May 30

May 30 Trusting my body again

Something happened when I was at the gym yesterday. Something I realised I haven’t fully experienced for a what feels like an age.

For the first time in almost four years my body felt strong. Dependable enough that I could properly do the weights and leg work which, for a long while, I’ve been wary of.

It felt as if I’d turned a corner - physically and mentally.

Exercise has been a part of my life my whole life. I can’t remember a time, from my early teens onwards, when I haven’t been doing some kind of regular exercise. It started, as it does for so many of us, at school where my sportiness made up for my less-than-stellar academic performance. From 14 to 17 I swam competitively, culminating with representing Great Britain, which involved two training sessions a day and circuit training twice a week.

Once that gruelling regime came to an end, I broadened out into exercise of all kinds and over the many years since have done everything from running (which I have never enjoyed) and yoga (ditto) to zumba (lots of fun) and working with a personal trainer (brutal but effective) to pilates (which I’m a dedicated devotee of). I’ve strained and sweated, stretched and variously engaged every muscle in my body.

I have never not felt better after exercising, even, or even especially, when, my aching muscles are testament to how hard I’ve pushed myself. Exercise has been and is as important to my mental wellbeing as it has and is to my physical health. I can fully vouch for what a powerful mood enhancer the endorphin rush triggered by exercise is.

Through all the years of exercising, whilst I’ve had the odd injury, my body has been obligingly co-operative with whatever regime I’ve subjected it to. Up for most challenges albeit with the consistent proviso that I remain stubbornly un-bendy (I’ve never been able to touch my toes) and have a susceptible lower back that demands respectful consideration.

Then, in 2020 two things happened.

I turned 60 and there was - as you may recall - a worldwide pandemic.

The first seemed, at the time, to have little impact (I realise now it has been more significant that I thought) the second was, of course, monumentally impactful.

Like everyone, I took every opportunity get out of my house during the lockdowns and gradual re-mixing of people, and I walked as often and as far as I could. At home I faithfully followed Joe Wick’s daily workouts, and continued my pilates classes on-line. I felt I was maintaining my fitness as well as I possibly could.

But what started out as a niggle in my left ankle, and uncomfortable twinges in my hips and back, gradually increased until they started to give me varying degrees of pain that made everyday activities, like climbing the stairs, varying degrees of miserable.

Cutting a long story of investigation mercifully short, it was discovered I had - I believe courtesy of a pair of trainers that were past their best and not properly supportive - frayed a tendon in my ankle and that that, combined with my naturally horribly flat feet, had had far-from-ideal consequences pretty much all the way up my body. Turns out if your feet and ankles don’t work properly, pretty much nothing else does either, because your poor body is so busy twisting itself to compensate. Who knew?

I didn’t like it. At all

I realise now that my physical deterioration was also not being helped by what was going on in my head. I had always been able to rely on my body doing what I wanted it to. Now it wasn’t and I didn’t understand why. Or like it. At all. And all of this had happened since I turned 60, a fact which gradually and insidiously contrived to make me feel I wasn’t just getting older, I was getting old.

Although I’ve never been anything other than grateful for the chance to keep on ageing (ie living), I wasn’t prepared for how much the idea - and apparent associated physical weakening - of being old would bother me. My mind and body were working - or rather, not working - in apparently perfect tandem to make me feel vulnerable, unsteady and unsure of myself. Rather than being able to depend on my body, it felt weak and liable to give in or give me pain, much of the time.

My gym sessions became tentative rather than challenging. And my much loved pilates classes became a patchwork of working around the bits that weren’t working properly. I even struggled to walk without pain. It was miserable.

Back on the physical straight and narrow

I’ll save you the boring detail about the many different appointments and experts involved in getting me back on the physical straight and narrow (you’re welcome), other than to say the two stand-out stars of my very gradual recovery were an unexpectedly sexy podiatrist who made me custom orthotics whilst explaining in his fabulous French accent that the pain in my shoulder was coming from my foot (I was concentrating on what he was saying, honest), and the heroic physiotherapist who painstakingly, and quite literally, straightened me out over our year-long sessions, and who I still see periodically when I can feel anything’s not working right. “Oooh you’re complicated,” she said at my first appointment. “I LOVE complicated!”

It’s been a gradual and far from linear process of recovery. The ankle will always be a weak point - the consultant said he wouldn’t operate until the point I couldn’t walk on it at all, because the recovery time is so protracted (a year until it’s fully healed) - so I’ve worked hard to build up the strength in it and reset my flat-as-a-pancake arches. My hips and back still have a tolerance of not much more than 2 hours of walking at a stretch on a good day, and I’m tentative on extremely uneven surfaces (too much potential for twisting my ankle).

But at my body’s lowest point I couldn’t do a lunge at all, and now I’m lunging easily - forwards and backwards as well as side to side, with added weights. I couldn’t do arm weight work that involved rotating them too much and now they and my shoulders move freely. My hips and glutes, which had respectively contorted and contracted, limiting even my capacity to stretch, are mobile and working as they should. And the pain that meant I hobbled up stairs is gone, so I can once again climb them with ease.

Catching up mentally

It wasn’t until yesterday’s gym session though, that I realised that my mental recovery had caught up with my physical one. That I felt my mind could once again have faith in my body being able to - mostly - do what I want it to. And that when it can’t - which does and will happen - even when that can be put down to the entirely normal process of ageing, I can accept that with equanimity and compassion to this amazing body that has served me so well and carried me through so much.