Workout Recap 6-27-10

Distance: 1.85 miles
Warmup: 5 minutes brisk walk
Running Time: 25 minutes
Cool down: 5 minutes brisk walk
Water breaks: 1
Most Valuable Song: Teeth - Lady GaGa (seriously, I felt like such a badass powerful rocker-god that I may or may not have bared my teeth at the world and picked up the pace a bit)

Today was a personal record for me! I ran the first mile of my workout in 12 minutes!!!!

This is a big achievement for me, and I almost didn't record it here at all. Why not? Well because one of my misguided assumptions about health is that healthy people can run a mile in at least ten minutes. You can trace this back to my sophomore year of highschool, when my gym teacher told the class that we were going to have a practical test in two weeks. We were going to run the mile, and if girls ran the mile in less than ten minutes we would get an A. Between 10-11 was a B, 11-12 a C, and 12-13 a D. Any slower than 13 minutes, and you would fail the test. Being the overachiever that I was at 16, I began crying as soon as she showed us the rubric. I knew that there was no way on earth I would be able to get anything better than a D, and I would have to bust my ass to do that. My teacher then decided to rub salt in the wounds and told me that if I had been really trying in gym class and working out at home that I would be able to get an A almost without effort. It was really my fault for not trying hard enough/being lazy.

As an adult, I can realize that this was total and utter bullshit. No one can train enough to shave minutes off of their mile time in 2 weeks, and if I were going to be training to run a mile at my best speed it wouldn't be through 45 minutes of dodge ball twice a week with my classmates. I was set up to fail. I tried to call in sick on test day, but my parents saw through me and made me go in to school. I ran as hard as I could, and I missed a D by 30 seconds. I failed. I walked off the track and straight back into the locker room without even asking for my time, because I knew it was bad. I cried, I threw up, and went to my next class.

So because my asshole gym teacher set the rubric in 10th grade that anything over 10 minutes is not your best work I should feel ashamed of where I am now? HELL NO. I ran a 12 minute mile, which is my best time since my exciting 10:53 in my sophomore year of college. I am proud of my 12 minute mile, because it is so much faster than last week, and the week before. My body is capable of more, but only with adequate training and work over time. I am also retroactively proud for my 13, 14, 15 minute miles, and my first run 8 weeks ago when I ran and walked for 20 minutes, and didn't quite hit a full mile. While I am at it, I am retroactively proud for my D mile in gym class in the 10th grade. It was pretty fucking fast for someone who had recently been prohibited from exercise.

In conclusion: be proud of your best whatever that may be. Fuck your gym teacher, fuck the magazines at the grocery store checkout line, fuck your coworkers, fuck the blogosphere, fuck television, and most importantly fuck the patriarchy. Fuck the whole damn world for not understanding that you've worked hard to be where you are, and that everyone is facing a different journey. I am proud of you for whatever you've done lately that was your best. Nice to an annoying coworker? AWESOME WORK. Went to the grocery store when you felt super panicked and nervous? A+++++ Ran a marathon? YAYYYY. Whatever you do now that you couldn't do before is an achievement to be celebrated. Fuck the haters, except when that hater is you. Then blog about it until you are suitably pleased with your achievements.

Different opinions are different SURPRISE

This is how far I am going to run next year. Exciting, no?

I was surfing around on the LA Marathon website and looking at training tips and I was pleasantly surprised by this:

"It may come as a surprise to the new runner to discover that there are
numerous training techniques, and even among coaches there is no clear
consensus as to which is the best one to follow." - LA Roadrunners Running and Training Terms and Methods

Why was I surprised? Why are so many new runners surprised? In our culture, we discuss fitness and health in weight related terms and in those terms there is no room for debate. Fat is unhealthy and thin is healthy. Take a look at a women's health magazine's website and count the number of articles about weight loss if you doubt me. Isn't this magazine supposed to be about health? Even if you assume that weight and health are connected (I don't and neither does Dr. Gaesser among others) aren't there conceivably some healthy women out there who are at the "correct" weight and would still like tips on healthy living?

I guess that is why the "health" section of the magazine is helpfully separated from the "weight loss" section. That is where I can find helpful articles like "Are you destined to inherit your mom's body shape?"

"Mom's overweight and you're hoping not to be? Find out how much control you have over your genes"

In this article you can helpfully read about how no matter how hard you work to lose weight and stay thin, you might be doomed to be a big failing fatty. I guess that is why you need to always be vigilant about losing weight. What is it that you call it when you spend all of your time thinking about food and how to lose weight? I feel like there is a word for the overwhelming fear that you will gain weight if you don't diet constantly. Hmmm...

Fortunately even though your genes likely determine your size, they DON'T determine your health. A study on sedentary harvard alumni showed that taking up an active lifestyle decreased mortality EVEN WHEN NO WEIGHT WAS LOST. To quote my buddy Dr. Gaesser "Because alums who lost weight were no better off healthwise than those who did not lose weight, the reduction in all-cause death rate observed in the more physically active men was in no way attributable to slimming down."

So doctor's disagree about whether or not losing weight will improve general health. The good news is that they DO agree that increasing physical activity does make you healthier. So the moral of the story is that we should all stop feeling guilty, start treating ourselves and others with respect and love regardless of body size and type, and start enjoying a wide realm of physical activities. Go for a walk, go dancing, go jogging, ride your bike to work, make love, clean your house, whatever. Stop fighting an unwinnable war against your size, and start using your body for what it was meant for: living.

The Menville Test

Last week I had an extremely pleasant conversation with a co-worker about running. When I tell people that I am planning on running the L.A. marathon next year I get two responses:

1) OH GOD THAT WILL BE SO HARD YOU WILL WANT TO DIE
2) You know, running is a GREAT way to LOSE WEIGHT which you obviously want because who doesn't?
3) Oh god, that will be hard, but at least you will lose weight and get in shape!

This is hard for me because I do not want to lose weight. I do want to be active and healthy, and I do want to be a badass who can run 26 miles and change in one day. When I explain this to people I get an enormous amount of what my grandma would have called guff. I've had to argue with people I talk to about whether or not I want to lose weight. Not even whether or not losing weight is a worthy goal, or would make me healthy, or would make me happy, whether or not I, Mary Menville, would like to lose weight. While I feel very strongly that losing weight does not improve cardio-vascular fitness and that men and women of all different sizes are human beings who deserve to be treated well I recognize that there are a number of opinions on these issues. There is however, only one opinion on whether or not I want to lose weight. I do not. The End.

This is what made my conversation with a fellow runner at work so lovely. We talked about the runner's high, the extra time to think, and what music we choose to jam out to. He told me that running a marathon felt amazing, and that while you do sometimes feel like you had been hit by a truck you also feel like a freaking super hero. Not once did my new friend mention how much weight he had lost, or how much weight I could lose, or how many calories you could burn up so that you wouldn't feel wracked with guilt for eating food.

I remember feeling so wonderful after this conversation, and so encouraged and happy. Then I realized that this was the first conversation I had about exercise that did not mention weight loss since I was a child. I'm going to say that one more time, in all caps: THIS WAS THE FIRST NON-WEIGHTLOSS RELATED CONVERSATION ABOUT EXERCISE SINCE I WAS A CHILD. And by child, I mean somewhere between 7 and 9 because lord knows all the girls wanted to lose weight in 5th grade.

I propose a test, similar to the Bechdel Test and because this is my blog, I want to call it the Menville test. To pass the Menville test a person or persons must discuss exercise for at least five minutes or 500 words in print without mentioning weight loss. Bonus points if one or more of the participants in the dialogue are non-male identified.

How many of your exercise conversations pass the Menville test? How many of your health and fitness blogs/magazines/books pass the Menville test? Why is it so hard to find a fitness blog or magazine that doesn't discuss weight loss?

The way it could be

Today I went for a really long hike with a friend of mine. We talked about what we referred to as our "come to Jesus" moments, where, when, and how we discovered feminism. We shared, we sweated, we hiked ever closer to the top of the mountain. It wasn't all serious talk, we spent a few minutes talking about the kind of dogs we loved and our favorite places to eat out.

What is notable about our conversation, is how notable it is. Part of why I started this blog was because it seemed that everywhere I turned for support in living an active lifestyle, all I got was a big dose of fat-shaming articles on how I should really participate in a "cleanse" to get all the dirty dirty toxins (and FOOD!) out of my body. I don't want diet tips, I want a hiking buddy. I don't want to discuss my weight, I want to check out the teeny tiny lizards that crawl all over SoCal and still seem strange to little old midwestern me. See? Isn't that much more interesting than a discussion of how I would be a happier, safer, more accessible, friendlier, lovelier, sexier, smarter, healthier version of myself if I dropped 50 pounds? Yes. Yes it is.

Healthy does not equal thin, and exercise does not equal weight loss, and I don't care how many calories I burned just now

Here is the US Olympic Softball team after their gold medal win in Athens. These were my idols growing up. I played softball, and I played hard. I was in the best shape of my life. I was also 170 pounds, and 5'5", which according to every chart on the internet and in teen magazines made me obese. About one quarter of my softball team fell into that category, and another half were "overweight" and the remaining quarter were "normal".

I wanted so badly to be "normal". I tried every diet I could think of. I added more and more workouts to my schedule, and I ate less and less. I wasn't the only one either. These wonderful, athletic, smart, beautiful women were convinced that it didn't matter if they could hit a ball out of the park, or leap feet in the air to catch a fly ball, or play 5+ 90 minute games in one tournament day. None of this mattered because they weren't thin. They weren't in good enough shape.

I was one of the lucky ones. After a few tumultuous adolescent years of shame and unhealthy body image and restrictive eating I bounced back. At my smallest weight I suffered from a damaged stomach lining, and a compromised immune system which made what would have been a regular teenaged bout with mono into a 6 month ordeal that compromised my health and athletic career. I realized then that there was something massively wrong with a world that made me feel like this, something terribly horribly wrong. How could it be that when I was healthy and active and happy I was obese, but when I fit into all the pretty prom dresses and everyone complemented me I was miserable and ill?

That, my friends, was the moment when I became a feminist. I realized that the way my teammates and I were treated was fucking bullshit. I was lucky. Through some combination of a supportive (and feminist!) family, coaches who realized bullshit when they saw it, and a lack of any genetic predisposition to develop long term disordered eating I made it out alive. I took a break from exercise, and sports, and spent the last couple of years of my high school career going to concerts, kissing people, and watching every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I got into sports again in college, and worked with the rowing crew in some of the most intense workouts I've ever done. I still never weighed less than 170, although I could sure run the pants off of just about anyone. After I dropped out of college, I quit exercising regularly. I was busy working 70-90 hours a week, and was so tired after a days work that I didn't have the energy.

So now here I am. 23 years old, and living in the City of Angels and I have decided to take up a new sport, get in crazy awesome shape, and not give a flying fuck about losing weight, counting or burning calories, or what my dress size is. I'm currently in week four of my running plan, and by March of 2011, I hope to compete in the Los Angeles marathon. In this blog you can learn about my training, how I keep myself real about food and body image issues, and my feminist dissections of sports culture. It isn't easy, and it takes effort, but I am a feminist on the run and I am miles ahead of the patriarchy.