to find a way out of the perimenopausal woods of woe. The key is to schedule this around research and family; I want to finish the biblical prison book in a few weeks, and I also want to be a present and energetic parent. The time expenditure is not trivial; we’re talking about 90 mins of physical activity not including the bike commute, so at least some of it has to happen before my kid wakes up and some of it while he’s in school. In general, this calls for more productivity and less dawdling in the library and in the classroom, and I find that the HRT bought me some mental clarity that helps with that.

As far as food goes, I try to hit 100g of protein a day, which requires some aggressive strategizing when it’s plant-based. I usually succeed if I start the day with 30-40 grams right out of the gate, which require some combination of tofu/tempeh, high protein vegan yogurt, and/or protein powder. The easiest thing to get this to happen is with a giant protein smoothie, full of fruit and greens; it’s not a culinary sensation, but it’s fast, simple, and effective. Being strategic about snacks (my go-to is a bag of lupini beans) helps a lot. My fiber goal (hovering around 40-50 grams) is much easier with plant-based diets, and I usually hit it without even making an effort. I take a multi that includes iron, zinc, and of course B12, and also creatine (usually in my morning smoothie). The next step will be to add some probiotics to the mix, as there seems to be research that supports the connection between a healthy gut and increased estrogen production.

The perimenopausal weight gain is not budging, but it’s been rearranging itself differently, and there even seem to be some glimmers of a physique that are really gratifying (the muscular women’s book is a real inspiration!). I’m avidly following marvelous Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher for some liberating inspiration and am enjoying her wisdom very much. My main goal is to get as strong as I can, to increasingly improve my quality of life, and to figure out the next steps in my swimming comeback. Honestly, the fact that the weepiness, constant periods, and nightly sweat lodge seem to be in the rearview mirror is a LOT, and just the fact that I have the energy to do all this makes me very happy.

One factor that seems to be outside my control is the resting scenario. Even with optimal conditions–pitch dark room, reasonable bedtime, ice-cold tart cherry juice before bed–and even with the HRT-induced improvement in my insomnia–it’s still difficult to sleep straight through the night. Grief and fear are very much in the picture, the news intrude into my nightmares, and even though I meditate at night and have a short and beautiful prayer routine upon awakening, there’s only so much I can do with world events and personal trauma against the backdrop of perimenopause. If this is what’s jamming the wheels of my journey, there’s precious little I can do about it that I’m not doing already, and as the Serenity Prayer reminds us, the wisdom to know what we can and cannot control is priceless.

There’s one more thing to add to this snapshot, and that seems to be that my new pastimes seem to be organized around themes of butchy resilience and competence. I started learning to play drums in February, in a really supportive group led by master teacher Brian Gorman, where the hilarious, no-nonsense Gen X energy feeds my soul. I’m in love with this! I’m also in love with my new krav maga class; the new realities of living in this environment have reminded me that knowing how to defend oneself is an important life skill. I don’t need robes, belts, or gurus–I just need to know how to beat the crap out of people if the need arises, and that’s exactly what they teach us at Tactica. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.

All of this reinvention may seem a bit odd, but remember that many life events have hastened it: the death of my beloved father and resulting changes in our family dynamics, the horrors of October 7, the ensuing war, and the resulting devastation of my professional environment, are all part of this. The older I get, the more I feel that what we do–jobs, hobbies, even relationships–is really not who we are. Very little, if anything, of what comprises my daily life is an inalienable part of my identity. The smaller the ego becomes, and the less is wrapped up in it, the better I feel, and these new things that are healthy and life-giving right now are no more a part of me than, say, flute playing or singing or meditation teaching were in the past. It’s just what feels right to do at the moment, and I can revisit as the seasons of my life continue to change.

One of the creepier, more Gothic stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon is The Adventure of the Creeping Man, in which Holmes and Watson are retained by the secretary of an academic, Professor Presbury, when the professor begins to behave in a peculiar and alarming manner. Recently engaged to a woman much younger than himself, the professor becomes irascible and menacing and his body language is altered: he climbs and creeps like a monkey, at some point climbing up to his daughter’s window. In addition, the professor is very secretive about packages he receives from Europe, and his own dog begins to attack him.

Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers (but I hope you won’t, because otherwise the rest of this post won’t make much sense): Holmes figures out that the professor’s behavior is cyclical–he seems to be taking some behavior-altering substance every nine days. It turns out that he sought suspicious rejuvenating treatments from a shady European practitioner (one in a long line of shady antagonists from the continent in the canon) in anticipation of his future nuptials to the young woman.

I’ve probably read this story dozens of times, alongside the rest of the canon, and like any person who has a decades-long loving relationship with an artistic or literary work, it hits me different each time. In her gorgeous book The Jane Austen Remedy, octogenarian author and literary scholar Ruth Wilson tells of her evolving understanding and relating to Austin’s novels, which she has been reading and rereading since 1947. I have the same sort of relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle. His works enrich and educate me, and sometimes piss me off, in ways that evolve throughout my life. I just recently rediscovered the terrific, chilling film adaptation of Lot no. 249 and my life hasn’t quite been the same since I saw it. But I digress–let’s get back to Professor Presbury and his mysterious medication.

Earlier in my life I found Presbury pitiful and creepy in equal measures, and as a modern reader, identified with the deep distaste that Presbury’s daughter Edith and his secretary, Bennett, have for the huge age gap between Presbury and his fiancée. It’s easy to mercilessly dismiss Presbury as a pathetic old man, desperately attempting the impossible: to bend evolution to his will using the Victorian version of Viagra so as to turn back the wheel of time. But when I started studying criminology and learned of the emergence of positivism, a lot of this stuff made more sense to me. As I have explained elsewhere, Doyle started writing the stories when Darwinism was already a sensation in England, and his enthusiasm about the marriage of science and crime is palpable in the stories. Shortly before Doyle began writing, Italian doctor and academic Cesare Lombroso published his book L’Uomo Delinquente, in which he argued that criminals were atavists, evolutionary aberrations, who could be identified by physical markers such as their measurements and facial features. If you visit Museo Lombroso in Turin, an experience I highly recommend, you’ll get more of a sense of the life and times of Lombroso, as well as of the sociopolitical underpinnings of his theory, and you’ll see his huge collections of skeletons, skulls, and death masks of criminals. You can also read David Horn’s fantastic book about Lombroso. This also explains why Holmes offers such aggressive censure of Presbury toward the end of the story, when all is revealed: “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.” To subvert the natural course of events by injecting one with the extract of monkey glands is to reverse the ape-to-human evolution. It is an aberration, it is recurrence to atavism, and it must not be attempted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Professor Presbury lately because of my own physical predicament. Normally I have heaps of distaste for tiresome, self-centered Internet confessionals crafted to “raise awareness” to the suffering and misery of the author, so of course I ask your forgiveness in advance for burdening you with more of this annoying genre, but this is such an unspoken issue that it can benefit from some exposure. I’m in perimenopause and in the thick of an entire buffet of horrible symptoms. It is difficult to describe the bad feeling to anyone who is not experiencing it. Everything you’ve read about–the brain fog, the weight gain, the irritability, the heart palpitations, the sudden drop in aerobic capacity, the frequent and unpredictable periods, the hot flashes and night sweats–is true, of course, but underlying it all is a deep, unrelenting feeling of malaise beyond definition, that makes one want to crawl out of one’s own skin and flee far, far away. I’ve tried to remind myself that this could also be a product of my grief over my father and the appalling antisemitic climate I experienced this year, but the physical suffering cannot be denied and it is immense. I’m not a crybaby, I’ve swum marathons in frigid water without complaint, but perimenopause has truly brought me to my knees, and shortly before my 50th birthday I found myself asking my doctor for HRT.

Hormone replacement therapy takes a different form for each woman. In my case, it involves 12 days a month of progesterone, taken orally in enormous capsules, and estrogen patches that are supposed to be waterproof but don’t fare 100% well if one swims a strenuous workout. Anyway, we’re a month in, and the sense of relief is palpable. I feel alive. I have my life back. My period was short and predictable. No more sweating, no more weeping, mental clarity is back, and my lifting and swimming have both improved.

I’m mentioning this because I sense there is still some stigma attached to taking hormones. For one thing, it presents one with one’s Professor Presbury-ness: I’m now older, I miss being younger, I’m pathetically trying to bring back my juice by taking hormones my body no longer reliably produces. It’s embarrassing and humbling and, oddly, has brought about a wave of sympathy for Presbury (and for another pathetic and scary heroine of a book I read in childhood, She by Henry Rider Haggard.) I get it now. I get no longer recognizing your vessel and longing for the sense of vitality you’d taken for granted. Watching (and being enthralled by) the Olympics certainly drove the point home. I am captivated and inspired by the athletes and their stories. Like so many people worldwide, I was swept into the drama, joy, camaraderie, and astonishing performance of the USA Men’s Artistic Gymnastics team and their heroic capturing of the bronze medal. I could daydream about performing astonishing feats of strength, endurance, and agility on the international stage, but I’m not an insanely talented kid in his or her early twenties who spent hours at the gym every day of their life; instead, I’m a middle-aged family woman and where I am in life is a lot more reminiscent of the athletes’ parents, shown cheering for them in the audience. But the joy on the faces accomplishing their incredible athletic goals made me also crave the sense of feeling strong, capable, confident in my body, the way I felt a decade ago when I was swimming open water marathons. HRT has brought this sensation back. I feel at peace inside my vessel. It is much easier to be an Instrument of God’s Peace, as per the Prayer of St. Francis, when your body works in predictable and satisfying ways.

There’s also the health stuff: many women are still terrified of HRT because of misleading science, which made many friends of mine who are now in their sixties miss out on a medically provable, low-risk solution to abject physical misery. If you follow only one link in this blog post, make sure it’s this superb, science-based NYT exposé of how women have been cheated out of this important remedy (you’ve read thousands of screeds about misogyny in medicine, so insert one here). Risks of cancer with HRT are associated only with start of use after one turns 60. Start using hormones before you’re 60, and the benefits often outweigh the risks.

Finally, there’s this notion that we must accept what is happening naturally and resort to herbal remedies and meditation. HRT, we are warned, will not do the trick if we are too lazy to eat well, exercise, and reduce stress. I find this message patronizing and insulting, not only to me, but to many women in the same condition. I eat extremely healthy, plant-based, and maximize lean protein and fiber beyond what doctors and coaches prescribe active people. I work out approximately 90 minutes a day, combining strength and cardio, I lift heavy, I do plyo, I do intervals and sprints in the pool, I do pilates and abs and conditioning, I stretch, and I commute by bicycle. “Reducing stress” as a prescription for women with kids and aging parents and mounting responsibilities at work and elsewhere is a risible proposition, but I’m a meditation teacher, I do engage in contemplative practices and know how to do it. Why try to sell me on black cohosh and St. John’s Wort rather than on the hormones my body has produced naturally for decades–estrogen and progesterone–and give women who resort to the latter the sense that they have somehow failed to take proper control of their health? I’ve spoken to several friends who have started taking HRT. It’s not an openly talked about issue, which, lemme tell ya, is a damn shame, because there is a wealth of information in these stories. For one thing, the hormonal dosage and delivery method do require attention and, frequently, tweaking along the way. But every single woman I talked to has raved about the vast improvement to her quality of life taking hormones. Why not take them? Do some investigating, talk to your doctor, and take your life back. Feeling comfortable in your own skin is your birthright.

Oh, and please read Stacy Sims’ excellent book Next Level, which is a phenomenal primer on menopause and perimenopause physiology for active women, accompanied by superb action items and recommendations, or take her fantastic menopause online course. This is happening in your body right now. You’re living it. You’re not in the waiting room, holding out for something better. This is your one and only body, your one and only precious life. I’m rooting for you to improve it, to seize it by the horns. Kind of like Professor Presbury tried to do, but science-based and practical. Not on the sly, not in the shadows. In the open, so that we can all talk about this and make the best medical decisions for ourselves.

A few months ago I mentioned my new commitment to strength training, which has since taken shape with the help of my fantastic coach, Celeste St. Pierre. Celeste knows a lot about triathlons and about swimming, and, like me, she is a disciple of the excellent Stacy Sims. Sims’ work on perimenopausal and menopausal athletes emphasizes the importance of building muscle and bone at an age in which we start losing both very quickly, and offers no-nonsense advice on diet, supplements, and training, which focuses on shorter and more explosive workouts, including sprints, plyometrics, and lifting heavy. Celeste and I have been working on a weekly schedule that combines my love for endurance/cardio things with my newfound passion for lifting, so this is what my week looks like, fitness-wise:

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays: I lift, swim, and roll/stretch. On Mondays and Wednesdays I typically use the Berkeley facilities – their weight room is terrific and the Spieker Pool brings back grad school memories. If I really want a treat, I swim at the Golden Bear pool. On Fridays I lift at home and swim at Balboa Pool or at Garfield Pool and, if I have time, I take a yoga class at Yoga Flow.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: I do some form of strength (typically abs and a leg series that includes plyometrics and jump-rope) at home, followed by a sprint/interval run/walk.

On Saturday, which is my official recovery day, I take a pilates class at Synced Pilates with the fantastic Sue Free.

On Sunday I do something long – either a long run followed by boot camp in my neighborhood or a brick workout (swim followed by run.)

On all these days I also commute on my cargo e-bike, which adds some cardio to my day.

For more than half my week, several of my workouts happen at home, and over the years, with Chad’s help, I’ve constructed a fabulous little workout corner that has pretty much everything I need. I have a yoga wall, which I bought used during my days of teaching fitness at Elevate Group Fitness; I can use it with springs or with TRX straps, and I have a belt that allows me to go upside down and remember my Antigravity days (it’s also great for those of us with back afflictions.) I also have quite a collection of dumbbells, some of them adjustable, a little barbell that fits my space with some plates, and a foldable bench for bench pressing. The weighted balls are nice to use, as are a few kettlebells that I swing around when I do high-intensity interval work. I have some resistance bands around, which I also take with me if I’m at a hotel for a few days. Music is always an essential part of this routine.

I may outgrow the weights I have at some point, but I’m coming to realize that gaining muscle is a function of various different types of lifting: powerlifting heavy weights through compound lifts and burnout exercises with more moderate weights. I’m already seeing some success (newbie gains are so encouraging!) and plan to continue gain as much muscle as I can to combat perimenopause and its insidious effects on fitness. Honestly, I’m not sure whether workouts are becoming more ferocious or I’m getting older or both. But this approach of shorter, more intense and more varied workouts, combined with a lot of stretching, rolling, and recovery, is working quite well for me at this point, and it might fit those of you who are entering your forties, fifties, and beyond.

This week I started working at my new side hustle: I’m volunteering as a lifeguard at my local pool to acquire the requisite experience hours for a salaried lifeguard job with the city. I’m happy to report that I’m finding it just as exhilarating and rewarding as I expected.

Every job has discontents, and professional jobs are cushier than many other occupations, which makes whining about academia trite and tiresome. Still, the last few years have eroded much of what I enjoyed about my academic work environment, and finding myself in a new professional context was refreshing. I like the fact that people are measured and judged in a more straightforward, honest way on a job that involves a fitness/alertness component. I like the fact that the job is completely stripped of markers of prestige (I work alongside people of all ages, occupations, and walks of life.) But mostly, I’m immensely enjoying the service aspect of the job.

Lifeguarding offers a sublime combination of calm and focus. I sit by the water, which has always been my favorite place, and find a precious balance between the stillness of being of quiet service to people and the alertness to things that might happen before they happen. Empathy and perspective-taking are relevant to the job in surprising ways – most of the time one can prevent all kinds of calamities and crises not through heroic water rescues and CPR, but through anticipating what might happen, putting oneself in the place of a swimmer or exerciser, and preempting the problem by addressing their needs. The job offers varied avenues for service: lowering some of our senior swimmers to the water in a special chair, offering a toy to a kid, politely but efficiently moving people along lanes so that they are swimming with people at their speed, offering an aspiring triathlete a couple of pointers about their stroke. I’m really having a terrific time.