Читать книгу Getting My Bounce Back - Carolee Belkin Walker - Страница 7

Introduction

I’ve experienced two significant failures in my life.

Okay, I know that sounds dramatic. Let’s just say I’ve made lots of mistakes over the years, but it’s the two failures in my fifties that I want to focus on here. When I was younger, messing up didn’t seem to sideline me. I was always back at it.

The first was in 2011, when I was fifty-three and I was on a detail assignment at the U.S. Department of State as a senior watch officer (SWO) in the Department’s Operations Center.

SWOs have full command over the Department’s official communications between principal officers and foreign government leaders. The workspace feels like a cockpit, but without the windows. SWOs flip a switch to activate a blue light when they need to step off the floor and use the bathroom. This is where SWOs live, sometimes for fourteen hours straight without a break. The shifts were one thing, but it often took two hours to read in and as long again to brief out. SWOs work overnight shifts, early morning shifts, and late afternoon shifts that end around midnight. I was tragically sleep-deprived and lacked the stamina to do the job.

I failed miserably and after two months curtailed from the assignment.

By the time I’d accepted the SWO assignment, which was prestigious, competitive, and critically important to the day-to-day workings of the U.S. government, I’d already enjoyed a full career, first as a public diplomacy writer and editor in the Bureau of Public Affairs, and later as a consular officer in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, assisting U.S. citizens overseas in emergencies. I was a coordinator on the Department’s fast-paced task forces, often working overnight shifts, and was a chief point of contact, available 24/7, for the families of the hikers who were arrested and detained in Iran from 2009 to 2011.

So not cutting it as a SWO was a blow to my confidence that I’ve never completely shaken off.

Who knows whether I would have made a great SWO if I’d been in better physical shape, but even though my bureau welcomed me back with open arms, and my colleagues at the Operations Center assured me that good people curtail from assignments all the time, I spent the next two years questioning my ability to accomplish anything whatsoever.

In truth, it wasn’t so much that I could not keep up physically that haunted me. It was my inability to bounce back. For me, the SWO problem had become all about the setback, and, in truth, it lingers.

My second failure was in September 2015, nearly a year and half after beginning my fitness journey, when I did not finish my first triathlon, the Bethany Beach Triathlon. I had made it through the ocean swim (nearly drowned) and finished the bike section (nearly got lost), but was disqualified before the run because of the race’s strict time limits.

I was devastated. I felt I had let everyone down who’d supported me and trained me. Earlier the previous day, as I was loading my bike onto my Honda CRV outside my house before driving to the beach, a FedEx driver stopped on my street and jumped out of his truck.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I replied as I turned to him.

“I got this.”

That afternoon, as I drove to the beach, I was filled with excitement and dread all at the same time—just as I had been the day I walked into the Operations Center.

Now, as I lifted the bike onto the rack on the back of the CRV as we got ready to head home from the beach, I wondered why I thought I could complete a triathlon.

I know.

Really?

Putting failing as an SWO and failing to finish a race in the same category of failure?

So, here’s the thing.

After a first-rate hamburger at the Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth and l e n g t h y conversations with my family about what I had done well during the race and what I needed to improve, within hours of emerging from that horrific ocean swim, I began the process of failing forward.

Of bouncing back.

Before turning in for bed that night, I wrote about what I had learned from the experience and submitted the piece to the Huffington Post Healthy Living editors for consideration. Earlier that month I had begun to publish my freelance wellness articles in the Washington Post, but I had followed Arianna Huffington’s journey and was a fan of the Huffington Post’s myriad and diverse contributors. By morning, as I was getting ready for work and turning my attention back to training for my first marathon in December 2015, I had received an invitation from the Huffington Post editors to join its team of wellness bloggers.

I sat at my kitchen island having coffee and closed my laptop.

“Wow,” I must have said aloud, because my dog jumped up.

I was the editor in chief of The Miscellany News at Vassar, and I had spent the first two decades of my professional life doing some form of writing and editing, always planning a career as a journalist. Yet when I joined Consular Affairs, wondering whether I’d ever have the competitive edge or grit to make it in journalism, I did not think twice about putting aside my writing to learn something new.

It wasn’t until March 2014 when I used my weight loss blog to hold myself accountable that I began to flex my writing muscles and discovered I had a passion for wellness subjects. If writing is about having something to say, here I was, after years away from a keyboard, with a lot on my mind.

Here’s what’s on my mind.

As I encounter challenges as I age and continually reinvent myself, I can’t afford to let setbacks take me down. For me, running is hard, but every time I do it, for any length of time and for any distance, I simply feel better about myself.

Learning how to push myself, how to find my edge, how to stumble and recover—this is my foundation for becoming ageless, for being resilient. For bouncing back.

I’m not suggesting we have to run a marathon or be a triathlete, but we do need to become grounded in a meaningful exercise habit in order for exercise to matter. Every time I run I push myself physically, but mostly it’s the mental effort that adds up. Each time, after each run, I am a little more empowered, a little more resilient. By discovering my edge, I’m in a better place to face the inevitable disappointments and obstacles with a comeback attitude.

Like I did when I was younger. When I was just a kid.

And not just after a run or a race.

In life.

***

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in my early forties before joining the State Department, without a whole lot of drama going on in my life, I put on more than twenty pounds. I had never before been overweight and did not see the weight gain coming. My doctor ordered tests, but she knew what I knew—that at some time in a woman’s forties, her metabolism changes.

“You’re gaining weight because you’re burning fewer calories than you’re consuming.”

Other words came to my mind.

Is this as good as it gets?

I was working as a freelance book editor, and since most of my clients were on the East Coast, I started my day at five in the morning but finished by two in the afternoon.

After the appointment with my doctor, I used my afternoons to rollerblade on a path overlooking San Francisco Bay in Foster City, met friends for hikes on Windy Hill or the Stanford Dish, and joined Weight Watchers. Within a few months I dropped more than twenty pounds.

We moved back to Washington, D.C., in 2005, when I started working at the Department of State as a writer and editor. I lost track of how long it took me to put that weight back on, but by the time my husband Bob and I were in London with a group of theatergoers from the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in February 2014, my mind-body connection was less than harmonious.

We were walking everywhere, seeing interesting shows with interesting people, and talking about theater.

But I felt like crap. I was huffing and puffing as I trudged through London’s streets in the rain, and I was exhausted nearly all day. I was irritable and easily annoyed by anything outside my control, especially the relentless rain.

Bob had already been living and working during the week in a suburb outside Philadelphia before we came back from the trip, so I made a commitment to myself to figure out my weight gain and my constant feeling of exhaustion. At that time, I didn’t acknowledge that I needed to establish a fitness habit. Back then I didn’t even know there was such a thing.

When I tell you how ridiculously unprepared I was as I began this journey, try to imagine that I was even less well informed. In a lucky turn of fate, I connected with a gifted personal trainer half my age who agreed to ride along with me as we navigated a path to health and well-being.

Like many personal trainers, Reuel Tizabi, who left personal training to pursue physical therapy studies full time after working with me for nearly eleven months, had been an athlete with childhood dreams of playing professional sports. In Reuel’s case, it was soccer.

Is this really happening? Reuel thought as the medics carried him off the soccer field on a stretcher after he suffered a tear to his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a common knee injury.

As Reuel told me his story, I didn’t say anything.I was listening to him talk while he was trying to distract me during a wall sit, but I was thinking, I’ve been there. Once you hit your fifties, you’ve probably been there too.

Is this really happening?

With Reuel at the helm at first, and then by my side as an unexpected friend, I started training in the gym in the winter of 2014 and took up running to burn calories. By now I’ve run ten half-marathons, and I finished my first marathon in Negril, Jamaica, in December 2015. And, yes, I completed my first triathlon on June 12, 2016, in Cape Henlopen, Delaware.

What began as a journey to weight loss and getting fit turned into a path to self-confidence and wellness that has had an enormously positive impact on every aspect of both my personal life and my professional life. I fall asleep at night grateful for each day and wake up each morning full of optimism and good will.

Although I was a gymnast and a competitive swimmer as a teenager growing up on Long Island, I never considered myself an athlete. Until Title IX, schools and coaches rarely provided athletic guidance and support to girls’ teams, and later, when I attempted to get fit, small injuries piled on top of each other like domino bones.

Yet even women who have been exercising for years face challenges when it comes to getting results. Often experts such as trainers and physicians enable us to take a comfortable approach to our fitness regimen because they do not take women seriously. Unless we had been athletes as kids or young adults, and few of us were, we do not know how to find our edge. Learning how to carve out time to meet our own fitness needs or how to “be the dog” and dig in, pushing ourselves physically and mentally, is one of the greatest challenges to aging well.

Since Day 1, I’ve continued to work with a series of first-rate personal trainers. And in another turn of fate, in the summer of 2015, when Dr. Katie Taraban Mahoney, my early physical therapist, left Washington to relocate to California, I met Dr. Kevin McGuinness, a sports medicine specialist at Washington Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Kevin has put me back together after multiple small injuries and setbacks, and he is often a collaborator in my wellness writing. Kevin has helped me to enjoy becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the science of exercise, especially how exercise relates to aging well.

Early in 2016, I was taking a group exercise class at the gym when the teacher began, as many teachers do, by asking what was bothering us.

“Does anyone have any issues?”

I was used to thinking about these questions, especially in yoga, because I’m forever devising ways to modify poses.

“Knee problems?”

“Raise your hand if you’ve got back issues!”

“Hips?”

I looked around the studio, and I was surrounded by a super-fit, ultra-fashionable group of women. Even so, there were a lot of hands in the air.

The instructor, Jennifer Blackburn, was wearing a Madonna-style wireless headset, and her voice dominated the room, even above Flo Rida’s “Low,” which I remember was playing because oddly, the song had popped up on my mix during my morning run. I instinctively touched my ears to see if I was somehow still wearing my wireless earbuds.

“This is the year you want to fix that.”

I have some ideas why it can take more than a sea change in a regular woman’s life for her to develop a serious exercise routine. Off the top of my head, raising children often plays havoc with any routine, let alone a healthy one. When my children were young, it was a good day if I shaved both legs in the same shower.

This is the year you want to fix that.

But another challenge is addressing all of our little issues that have a way of distracting us and diminishing our self-confidence or level of endurance. I remember early in my training in 2014, Katie stared me straight in the eye and told me my knee was FINE. I’m using caps because she was kind of yelling at me.

Two years earlier, an orthopedic surgeon had removed 70 percent of the meniscus around my left knee, and every time I got out of a deep chair (squat) or bent down to pick up the morning paper (lunge) since then, I felt that bone-on-bone sensation you read about.

“Your knee is fine,” Katie said, exasperated. “YOU’RE FINE.”

Katie showed me how to strengthen the muscles and tissues around my knee so I could exercise vigorously, including running. I still do these exercises, and finally in 2016, under Kevin’s guidance, I added actual squats and lunges to my regimen. Both of these exercises are fundamental for strengthening the glutes, which is at this point also critical to achieving nearly all of my fitness goals.

So here is what I want to say about getting in shape.

We can’t accomplish anything until we (1) address and fix our issues, and (2) establish a meaningful fitness habit.

Over the past three years, I have rarely had a clear sense of when I needed to deal with an issue or put it aside, so I know this isn’t easy or simple. If my shoulder was bothering me, I skipped the pool and focused on running or cycling. If my knee felt wonky, I stopped running and was back in the pool.

In our everyday lives, this kind of working around problems is a good thing. We’re creative and flexible and we’re efficient at getting things done any way we can.

But in terms of our health and well-being, we need to figure out why our knees hurt and fix them. Sure, we may still need to work around them and bike instead of run, but at least we’ll know what it is we need to do and make a plan.

Because exercise is not optional.

You don’t need me to tell you that becoming fit in middle age is critical to preventing or at least putting off some of the most common serious medical diseases as we age, including Alzheimer’s and dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many types of cancer. These stories pop into our social media newsfeeds nearly every day.

As women, we talk a lot about what we want. We want to lose weight. We want more energy. We want better jobs. We want tighter skin. What we should be talking about, in the words of legendary coach Dan John, is what we need to do to achieve any of this.

For me that means that on a regular basis I’m finding myself in a room with a sports medicine specialist, as well as a physical therapist who understands my need and desire to be active. I’m continuing to learn about strength training from my trainers and also from Kevin, because he has me addressing and fixing my issues one by one.

The idea is that the better we get at exercising by addressing and fixing our issues, the more we’ll hate it less and ultimately begin to take real pleasure in the activity.

I began my fitness journey in earnest in 2014, and as I look back it occurs to me that my greatest achievement then was what I needed most: to develop a serious fitness habit.

Developing a habit was not what I wanted.

What I wanted was results.

If Reuel had said, “Actually, your goal is to develop a fitness habit,” I’m sure I would have been outta there.

Yet this idea is backed up by numerous scientific studies that point out that in order for exercise to matter, it needs to be frequent, intense, and vigorous.

According to a December 31, 2015, Washington Post Op Ed, “The Five Myths of Our Habits,” it takes an average of sixty-six days to form a new habit. While some simple behaviors may only need to be repeated for a few weeks in order for you to continue doing them without thinking about it, some, like exercise, can take a year.

A year.

A freakin’ year.

The author, Wendy Wood, a University of Southern California psychologist, suggested that setting a routine (what you do to get ready or prepare) may be even more critical to forming a habit than repetition (exercising). Even now, I plan out my week, incorporating my exercise and nutrition into my work schedule, I set out my workout clothes before I go to sleep, and I am out the door to run or train by 5:15 a.m. I don’t think about it. It’s like brushing my teeth, which is what I do after drinking coffee, not before—another mindless ritual.

By this point, I may be obsessed with my fitness routine, but like my coffee addiction, I’m good with that, because the benefits are worth it. I take true pleasure in the moments in my day when I’m moving around.

The point is to get set in a fitness habit and schedule your workouts in the same way you factor in anything else you need to do every day. What’s important, according to Wood, is that whatever we do, it needs to become routine. If you can only exercise three mornings per week, establish a routine for this until it becomes a habit.

And here’s where establishing a fitness habit gets so challenging, and possibly why many of us are setting the same fitness goals year after year.

What if you don’t enjoy exercising? Or what if you are like me when I started and so out of shape that exercising is physically and mentally uncomfortable?

My niece Nina Lish, an architecture student in Philadelphia, told me about a podcast she heard on “Freakonomics” with Katherine Milkman called “When Willpower Isn’t Enough.” Milkman, who coined the phrase “temptation bundling,” suggests that if we can combine two activities—one you should do but tend to avoid, and one you love to do but that may not be entirely productive—we can have better success achieving our goals.

The example she gave is this one: Milkman hates to exercise and loves to watch television when she’s got other important things to do. She told herself she could only watch her favorite shows when she was at the gym, so after a few evenings, she found herself rushing to get to the gym.

“Or like having a beer while you fold the laundry,” Nina said.

“Was that an example in the podcast?” I asked.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, writes about this in her book Better Than Before. Like Milkman, Rubin, who doesn’t focus on exercise, makes the case for combining activities in order to form a habit. So genius, but not so different from gradually loading your child’s plate of beige foods with colorful, healthy items. We’ve all done that, right?

As I began to develop my exercise habit, without thinking about it and without seeing fast results, music became my incentive to work out. It occurred to me that as I had my children and worked outside the home, I never noticed how much music had fallen by the wayside. If you ask me what I most look forward to on a long run, I’d have to put listening to music high up in the plus column. Now I devote a chunk of time on a regular basis to catching up on new artists as I curate and build my music playlists for exercising as well as warming up and stretching.

“You have the music taste of a fifteen-year-old,” my State Department colleague and friend Steve Royster told me after he came across my blog and playlists and agreed to read an early draft of this manuscript.

Ha, I smiled. You have no idea.

It’s not just my taste in music, which by the way is closer to that of a thirty-year-old. It’s my brain, too. It’s as if by developing a meaningful exercise habit and discovering my edge, I’ve found a way to live all of my ages at once. Kind of like being fifteen—or thirty, but with the benefit of being fifty-something.

I’m good with that.

***

I was in New York City in July 2016 attending the opening of the New York Music Festival as my daughter, Mia Walker, and my son, Adin Walker, made their New York professional debut working together as director and choreographer, respectively. I asked the concierge in my midtown hotel if she could recommend a good place for my morning run. After she mapped out my route to the High Line, she put down her pen and sighed.

“I wish I could be a runner,” she said.

“You can,” I quickly responded.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re so fit.”

We talked for a few minutes about the importance of making time for ourselves, of starting out slowly and committing to walking a few blocks every day.

“Seriously, if I can do this, you can,” I said. I showed her my before-and-after photo, and she nodded.

“You got this,” I said.

And you can, too