Ignoring My Body

There’s rhythm to everything. There’s sound that accompanies all movement. Maybe it sounds a little woo-woo, but once you start noticing it, you’ll find it everywhere, like when you fall in love with the new Volkswagen bus, and then you start seeing them all over the place.

Recently, I was swimming, and I put it together that I was singing or chanting in my head as I swam. It wasn’t an epiphany or anything. Just an observation. “Singing” and “chanting” aren’t quite the right words because I wasn’t making any sound. I was just listening to the rhythm of my strokes in my head and finding patterns. A similar thing would happen when I rowed. It’s an old trick, a way to stay consistent and get out of my head. It helped me to block out conscious thoughts. If I chanted/sang/imagined this rhythm, keeping time and constant patterns, I could do repetitions of the same movements in roughly the same amount of time. It helped a lot with pacing. Plus it had the added benefit of consuming my mind, allowing me to ignore my body entirely. Interval training is useful in both sports, and if I really think back, I was doing a similar thing in high school when I ran track, repeating the patterns each interval to keep each rep’s time the same. 

I remember one time, I was running on a track with my dad. We were in Greece, visiting his old stomping grounds, which included a track that had been recently renovated. It was awesome. Bouncy. Fast. It was the kind of track that a person can’t help but reach down and touch. To try to press down and watch your fingers spring back up. It didn’t take a lot of convincing for my dad to get me to do a workout there. Funny, I can’t remember what year this was. I just know he had me do 200m sprint repeats. I did a few (with proper rest time, I’m sure - Dad knows his stuff), and after I finished, he looked at his watch and chuckled. This had to have been more than 20 years ago, and I can still hear his voice saying, “Well, you certainly have pace.” 

Now, this may have been a dig. (My dad loves me but is not above a subtle jab.) I think the context was that I wasn’t a particularly fast sprinter, but I was hitting the same times over and over and over again. It came from this rhythm trick, an innate skill I didn’t realize was unique. My body likes to follow the same patterns, muscles repeating movements, lungs pulling and blowing out air to a cadence, ears hearing the same pounding of feet or whir of the rowing machine fan or indescribable whoosh-burble of arms through the water. I'm really good when I can find this rhythm. My muscles can hold out a lot longer when retracing patterns and keeping the sound the same. Like a dance without music. I am unstoppable.

However. 

It can’t last. 

No one’s body can hold out forever. The rhythm can only carry a mind pushing a body for so long. Rest is necessary to be able to recover and gain the most fitness/strength/whatever from the effort. Without recovery, a body will grind to a halt, no matter the mental or physical strength. Yes, this is obvious when reading from the luxury of distance and time away, but in the moment, when a person, say a rower in her early 20s who has decided she wants rowing to be her future and has set aside all other pursuits, including those that might potentially make any actual money, rest feels optional.

There’s also an element of trust in keeping with the rhythm. I trust that if I continue to push, if I keep the same time and sound pattern on the 10th rep as the first couple of reps, I’ll still be able to finish the workout without killing myself. Without the sound to fall back on, my mind would be left thinking about the physical sensations in my body, making it much more likely that my pace would sag or I’d fail the workout early. In prioritizing rhythm, I’m trusting that my body can do it and then not accepting alternative facts, ignoring the signals it's sending: exhaustion, fatigue, slow-creeping pain that comes with muscles straining to their limits. None of those signs get any of my mental space. Keeping time is what matters. Not changing the rhythm consumes my thoughts, leaving no room for hearing messages from my body. 

We all do this in our own ways, for lots of reasons. I learned to listen to these rhythms to ignore my body telling me to stop. But we listen to music or we keep our eyes on our phones to tune out the world. It’s all about control. If I control my rhythm, I control my world. If we control what we let in, we control how we perceive everything around us. 

I can see now how this has been harmful. I got shingles in college because I ignored my body long enough that it saw fit to shut me down in another way. It was the loudest message my body could send at the time to say STOP. This still happens from time to time. I wrote recently about the development of arthritis in one of my knees. It’s a gradual change to shift the mindset from seeing my body as a tool, a vehicle to be controlled, to seeing body and mind as parts of the same whole, equally me. How often did I think of my body as an unruly annoyance that would never fully cooperate, always needed work, wouldn’t fully submit to my will? The limitations of flesh gained a fair amount of my attention over the years, either because I felt there was too much of it, or what was there wasn’t strong enough, or it was, god forbid, in need of rest. 

So here I am, in recovery from my single-minded ways as an athlete. I can’t just stop hearing rhythms as I run or swim or row. There are fundamental things I can’t change about myself. But I can change how I interpret the inputs. I can stop running with headphones in to listen more closely to my body. I can remind myself repeatedly that rest is good, helpful, necessary, and no one benefits from me being exhausted, myself least of all. And I can try and remind myself that I’m not 20 and have a full life. No one is asking me to be anything more than who I am.