Gender in the Gym

This is totally inspired by Babyeater Lifts recent post.  While I don't want to get into a big argument or diatribe about what it's like to be a woman who lifts in a university gym, I can certainly share my experience.

I first tried lifting late in my undergraduate years.  There was a lab I worked in and for whatever reasons I can't recall now, I made plans to meet my labmate at the gym early one morning.  He was going to teach me how to work out, as all I ever did prior was a lot of cycling.  He never showed, but the attendant taught me a bunch of stuff, likely to stave off boredom, but it was enough to get me interested.  I started to go more regularly.  I can't really remember what I did early on, probably just played with machines a lot.  Eventually I ran into a guy at the gym that I knew by sight and slightly intersecting social circles, and he started chatting with me.  This led first to a pleasant friendship and workout partnership.  Then his occasionally amusing compliments grew more and more lascivious in nature.  I was young and stupid and not very assertive, so instead of telling the guy off, I just stopped going to the gym.

A lot of years have passed between that time and my walking back into a weight room this past summer.  I'm older, proudly bitchier, and I grew more spine.  I studied a lot of online videos so I'd have a clue what I was doing when I went into the weight room, and the place in the summer is conveniently underpopulated, so I never really had to fight for space or equipment.  I've lived a number of years where I stood out visually; by virtue of hair, clothes, jewelery, and ink.  As a result I've become very able to just ignore people's reactions to me in shared space.  It means I'll never notice some hottie giving me an invitation to say hello, but it also means that I can tune out some guy giving me stink-eye for bringing a pair of ovaries into "his" gym.  Being a climber also helps, as the demographic of that community still skews to the 20-something male (although admittedly it's been changing rapidly since I first harnessed up), so the social group I find in a university weight room is familiar.

There are times that I am acutely aware of how I stand out in the weight room.  When it's crowded it's always a total bitch to fight for equipment, and I can't help wonder if men waiting for a rack are given the same sort of impatience that I receive.  Sometimes the gender imbalance is to my favour, however, as being viewed as weak, I am never asked to spot.  I also know that I've made at least one friend because he was inspired to talk to me after enjoying watching me do squats.  Certainly when I first started climbing at a naval base gym, I never had to wait long for a belay.

I guess overall, there were times when my being female was something that caused problems in the gym, in that I was uncomfortable being watched and objectified.  Since then I've become a lot more thick-skinned and eager to assert my right to place.  My gender has become less of an issue to myself as I've gained self-confidence and a feminist "fuck you" attitude.  As to how the boys in the weight room deal with it, I couldn't give a rat's ass.

Things I Thought Of At the Gym Yesterday

I hate it when the semester is fresh starting so all the kids are back and have nothing better to do than create crowds at the gym.

Waiting for a squat rack is a big pile of bull shit.

Boys become whiney little bitches when you chase them out of a squat rack for doing deadlifts.

Many boys seems unwilling or unable to squat fully; they just sort of crouch down a bit.

Lacking Context

The other day I went to my climbing gym.  It was a day that I wasn't there to meet anyone in particular, I just went to boulder on a night when it was likely some of the climbing friends I made would be there.  I climbed.  I was having fun, although not climbing particularly well, and being that the group of people I liked had conglomerated around one wall, I joined them and worked on a problem there that some others were playing on.  

There was this other woman there (I'll call her Condi) who had not been to that particular gym before, although she was clearly an experienced climber.  She was with a couple I had definitely seen in the gym a number of ties, but hadn't previously socialised with.  This triad eventually moved to the wall I was playing on with my friends, and Condi did the problem I was playing on after a number of tries and was playing on something else.  One of my friends got the problem and she was really excited about it.  I was close, but there was something in the last couple of moves that I wasn't figuring out.  My group eventually cleared out, but I gave the problem a few more tries, changing up what I was doing at the end, looking for the way that would work for me.  Condi had a lot of opinions and suggestions which she shared freely. 

Climbers refer to information on a climb as "beta".  My opinion about beta is that one should be open to sharing it, like they would chalk (oddly some people don't share chalk, either).  One has to be careful, and not shove a lot of beta at a person who wants to figure out a climb on their own, or worse, someone who's not really had a chance to try the climb yet.  I have always tried really hard to ask someone new to me if they want beta, or waited until they asked for some, before I've given it.  In the case of this problem, I wasn't figuring out the ending sequence, so at first I really didn't mind the beta Condi was tossing. 

It got a little annoying, however, when she started to say shit like, "Sometimes you've just got to feel the way your body wants to move and go with it."  This is not necessarily bad or wrong advice (despite sounding stupidly flakey), but it's stuff than at experienced climber already knows.  It's like reminding an adult to wash their hands after going to the washroom.  Condi moved on in a comparable vein saying things that I'm sure she thought were kind and encouraging, like "We all have bad days, I'm sure you'll get it next time." and "The numbers don't really mean anything."  I kept my mouth shut, but it really started to piss me off.  Because I've been climbing for years and used to be pretty good at it, all the crap she was coming up with just came out as bloody condescending.  

I ended up making a point of talking to Condi about having broken my ankle last year and having a bunch of health issues this year.  This stuff is none of her damn business, and I hate making excuses, but I really wanted to get it into her skull that she was making assumptions about me that were completely off base.  I wanted to try to open her mind to the notion that maybe not everyone who is climbing poorly is new.

The whole thing, however, has left me with a nagging unease.  Have I done anything like this?  Have I tried to talk up someone I didn't know and inadvertently insulted them?  Have I treated someone like they didn't know what they were doing when they had some invisible disability that was hampering them?  I feel like I need to look a little more closely at myself and my own motivations for opening my mouth.  In the case of Condi, I really can't be certain if she was genuinely trying to make me feel better, or if she was trying to prop herself up as the cool and welcoming expert to the bumbling ingénue she took me for.

When I first began to climb, I was welcomed and helped so much by the climbing community that was in place at the time.  I knew people who gave me excellent coaching when I needed it, and genuinely encouragement.  I met folks who could be as thrilled by a beginner's victory over a V1 as they could by a strongman's completion of a V9.  These people helped me and shaped me and gave me something that has changed my life for the better.  I would rather be one of those people than someone who judges without information and ends up belittling.  I will be trying hard in the future to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.

new year?

I've not been a fan of New Year's crap for awhile.  Part of it is that it's an arbitrary system: there's nothing special about January 1 (on the Gregorian calendar), such that life will magically change up on its passing.  The other part is as I mentioned before: resolutions are about as arbitrary as the day and typically occur under duress.

I wish that this year flipping over could usher a change for me.  While there are things from the twelve months past that I am glad of, there's also been a ridiculous amount of frustration and setbacks.  I would like to pretend that there's a clean slate for me to write upon, as opposed to something scratched and pock-marked from prior abuse.  The idealistic notion of "living in the moment" is a great thought, but can only ever remain a notion.  Realistically, my past has an impact upon my present, and likewise my concerns for the future may dictate my actions now.

While I might try to slough off the mistakes I've made and the opportunities I've lost, I'm still carrying the luggage from them;  sometimes in literal weight (like my jiggling belly), but even more burdensome is the loss of trust and faith in myself to do better than I have before.

I can't promise that the bullshit of life won't stop me from getting to the gym or eating well or sleeping enough.  Quite the contrary, I know that it will.  I can only hope that the bullshit and setbacks and failures are temporary, and that somewhere I'll find the will to keep on trying and pushing and doing better.

Failing that, there's the next New Year's celebration in about 40 days.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzz

I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions.  It's because they so typically (in my hands, at least) are "inspired" by a calendar schedule and thus often rushed notions without any particular plan of execution.  A recipe which essentially dooms the resolution to failure within very short order.  I always felt like the beginning of September was a better time for resolutions, which I'd guess is notion shared by most people who were schooled outside the home.  New school year, new classes, new notebooks and pens, and if not a new attitude, at least a refreshment of the old.

That all being said, I also find that as much as part of me resists the beginning of a year as a time for change, the late December holidays invariably disrupt normal life and routines to an extent that it's difficult not to align the termination of the holiday season that comes with January 1st with the attempt to resume or initiate good habits and better routines.

This year brought a total disruption to my normal mode of living and working.  First a time course, then a ridiculously heavy work week (still trying to squeeze some useful information out of that experiment, incidentally), then... what?  disruption of normal climbing and lifting days thanks to gym closures, fatigue, inclement weather, pet-sitting, and now a cold.  I'm frustrated, but too tired to really give a crap.  I keep telling myself that I'm going to clean up my life and get back on schedule and I'll do something like go to the climbing gym, but of course absence begets weakness, which begets frustration and kills motivation, which begets absence.  So I tell myself that still the holidays are disrupting everything and maybe once this is all over I can get back on schedule.  We'll see how next week looks, yeah?

One thing that I am determined to do is to get more sleep.  I was running through all the crap that one should do to get a little leaner and a little stronger and trying to figure out where I was failing.  Diet: not stunning, but pretty decent: no processed food, fairly low on carbs, almost completely free of blood glucose spiking carbs, not ridiculous amounts of calories...  I should probably increase the vegetable content, and maybe double-check the fat.  Exercise, again not very impressive lately, but not horrendous:  need to be more consistent, maybe get some cardio in there (or stab myself in the eye because that's almost as fun), push myself a little harder, especially when climbing.  Sleep.... oh.  whoops.

I used to typically get 6 hours a night.  It never felt like enough, but I was totally functional on it.  Then I started to get treatment for the Graves disease and while I still was getting 6 hours or so a night, it felt hellish, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get up and get going in the morning.  I was starting to sleep through alarms.  More recently, I might be getting somewhere around 7 hours on an average weeknight these days, but that drops precipitously on the weekends where I feel like I can stay up later because I can sleep in, but then I completely fail to sleep in.  It's still a struggle to get up and get going the morning.  I'm always tired, but that's not really different than any other phase of my life since I stopped being a slack-assed teenager.  We all know that getting insufficient sleep increased stress and cortisol and all sorts of other nasty things, so I'm not going to explain it all and link to good articles (although feel free to share some of your favourites, if they're from or informed by solid peer-reviewed research).  Suffice it to say that sleep is an obvious weak link for me and a little effort is probably going to go a lot further than my weighing my morning yogurt.

So.  I'm going to try to get more sleep.  No more late-night web surfing or Netflix, even if I'm trying to settle after getting in from climbing, that fluorescent-light emitting screen has got to be off by 11! ... er... midnight?  at the latest?  ..you know, after New Years...

Never Enough Caffeine

I'm sitting here in a bit of a haze.

I've had a stressful chunk of time at work.  Right now, I'm waiting on seeing if the past three days, (aka, 40 work-hours and over $2000 of reagents) are successful or not.  When you're trying something new in the lab, it takes longer than it should.  When you're doing something that has a lot of money and data riding on it, it takes longer still.  I have about 39 more hours to wait until I have a good idea if this all worked, but in about an hour I'll have a crude notion.

Before I started all this, I was coming off an experiment which had me in the lab at 2 am for 4 nights running.  Sleep hasn't been something I've been doing enough of this week.

I'm trying to remind myself that it's ok that I've only been to the gym once this week, because lifting hunks of metal when  even a coffee cup feels heavy is probably not sensible.

The good news, of course, is that I've been so preoccupied with this lab crap that I'm not really thinking about how blubbery I've been feeling.

Needing Encouragement Again

Last week I was all psyched and excited to be lifting again, and I was enthusiastic about climbing (yet didn't manage to do it at all that week), and right now at this moment part of my brain is curled up in a corner whimpering.

I had a crappy day of climbing on Tuesday, and not much better last night.  The joke amongst climbers is that it's a "high gravity day" because it feels like every move is harder than it should be.  Like your bones have turned to lead when you weren't looking.

While I avoid weighing myself as a general rule, I have regular dates with an endocrinologist and hopping on the scale seems to be part of the deal.  This means that since I've been dutifully medicating for my Graves' disease, I've got to watch my weight creep up and up and up.  I've been in laundry crisis this week and thus discovered that some formerly baggy pants are now tight enough on the waistband to be uncomfortable and essentially unwearable.  Despite getting overheated I've stopped wearing tank tops to the climbing gym because they don't hide my flab well enough.  I skulk from the shower to locker in the Uni gym with a towel clutched in front of my ballooning belly.  My body and I are not getting along well.

I don't have the best diet in the world, but it doesn't suck.  My carbs are fairly limited, and I don't do processed food.  The dietician was complimenting my eating habits last time she was looking at my food log.  I kind of am at  loss as to what more I can cut out without getting all bingey (and I will binge if I try to restrict my eating).  I could probably make an effort to sleep more (but I have a hard time going to bed the moment I'm home from the lab).  I could do cardio (although I hate it beyond words, and when the hell do I have time?!)  I'm feeling a little stuck.

I feel like I can still lift, so that's good (although maybe I ought not have goals that are related to body weight because at this rate I'll never keep up), but I'm having problems climbing.  I'm worried for my fingers like I've never been before.  I'm getting new pains in one of my already bad fingers, and I jarred one of pinkies a long time ago and it won't heal... I actually had to tape it up last night.  I'm starting to tape my bad fingers when I lift, too.  While I know I need to work on my finger strength really badly of late, I'm scared that I've already put too much stress on them and that any more will put me over the edge.  Climbing is something that keeps me sane in the way nothing else I've ever found does.  Climbing poorly, as I've been doing for over a year now since moving is a slow heartbreak, and while I keep working on trying to regain just the joy of climbing and have phases of doing that, I don't think I could keep at it indefinitely if I stalled here forever.  I'm starting to think that maybe I'm too old for this.

I'm having a really hard time now that I've let doubt slip in and take hold.  I think it was inevitable with the steady increase in weight and pain I've been having.  I don't really know how to hold the dark cloud back anymore.

You must all think I'm bipolar or flighty or something.  I'm typically not.  Maybe it's just exhaustion because it's been a couple of crazy weeks at the lab again (including something that has me here babysitting cells in the middle of the night for the next few days).  Maybe it was an excess of caffeine when I was feeling good.  Whatever it is, I need a little kind and sweet kick in the ass or something.  ...and some more tape for my fingers.