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exercise

weak in the knees

August 21, 2018 by krisis

Everyone has their own version of what makes them feel physically fit. For some it’s their weight. For others it’s their abs, or how much they can lift.

For me, it’s always been squatting.

Not “squats,” where I have to crouch down with a fraction of the weight of the world on my shoulders and then power that weight up to the sky as I straight my posture. Those came later.

No. Just good old regular squatting to reach something on the ground.

If I wheeze or grunt while I’m doing it, I am not in shape. That’s my litmus test. That’s what sent me to the gym for the first time back in 2011. I was not quite 30 years old and doing that little old man grunt when I bent over to pick something up.

“Uhnf,” I expel on a little puff of breath as I crouched down, or as I pressed myself back up.

A lot of that “uhnf” came from the knees. I was sure mine had gone bad from years of pounding down Philadelphia’s cracked concrete sidewalks at high speeds in my unforgiving pair of Sketchers boots.

In yoga I could not do “chair pose.” When I ran it felt as though my knees heated up like a paper clip being repeatedly bent. My mother’s knees needed replacement. For me, it was probably just a matter of time.

“Should’ve gone with Doc Martens,” I’d muse. Oh, the folly of youth.

I felt fit at some point in my original gym adventures earlier this decade, which meant my squatting was not bad. No more little puff of complaint at their nadir. My opinion of my knees did not change.

I shared that same opinion with my friend Alison when she coaxed me to start weight training in 2016. Why did I use only half of the weight I needed to use for squats (this time the real sort of squats that required that fraction of the weight of the world)?

The knees, I’d tell her. It’s all in the knees.

It’s now been two years of lifting those weights every week, with a few breaks along the way. I’ve had a lot of little niggling problems in that time – ankles and cramps and my back and a whole litany of other little weaknesses to overcome.

Never the knees.

I realize now that the problem was never my knees. The problem was how I was using them. The only way I used my legs before 2011 were as massive pistons, driving my feet to the ground again and again as I walked four miles at a time. That was the only way they knew how to be strong. Any other kind of leg exercise – from running to yoga to squatting – I’d just rely on my knees to do all the work.

My legs know how to do different things now. I’ve got muscles I never had before, not just those piston pressing thighs. Squatting is fine, with weights or without. When I squat to pick something up I’m using my entire body – my abdominals, my back, my thighs, my calves.

I’ve come a long way from those squats being the delineation of my fitness. They’re not “not bad” now. They feel fine. Good, even. Sometimes I even pretend I am Spider-Man for a moment as I rock back onto my haunches.

How did I get past being weak in the knees? Back in 2016, Alison told me I couldn’t use them as an excuse. “Plenty of people have bad knees and still do modified squats,” she told me. “That’s not a reason to avoid them.”

Yoga teachers had said the same thing to me, but they didn’t know me like Alison did, since sitting on the floor in her dorm room putting together copies of my first demo CD. She met me when I was skin and bones and curly hair, before the singing lessons and the career and my relationship with E.

She knew that I didn’t let minor obstacles stop me from doing what I want, so she made me knees into an obstacle rather than my weakest point. “Just work around them,” she told me, and so I did – and it turned out that working around them was exactly what I needed to do.

I am trying to transport this little lesson about squats and knees into other areas of my life. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else. The place where you perceive the symptoms of a problem isn’t always the spot that needs curing. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else.

Whether it’s squats or something else, our metrics of success measure more factors than we might realize at first.

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: exercise, memories

Spring Thing: Ridley Creek State Park Trail

April 13, 2017 by krisis

As it turns out, I really like hiking.

A ruined old house on Ridley Creek State Park Trail; there were also some lovely private residences, some of a similar vintage.

This is one of those things that’s not surprising at all now that I pause to think about it. I have infinite stamina for walking and I enjoy nature the most when I’m passing through it at a pretty steady clip rather than enjoying it from a stationary position.

While E enjoys nature perhaps more than I do, she does not possess my unlimited stamina for walking. Thus, after a terrifically fun and challenging hike with the assembled Drexel crew last Memorial Day, I got it fixed in my head that I had to convince EV6 to enjoy hiking. I had positive reports from other parents that this was the sort of thing you could use to occupy a child’s time and attention at low cost. It seemed like a good tactic.

A not-quite-three-year-old is a bit too small for a hike of any substance, but that didn’t stop from from hyping EV6 up about hiking from the moment I returned from that trip last year. Any time anyone I vaguely knew uploaded a hiking picture I made sure EV6 saw it. We talked about how it would be challenging, and how it’s for bigger kids. We got a membership to Longwood Gardens to start getting used to traipsing around for hours outdoors.

Everything was proceeding as planned. I was about to have a hike-loving child at home with me for this Spring!

And then we did our little Darby Creek excursion the other day and I faced the cold, harsh light of reality: it’s unreasonable to expect such little legs to walk more than two miles in a day. EV6 is only a bit over half my height, so my two miles probably feels more like four miles to her! Whether it counts as two or four, that’s only about 60 to 90 minutes of hiking, all told. Not super satisfying, especially if it involved a long drive to get there.

Does that mean I resigned myself to a series of brief two mile hikes all Spring? NO MA’AM. I am nothing if not tenacious. [Read more…] about Spring Thing: Ridley Creek State Park Trail

Filed Under: day in the life Tagged With: adventure, bike, exercise, hike, Ridley Creek State Park Trail, Spring Thing

Spring Thing: Darby Creek Trail

April 11, 2017 by krisis

When we awoke this morning and glimpsed an ultra-beautiful day outside, EV6 and I determined we could not simply roll on with our typical Tuesday morning errands routine.

EV6 has been agitating for a return trip to Morris Arboretum’s Tree Adventure, but I find their admission to be a bit steep for what’s on the grounds – especially when we’re members of the massive Longwood Gardens! Still, I liked her plan of getting outside and being surrounded by trees.

Darby CreekThen, I remembered reading a Philly.com article about the newly-opened Chester Creek trail, a newly rehabbed stretch of old train tracks that’s not far from here. The article unhelpfully didn’t provide a website or an address for the trail, but it linked to The Circuit Trails, a very pretty and mostly useless website that also lists trails without directions or maps, but links to ChesterCreekTrail.org, a site about the trail without directions or a map.

Wow, this internet thing is pretty hard to do!

Luckily, Circuit Trails linked to the actually useful TrailLink, which revealed the mysterious and previously quite secret location of the the Chester Creek Trail! It was about a half hour away, and I didn’t relish the idea of an hour of car time to take EV6 on her first hike, which might spectacularly fail. Luckily, TrailLink makes it easy to search for other trails in your area, and we found a pair less than half that far from our house!

(By the way, the addresses of the two ends of the Chester Creek Trail are North – 439-446 Lenni Rd, Media, PA 19063 and South – 249 Knowlton Rd, Media, PA 19063).

The trail we chose was The Darby Creek Trail, a single mile of completely paved trail running north alongside 476 from where it crosses Route 1. Not only was it short, paved, and nearby, it included another feature that won EV6 over: a playground!

EV6 was so excited by the prospect of a hike plus playground that I think it was the fastest we’ve ever left the house in the morning!

As for the trail, I’d call it more of a pleasant jogging path than a hike, but it’s ideal for practicing with little legs because of the brief length and the even, asphalt-covered ground. That also makes it ideal for kids to practice riding their bikes, especially since there are no interruptions to the trail or sharp curves!

There were a few attractive stopping points at the creekside where families were fishing or dipping their toes. The creek was surprisingly unspoiled for lying just a few yards from the side of a highway (it’s shielded by a high retaining wall), and the white noise of the rushing cars actually added to the feeling of seclusion.

EV6 decided that she ought to use the mile as interval training. After all of her sprinting, by the end of it she was pretty wiped out and begging for her snack of apple sauce. I don’t think it had quite sunk in that we needed to reverse course and re-walk the entire mile to get back to the car! She wouldn’t have made it back if not for the promise of some playground time at the end.

While the walk itself wasn’t so thrilling, its proximity to a ton of our Route 1 errand locations makes it likely we’ll use this for our morning exercise on cool, sunny days like this one in the next few months. Plus, we’ll be back later this week to enjoy a bike ride!

Darby Creek Trail’s address is literally “Darby Creek Trail,” Havertown, PA 19083, but you could also dial in the playground, Merry Place, 600 Glendale Road, 19083.

Filed Under: day in the life Tagged With: adventure, exercise, hike, Spring Thing

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