On Screwing Up, and Moving On

Self magazine’s segment called the “BS Meter” has been in the news lately, because of a tiny little paragraph that poked fun at a fitness trend: tutus for runners. Personally, I like the idea of running in a colorful tutu. It is fun, it draws attention to the wearer, it helps adults release their inner child, and can raise money for charity (the subject of Self’s mini-article was Monica Allen, 35, who makes tutus and donates some of the profits to Girls on the Run San Diego).

Self was apparently oblivious that the photo of Allen running the LA Marathon was taken while she was in the midst of chemotherapy treatment for a brain tumor.

Self had asked for a photo of the tutu trendsetter without informing her that they intended to mock her product.  Ms. Allen probably anticipated that the skirts would be treated with respect, and that the exposure would be good publicity.

As if publicly mocking anyone isn’t bad enough, it happened to be a young female entrepreneur, who has started a fitness trend that raises money for charity, and who is also facing a daunting and potentially fatal medical condition. It was just one paragraph, but it was impactful.

I recently heard the expression, “true beauty is the ability to see beauty in another.” I also believe this idea meshes well with Christian philosophy, that we should strive to support and love one another. (“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” John, 13:34, among many others)

It’s not always easy to do, and it’s something that I continually struggle with. But there were days in my youth, when I did not scruple to try. I remember a time, freshman year of high school, when I let my demon tongue get loose.

I had a friend named “Barb”, who lived down the street from me, and she was friends with a girl named “Suzy”. Suzy and I never got along, and I’m not sure why.  At some point, Suzy got the idea that I was chasing her boyfriend, which is ridiculous, because he was in our grade and therefore way too young to be interesting to me.

When I heard that she thought I was trying to steal her guy, I guess I was insulted by the idea that I would: a) try to break up an existing relationship, b) be attracted to a high school freshman, and c) want anything that Suzy had.

I wrote a three-page note to Barb, in which I let loose every mean-girl thought I’d ever had about Suzy, and her beau. I made fun of her hair: How does she get it that way? It’s like wings sticking out on the side! I laughed at her slim figure, her choice of clothing (I must admit, I had a very limited wardrobe at that time), her performance in school, her manner of speaking.

I intended the note only for Barb’s eyes. I wrote it in a moment of anger. But my wicked humor was spot-on that day. Barb read it in one of her classes, and laughed (at her best friend of several years) until the other kids asked what was so funny, and the note began to circulate.

People I didn’t even know came up to me and told me how hilarious it was. “You are so right about her hair! It is like wings!”

I felt triumphant. I was funny! And it was so easy. All I had to do was make fun of someone else.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I started to realize that the attack on Suzy was completely unfair. Although she had been gossiping about me and her boyfriend, the two of us were on completely different playing fields in the battle of mean. I had a vast resource of written words and mean-spirited humor: she just had a few catty spoken remarks that didn’t go past the few people she spoke to.

It may have taken me years before I realized that, even though I gained a few popularity points from my snarky letter, I had used my writing skill to put someone else down. Unfortunately, it was not the last time the mean girl escaped from my pen. It’s so easy to climb a few steps higher by stepping on someone else that we don’t always realize we’re doing it, or what the cost is to the people around us, to our relationships, and to the general atmosphere of a community.

I am sure that when a writer at Self scribbled out a few sentences about running in tutus, she thought she was being funny. When the editor read it and approved it, she probably thought the same thing. And many people that find the tutus tacky probably laughed at the piece. Then the tide turned.

Although I disagree with the article, I wouldn’t mount an anti-Self hate campaign because a series of people in the editorial chain screwed up. We all screw up. All the time. Life is a process of learning to recognize that you are screwing up, and when you do, not only to apologize, but to learn how to move forward and do a better job in the future.

The publisher of Self has already apologized and published a short interview with Allen. The magazine has decided to stop running the BS Meter feature. I sincerely hope that in the future the magazine, and those of us who were upset by the blurb, will make an effort to do a better job of using our powers for good—for building people up, for encouraging good ideas and positive characteristics, and just letting little things alone when we don’t particularly like them.

Sweet Potato Fries

A lot of excellent Lindy-friendly songs talk about food. Maybe this is why I like jazz so much—because I love food as much as I love to dance. The songs get stuck in my head, and then I have to go home and make the food. This week’s food song is “Sweet Potato Fries,” By Gordon Webster, off of their Live in Rochester CD.

Sweet Potato Fries
with Montreal Steak seasoning
and ketchup

We saw Gordon Webster perform at the International Lindy HopChampionships last year, and bought three of his CDs. I love almost every song on these CDs. There is so much excellent instrumentation, and they all just seem to beg for improv while dancing.

I have included the “Sweet Potato Fries” lyrics below, and you can give the band a listen here. After listening to this song, you may want to make your own sweet potato fries, which is an excellent idea, because they are very healthy if you make them yourself. Not so much if you buy them in a restaurant, deep fried and smothered in fat, and not as tasty if you buy the big frozen bag at the store.

Tips for making sweet potato fries:

Use one sweet potato per person. Scrub and peel the outside of the potato. Cut the potato in fry-sized strips. (Sweet potatoes are very hard, so use a large, heavy, sharp knife) Place the cut potatoes in a mixing bowl and drizzle olive oil or melted coconut oil over them. Add one of the following seasoning combinations (or improvise your own):

• Salt and pepper
• McCormick’s Montreal steak seasoning
• Crushed rosemary, salt & pepper
• Crushed mint and salt
• Cinnamon and pepper

Stir to combine. Pour the seasoned spuds in a shallow baking pan (like a jelly roll pan) and arrange so they are in  one flat layer. Bake in a 400-degree oven for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the taters are brown and crispy.

Serve hot, with ketchup.

Sweet Potato Fries

By Gordon Webster

Live in Rochester

When men come and dine, they get to feelin’ full just fine

The dining’s in the timing with my sweet potato fries

When men try my spuds, they claim the other gals are duds

Does wonders for the hunger, o my sweet potato fries

When they come and meet, looking for a treat, they get taters

You can take a seat, then you’re bound to eat

A dish that’s just delish if it’s for now or for later

Take your appetite, down to the table, grab a bite

You’ll never have no better than my sweet potato fries

Well, I ain’t got much to show, but I can peel ‘em fast or slow

My sweetie loves to eatie all my sweet potato fries

Don’t got time, don’t got money, but I got a dish to try

Cause I’m a yammy mammy with my sweet potato fries

I can hardly wait, looking for a date with my honey

He knows where to look, when he needs a cook

I’ll fix him up a dish and never charge him no money

Dinner is served tonight, come get your fill and feel just right

You’ll never have no better than my sweet potato fries

Get the salt, pepper too

That’s all the flavor that I’ll add for you

You’ll never have no better than my sweet potato fries

The build-up to a pull-up

I have spaghetti-arms. This is what a lifetime of dancing will do—you get really strong legs and little tiny toothpick arms. When I was in my early 30s, I couldn’t even do a single military press over my head with any weight. I had to just use the bar.

I’ve gotten better since I’ve been working out regularly. I work my biceps, triceps, shoulers and back on the TRX. I use my sandbells and resistance bands. I can actually lift things over my head now. But there is still one exercise I cannot do: the pull-up.

One of the difficult things about pull-ups is that you need to do them in order to get better at them. But if you can’t even do one, then you’re sort of stuck. It’s not really rewarding to say, “I did 20% of a pull-up on Monday, and 22% on Wednesday! I killed it!”

There are a few ways that fitness pros suggest you work up to a pullup. One is by doing lots of push-ups and lat pull-downs. But I can do scads of both of these exercises, and still no joy with the pull-up.

Modified pull-up with chair assist

Another suggestion is using a chair/stability ball and putting one toe on it to take some of the weight. If I use the chair method, I can do pull-ups like crazy, but only because my strong leg is overcompensating for my weak upper body, thereby defeating the purpose of the exercise. As you can see from this photo, in which I am hanging about mid-way through the pull-up motion, I am able to smile, which means I'm not really working all that hard (thank you, chair!)

At last, I devised a solution that worked pretty well for me. I use a rubber resistance band and loop the two handles around the ends of the bar. I put one foot in the band, and use the extra bit of resistance to assist me in the path of the motion.

Hallelujah. It worked. It is still an exhausting exercise and I can only do two sets of four (spaghetti arms), but this is still eight more quasi-pull-ups than I have ever been able to do in my life. 

Modified pull-up
with resistance band assist

The first few days I did this, it worked great. But then I made the mistake of putting both feet in the band. This worked for about five seconds, until I reached the top of the movement, and the resistance on the band slipped off behind my heels, smacking me first on the Achilles tendon and then firmly on the butt. (Maybe it would have helped if I wore shoes, but it's still a risk worth avoiding).

It was a little like getting paddled, which I guess is nice if you’re into that kind of thing, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. My Achilles tendon still hurt the next day, too.

I would also advise guys to either be very careful when using a single foot in the band, or just not to do it at all. Because the fourth day I tried the band-assisted pull-up method, it slipped off my single foot and smacked me in the crotch. For me, it was a bit of a shock, but for a guy, this is unthinkable.

So what would I advise? Lots of pushups. Lots of lat pull-downs. Then probably try the foot-assisted chair method for a while. If you do try the rubber tubing assistance method, be very careful when getting in and out of the band. And consider having a buddy take pictures of you during the exercise. From this little photo session, I learned that my right shoulder is working way harder than my left (oh, the evil left side!)

I would also suggest that you try these adaptive methods at home. As potentially painful as a sound ass-smacking with a resistaband may be in your bedroom, at least it avoids the total embarrassment of doing it in front of the 6am crowd at the gym. Even better, lot of gyms have pull-up towers on which there is some sort of ledge where you can rest a foot, or even an assisted pull-up weight machine that is designed specifically to help you offset some of your body weight with the machine’s weight stack.

Whatever method you choose, you should at least try to do some pull-ups. Not only are they an amazing total-body workout, but if you ever find yourself dangling from a helicopter skid (which happens like, every day in the movies), then you will have a better chance of pulling yourself to a safer position and living to fight off all the zombies.

Massage Therapy 2: Massage and Writing

I am not a big talker. I prefer listening to people and thinking. I usually express myself best through dance and writing. I always have a hard time putting words together verbally, especially with people I don’t know very well. I get shy and awkward. I’m not an assertive conversationalist, so if other people are talking, I don’t fight to make myself heard.

A massage therapy session takes this verbal communication challenge to a whole new level. In addition to being quiet by nature, I am now face-down on a table, deprived of the use of facial expressions, and without the use of my hands to as a visual aid.

One of the main points of massage therapy is to help you chill out, so one of the first effects I usually experience is the unplugging of my higher brain functions. I have noticed that after about three or four minutes, answering basic questions like, “how did you hurt your shoulder?” require an enormous amount of effort. It’s a little like trying to have a conversation when you are mostly asleep: words come out, but they don’t always join together well and they rarely make sense.

While I am enjoying my hour of massage time, ideas swirl around in disconnected ways inside my head. I don’t say a whole lot, but I think a great deal. While I am there, these thoughts are unformed little baby concepts twirling like a sleepy tornado inside my head.

I can’t say I leave the session with a single idea in my brain. In fact, when I go to pay, I often have a hard time with the simple mental math of tip calculation, and I frequently have to ask the receptionist to do if for me. But in the days that follow, interesting things happen. When I have quiet time, like when I am out on a run, or waiting for my kids in the carpool line, those fragments of swirling ideas start to float back into my head one at a time. At this point, my brain is working again, and I can start to pull these ideas apart like cotton, and begin to weave them into a single thread, or two, or three.

During this phase, I find it really helpful to talk to myself. I like to do this when I’m driving my car, because no one else has to listen to me. As opposed to the massage therapy session, where I fail to assemble words in a coherent order, I am Winston Churchill when driving alone in my car. Baby ideas become stories as I drive around Virginia setting and retrieving radon machines.

At that point, all I need is time: just an hour or two a day of quiet time to get the thoughts down on paper before they evaporate.

The past three months in which I have been consistently doing massage therapy have been some of the most productive of my life, and I am full of gratitude for all the benefits this experience has provided. It’s like the unplugging of a drain. The challenge now is finding enough time in the day to capture ideas before they evaporate into the air.

Massage therapy: Be a repeater

I had the extreme pleasure of enjoying my first massage about 12 years ago.  Since then, massage has mostly been a sporadic gift to myself that I might use to celebrate a special milestone, or to help myself recover after a very stressful time.

I took a different approach at the beginning of this year: I began scheduling massage therapy sessions every other week, for a couple of reasons. I have a chronic neck and shoulder problem that has been bothering me since I was about 14 years old. I had become accustomed to a constant, low level of pain in my right shoulder and neck. Sometimes the shoulder would flare up so badly that I could actually hear the muscles in my neck squeaking when I turned my head.

I also had a pretty severe back spasm around New Year’s. That was the third time this particular muscle group had acted up on me. It wasn’t the worst episode: the first time, it affected me for about six weeks, even affecting my ability to work. This most recent time wasn’t nearly as bad, but it made me realize that I was turning into a five-foot-five stress ball.

I exercise a lot, but I also spend a lot of time writing on my laptop with generally poor posture. I juggle a few different jobs. I have three kids, a dog, a cat and a husband. I am a perfectionist. I have a low tolerance for disorder. I feel a compulsion to please everyone else around me. In other words, I am very susceptible to stress.

It was the low-back flare-up and my neck that brought me in for massage therapy at the beginning of this year. And although I had done massage before, I never particularly cared which therapist I saw, or where. But in this particular case, I happened to get matched up with a therapist who had a background in fitness and personal training, and was very skilled at interpreting the root causes of the muscle problems I was having. As with a hair stylist, dentist, doctor or manicurist, feeling comfortable with your massage therapist and respecting their level of expertise enhances the experience and makes you want to come back.

For the first time, I started working with the same person regularly, which produced many surprising benefits. For one thing, I began to feel safe and comfortable. Without having to worry about what they were going to do next, I could relax and allow my brain to unplug for a while.

The therapist also got familiar with some of my problem areas, and was able to quickly hone in on trouble spots. For example, we discovered that my piriformis muscle is a huge trouble-maker in my low back, and that my lack of upper-body strength was contributing to my neck and shoulder problems. Armed with that knowledge, the therapist suggested a series of exercises and stretches to help strengthen the weak spots and counteract the tight ones. I am working on those, but this is not a quick fix. It took several decades of postural mistakes to cause these problems, and they won’t go away overnight.

I have been working with the same therapist for about three months now. For the first time in recent memory, my right shoulder feels generally pain-free. It still flares up from time to time, but I haven’t heard the muscles squeak for many weeks.

We had a couple of memorable breakthroughs, like the day my right shoulder finally released and it seemed like a thousand pounds of pressure dropped out of my jaw. I have always been a tooth-grinder, but I never knew before that day that my tooth-grinding was connected to my shoulder pain. Once the shoulder released, the tooth-grinding decreased. It’s been about a month since I woke myself up with the sound of my upper and lower jaws compressing together so tightly that you could mistake them for a glacier moving across land.

We’ve done some excellent work on the right pirifomis as well, and although it is still a bit of a nag, I cannot remember ever feeling so good in my running stride as I do right now. I feel like a child when I run—both legs feel loose and light. I have a longer stride, and it is rare for me to feel the stinging burn in my hip and hamstring that used to be normal after a mile or two.

All the physical benefits are wonderful, and well worth the investment of time and money, but the psychological benefits are something else entirely, and the subject of another blog.

Resources 

This blog has been about my personal experience with massage therapy, but if you are interested in reading more general information about massage benefits, check out the following resources:

North American Journal of Sports Physical Therapy: NAJSPT

The Sports Physical Therapy Section of the American Physical Therapy Association

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2953308/

The Mayo Clinic. Massage: Get in touch with its many benefits

http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/stress-management/in-depth/massage/art-20045743

USA Today, The Benefits of Massage Therapy

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/weekend/health/doctors/2013/12/20/benefits-of-massage-therapy/4137819/