Let's Play Catch Up, Shall We?

I've been back to traveling lately and when I haven't been traveling, I've been noodling on some new ideas... mulling and chewing and finding myself coming full circle in a way that I hadn't anticipated. I've been somewhat quiet about it all as it has unfolded, but I think I am ready to put some of it out there now. So hang on, cause this is going to be long and messy.

I finished my Crossfit Foundations class. And.I.Loved.It. Yep. It brought me back to the energy I had lost in my training. It gave me a sense of re-invigoration. Between getting to work locally, joining the swim team and then Crossfit, I found myself regaining the love of being fit that I had lost over the course of injury and then the marathon. Truth was, I didn't really enjoy marathon training. I remember back to high school and having to read a book called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and hating it. I think I enjoyed the actual act about as much. I had wanted to run the Boston Marathon, and don't get me wrong, I loved it, but what I missed in all the training was the energy and the essence of what drew me into my adult onset athleticism in the first place. Camaraderie. Marathon training was long and lonely and without the variety I had fallen in love with when I was just a triathlete in the making.

So here came my chance to work local for a bit. And I joined the masters swim team and I took up Crossfit and little by little, with the variety of workouts and the camaraderie of people to do them with, I finally felt like my old self again. It was fun and before you knew it, I was off and running like a crazy person again.

In addition to all the training, I started to get excited about things like nutrition. Now if you know me in real life you know how far out and crazy this new interest really is. Sure I like to eat, but I'm the girl who baked cookies at 550 degrees because the 350 on the package wasn't written very clearly. I know nothing about food or cooking, struggle to taste salt and much like my sense of body awareness, existed in a very binary spectrum (this is yummy, this is yucky, this knee is fine, this knee is hurt). The idea that I would start to cultivate an interest in things like the effects of ghrelin and leptin on appetite regulation, insulin resistance and the endocrine system is a little... uh... way out there.

See, here's the thing. Crossfit for me was a little like yoga and a little like my injury recovery-- it was focused in something I knew nothing about-- the subtleties of bio-chemistry and kinasthetics. And you give me something I know very little about, and I am going to want to learn more and more and more. The thing that I love about Crossfit has been its obsessive focus on form. Each movement, each lift, each breath is specific. It's focused on efficiency within functional movement. It's about using your body in a dynamic way and then about optimizing that dynamism by perfecting the form. Sounds a little like yoga, right (at least yoga done right). Much like when I was in PT and much like in my yoga practice, again I was being pulled into strength through detail and it fueled my interest and energy towards getting stronger and better. Each class I would come home literally feeling exhausted and for the following 2 days I would feel tiny little muscles I had never felt before reminding me what I had done. I spent time doing pull-ups, push-ups, box jumps, squats, push presses and push jerks, dead lifts, medball cleans, kettlebell swings, thrusters, sumo dead-lift high-pulls and ring dips, just to name a few things. And through it, we talked about the nature of fitness, of health, of nutrition. Things started clicking.

Over the past few weeks I've been watching my body composition altering again. I've not only lost some weight, but I've been watching my body fat composition begin to drop in favor of more muscle (yes, I actually can measure this), my measurements begin to change (altho not uniformly... my left bicep has gotten bigger than my right) and new muscles begin to appear. In addition to the changes I am feeling inside, I am starting to see those changes outside too. If you've met me in person you've probably noticed the slight kyphosis I have in my back. It's slight and inherited (most of the clan has it), but it gets pointed out to me a lot by body workers. So much of my work in redeveloping my body has been focused around that-- restrengthening muscles in my shoulders, core, back and chest, to re-align as much of that as I can. Especially with weight-lifting, without very mindful attention to fixing that, my center of balance can be compromised, so each movement has had to be deliberate and attentive and I can begin to see some of the subtle improvements in my posture as well.

All this has got me thinking about something even bigger. I enjoy all of this stuff. I enjoy seeing the results of playing around with subtle movement, subtle bio-chemical changes, whether from diet or otherwise. I enjoy learning about occupying my body and my skin in a much more mindful way. I've talked with my mother a few times lately about just some of the changes in body awareness that I have cultivated and it occurs to me that the majority of people aren't really raised to be mindful of these kinds of things. We don't think about metabolic pathways, anabolic and catabolic reactions, movement efficiencies and the like. As a culture we are so far removed from ourselves that it feels like we are on auto-pilot and for many of us that's just the way life is. It's like being in the matrix. But something came along and made me unplug. So now here I am thinking about all of these things. I'm chewing on insulin resistance, on growth hormones, on tearing down and rebuilding muscle, on plyometrics and realizing I might have something here.

When Marisa first got started teaching yoga, I had talked to her about possibly working with survivors-- I knew well of domestic violence and rape survival from my work for many years in the field. One of the biggest challenges was working with people to re-inhabit their skin, to find the strength and the capacity to own their bodies again when someone had come along and taken that sense of ownership away. When I think of the extremes of that auto-pilot I was talking about, this is the most critical example in my head, but is by no means the only examples. To me, however, the need was and is real. Part of healing, if one ever truly heals from those kinds of traumas, is learning to reclaim yourself and to me body work, whether it is massage or yoga or training or whatever... can and should be a part of that process. But it's not something that would ever be easy. The emotions that get stored in muscle and in body tissue are palpable. The reclamation process can be overwhelmingly emotional and I think Marisa knew it wasn't an area she felt overly comfortable in. For me... well... I think I do. I've worked with survivors for years and while I had to give it up when I moved to NYC, its been something so important to me that I knew it would come back around-- I just wasn't sure in what way. And then it hit me.

I have a long way to go in my own fitness-- I have a lot to learn, a lot to adapt, a lot to strengthen and all of that. But as I am learning, my brain is starting to lean towards wanting to make this more and wanting to bring this back around to the work with survivors I had done before. So I am beginning to consider getting certified as both a trainer and a dietitian (yep... scary stuff for the girl baking cookies at 550.) and working that in to a part-time gig in addition to the work I already do and love. I'm not giving up the crazy traveling security consulting work cause I am damn good at it and I enjoy it... but I see this as something I can do on the side as a way of coming back around in the full circle I've always imagined making.

Anyway, its crazy and brewing and really where my brain is these days. It's fun to think about and over the next few weeks and months I am sure it will get some additional traction as I start to put some things in place and look into some programs I may want to consider.

On that note, this is long, so I need to wind it down, but I will leave you with a teaser for later this week. I got me a triathlon this coming weekend. I wasn't going to let 2 seasons slide without at least one tri. So now... look out... things are about to get a little bit crazy.