“For we are like waves whose existence is motion.”
On Boxing Day, I was bucked off a very tall horse and suffered
a compression fracture of my T12 vertebrae. I knew as soon as I hit the ground,
a relatively minor bump, that something was just not right. My sprogling anxiously
asked “are you okay?” expecting the usual answer “I’m fine.” But I wasn’t. I lay
on the soft grass, looking up at the sky for a few minutes, then rolled
carefully onto my side and levered myself up. Pleased to discover that I could,
in fact, walk, I hobbled to the house, but back pain drove me to the couch,
where I texted my husband from a prone position, suggesting that he might want to
leave work early.
After a night in the Farmville Virginia emergency room (itself an
experience worthy of a long blog post), I was fitted with a back brace and sent
home. A follow-up visit confirmed the
diagnosis with the order to remain in the brace for 8 weeks and then “take it
easy.” When I asked the doctor if I could walk on my treadmill in the meantime,
he just gave me that look and said “no, I don’t recommend that.” Sigh.
I’m on week 7 of my enforced rest, and in that time I’ve
gained 5 pounds. I wasn’t exactly a world-class athlete, but I lead
a pretty active life, running a little hobby farm, taking care of 5 horses, and exercising regularly in the form of yoga, running, rowing, walking, and bicycling. Typically
after a few hours spent on inside activities, I’m stir-crazy and ready to go
cut fire wood, shovel manure, haul trash to the dump, or any of the other
hundreds of things that always need doing around a scruffy 36 acre rural property.
Now, when I can’t stand sitting at the computer or puttering around the house
trying to tidy things without bending, I just prowl restlessly from window to
window, looking out at meadow and garden.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that when I wake up in the
morning, my breasts are tender and heavy. I haven’t been wearing bras with my
back brace because that’s just too many layers and too much pressure on my
skin. I’m fairly small-chested so it’s not a big problem to forgo the support,
but these oddly puffy lumps on my chest are uncomfortable.
“Ah, perimenopause,” my friends reassure me.
Although I’m that age, I’ve never had any of the other symptoms generally
associated with the change of life. So, being me, I lie in bed at night (flat
on my back with a pillow under my knees, as recommended by my doctor), hugging
the heating pad that relaxes my angry back muscles, pushing
the very persistent cat off my chest and Googling.
Of course, what I find is contradictory or fluffy or hidden behind paywalls (where real science is archived as dense PDFs in subscription-based academic ivory towers). But, piecing together bad reporting, filtering out woo-woo bullshit, and applying my own experience of a lifetime in a female body, I stumble towards some insights about estrogen and testosterone. Aerobic exercise and weight loss are associated with lower estrogen levels in women, so it would make sense that a sudden lack of aerobic exercise and weight gain would increase estrogen levels as well. Estrogen is the stuff HRT for post-menopausal women is supposed to put back in you, and it’s known to help make your vagina all moist and receptive as well as to combat bone loss. It seems to make your breasts act weird too. But honest web sites admit that it seems to have no impact on “sexual desire.” Those who tout it as a cure for sexual dysfunction in older women are pretty much admitting so long as you can have sex without pain, it doesn’t matter if you actually want it. Women have testosterone too. And we have more of it if we do resistance exercise, weight-lifting, muscle-building stuff. Unlike estrogen, increased testosterone is known to increase sexual appetite.
Of course, if your estrogen is relatively low and your
testosterone is relatively high, you’re unlikely to conceive. But unless you’re
trying to get pregnant, you probably don’t care. However, to read the online
literature, you’d think that lower estrogen and higher testosterone is the
worst thing that could happen to a girl. But that hasn’t been my experience.
I’ll define “fit” for me as being near my ideal weight and
regularly doing both aerobic and resistance-type activities. When I’ve been at
my fittest was when I was in the Army or when I was in training for specific
events or goals and really putting a lot of time and effort into working out.
(I was aiming for a job as a fire-fighter once, but that’s a whole other story.)
Being made the way I am, which is kind of long and lean by nature, I don’t
build a lot of muscle bulk even when I’m lifting regularly, but I do get a
little more defined.
When I’m fit:
- My energy levels are naturally high. I’m goofy and exuberant. I wake up ready to go. Exercise energizes me further instead of exhausting me. I chase the dog. I skip to the mailbox. I turn a flip on the playscape at the park.
- I can do more stuff. Stack the hay, haul the manure, take the chain saw to the dead tree in the yard, build flower beds, carry the feed sacks, move the furniture. I feel capable and independent.
- I stress less. I can deal with the challenges of my day with more grace. I can let out my frustrations by pumping iron or I can sort through a confused tangle of feelings while I run, letting my thoughts flow as they will in a moving meditation.
- I eat better. The more I work out, the more my body tells me what it wants, and it wants healthy food. I won’t even crave the sweets or the chips or the extra beer.
- I sleep better. When I go to bed, my body is physically tired from my day’s workout and I relax easily.
- I glow. Lots of aerobic exercise brings blood and nutrients to my skin, which is more elastic and has good color.
- I feel sexier. Whether this is just the inevitable result of all of the above, or an additional hormonal benefit, I can’t be sure, but the effect is real.
If fitness feels so great, why are women in our society
actively discouraged from pursuing it? My years spent in rural, conservative
communities gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the cult of domesticity,
or the cult of the womanly woman, or the cult of traditional gender roles, or
whatever you want to call it. It’s very real and it very much discourages girls and women from athletic activities. Whether we’re told it’s man’s
work when we pitch in to help unload the lumber, or the teacher asks for boys
to volunteer for a physical task, or the local cops harass the jogging or
bicycling woman, or the girl is told that boys don’t like big muscles, or the
woman is criticized for wearing a tank top, or the other women in your yoga class complain that you’re too thin, there are a thousand micro- and
macro-aggressions designed to steal and shame our bodily joy. Is it any wonder
that obesity is far more prevalent in women? Is it any wonder that twice as
many women as men suffer from depression?
Every time I get online, I’m pummeled by images and ads of
women who look nothing like me. They are either bone thin waifs without any muscle
at all, or they are hyper-curvaceous cartoons of women with enormous hips and
eyelashes and cinched-down wasp waists. They droop weakly or they pose provocatively.
Even on LinkedIn, lawyers and engineers and consultants post selfies with lots
of makeup and cleavage and short skirts to draw attention to their assets. I
don’t see in any of it what I know, the self-assured power of a strong body,
needing no validation, needing nothing other than its own joyous animal energy.
Today I put on my galoshes and walked all the way to my
mailbox and back. It’s a little more than half a mile. That’s the furthest I’ve
walked since I broke my back. When my brace comes off, my self-prescribed
physical therapy will include daily walking and light weights, working back up
to what my body can be, rediscovering the pleasure of doing and breathing and
stretching, finding my own beauty not in cosmetics or clothes or the admiration
of others, but in pure sweaty motion.
