GETTING MOVING, IN ALL KINDS OF WAYS

This last day of July has started with great energy… what a thrill. And it’s all because I’ve retrieved a strategy that I’d carelessly let slip these last couple of weeks. I feel so much the better for it.

Here in Toronto we’ve had a cool summer, with frequent rain showers. It’s kept the gardeners happy, including me. But it’s also meant that mornings have often been a little discouraging weather-wise, cold and rainy. During the day I’ve found myself less energetic and also feeling chilled, as I sit inside, with the doors open, working at my laptop.

How silly! I thought to myself last night as I headed to bed. I’m cold and a little lethargic because I’ve not been getting my blood moving. My time to exercise and get revved up has always been first thing in the morning. It was the time-slot for running, lovely early-morning trots, until the ligaments in my left foot gave way a few years ago and brought that to an end. I replaced running with cycling or brisk walking, but somehow lost the pattern recently.

What a pleasure to have it back, that early morning energy! I headed out in the chill with a jacket on over my Tshirt and biking shorts topped by a short skirt. The air was fresh (more like September than late July) and the traffic still mild at 7. The intensely -green grass glowed in the slanting sun, the gardeners were out tidying at the university, the road-works people were already digging and laying pipes and moving dirt, a parks guy was riding a mower in the ravine as I headed up the Poplar Plains road hill, joggers cruised along sidewalks absorbed in their earphones and their effort, and dog-walkers were trotting and walking and sauntering everywhere I went, accompanying their assorted pooches.

That landscape of early morning activity, like a gently animated Breughel, is such fun to ride through, a reminder of the layers of life in the city.

And my ride felt great, both the effortfulness of the uphill and the thrilling whoosh of the trip back down the long curve of Russell Hill Road. I topped up the endorphins with a short stop at a small local exercise park, where I did seated arm lifts.

And now sitting by the open door, with a cool breeze wafting in carrying the scents of the garden and the sounds of morning birds, I can feel my blood moving and my brain working, both much more vigorously than yesterday. A quick jolt of activity, call it exercise or call it labour, or call it pleasurable excursion, is such a gift.

Happy end of July everyone!

STRENGTH & HAPPINESS IN SPRINGTIME

Spring is back: The weather is moving slowly from chilly to mild, the blossoms on the wisteria are draped in white profusion and the air is intoxicating, with lilies of the valley and lilacs perfuming our passage.  The bicycle shops and cafes are busy, the streets are alive with untanned legs in shorts and sandals, new sunglasses, cotton dresses, and altogether there's the feeling that people are shedding the layers of winter and emerging, slightly fragile, pale, and fresh, into the warming sunshine.

And I too seem to once again be in spring mode. It feels great,

Perhaps it’s just that I am getting into some renewing activities. The Burma book is finally about to head to the printer: the photos have all been picked, the edits are done, with as many typos found as we could find (a few always manage to escape notice, no matter how many pairs of eyes check for them), and hurrah! the cover seems to have found its way at last (so the cover now up on Amazon is NOT what we’ll have: the fish will be safely tucked inside the book, a great shot but not for a cover, and replaced by fresh free loveliness - you’ll see).

Thrilling to have the book this far along.

With work less demanding the first renewal is that at last the spring house-cleaning thing is happening. It’s not exciting, more a (rather predictable) getting caught-up feeling.  At last! is the theme here, which it seems to me is the true essence of spring-cleaning.

The other renewal this week is about new horizons, not the food history course I’m about to start teaching this week (I am really looking forward to it, after hours of prep) but something entirely different. I mentioned last year that ligaments in my left foot had weakened and that I was not going to be able to go for my extremely pleasurable runs any more.  That remains true, alas.  I’ve replaced the runs with brisk walks, not quite the same, but way less potentially damaging for the foot and other body parts too.

I was talking about the sad fact of no longer running with a woman who came to immersethrough in Chiang Mai this last winter (and was in great shape). She told me I’d love doing weights, that it gave her great endorphin hits.  As an endorphin/adrenalin etc junkie (in a mild kind of way), I was intrigued.  It’s taken me several months to figure out how to start.  But now thanks to a friend I have met a personal trainer named Rafi, and had a first session with him.

Our phone call was funny: Rafi “what weights or equipment do you have?” me: “none” Rafi: “not even a ball?” me: “nothing at all, but there’s lots of room…” 

I had no idea what to expect when he came by yesterday.  My mother was a physio, and I’ve always been interested in how things work, body dynamics, for example why one person walks this way and another walks completely differently.  As Rafi had me lift, push against resistance etc, in various positions, he was checking out where I had muscle weakness or imbalance, in other words, where I needed work the most.  I learned a lot: glutes need work, abs too, and lats, and some other transverse muscle in my back.  hmm

And then he started getting me to do deceptively simple things: lie on my back with bent knees, breathe into my belly, tighten my abdomen and pelvic floor, then on the exhale lift one leg slowly toward my chest and then back down to the floor, keeping the abdomen etc tightened. Relax, then repeat with the other leg.  It’s not so difficult to understand, but to do it while keeping the hipbones level, the pelvis level, takes concentration I found.

And so it was with all the other things he had me do.

I made notes at the end of our session and now I have “homework”: I’m to do the full lot of exercises (a specific number of reps for each) every other day, just once for the first week, then twice in the second week, and so on.  And there are a few great stretches too, subtle and effective.  When I get comfortable, maybe in three or four weeks, he’ll come by again and add other exercises.

The day off is to let everything recover.  Logically, having done work yesterday I should have skipped today.  But I wanted to get started, and also to repeat everything right away to get my body-memory more established.

And how was it?  It was engaging and energising, a challenge that took concentration, way more than I would have imagined.  Somehow this combination of concentration and effort (side plank held for a minute for example, and knee bends with a stick held straight-armed over my head, to keep me in alignment) was exhilarating, got the old endorphins going, transported me, even though I wasn’t running happily down the street but instead working on the floor.

This is not a fascinating post, sorry, but I wanted to write about this new invigorating era in my first flush of enthusiasm and discovery.  It’s such a pleasure to embark on a new challenge and feel that I am going to get stronger day by day, through my own efforts.  We can’t ask for much more than that in life, can we?

…well, apart from the pleasures of friendship…  This evening I’m headed to eat and drink and play with friends.  I'll make a leek soup I think; we'll grill meat and vegetables; asparagus is finally here and fabulous (we had our first huge meal of it last night); and there's been talk of making a baker's cake (using a yeasted dough to make a sweet treat). Yum.  The excuse is Mothers’ Day, but really it’s all about the joys of extended family, celebrating the juiciness of life at every time of year.

IT'S UP TO ME TO FIGURE OUT FITNESS IN ALL WAYS

A beautiful penultimate morning of August here in Toronto that makes me feel renewed. That renewal also comes because of the seems-like-very-solid-and-sensible-advice-to-me advice that I got yesterday from a therapist named Damien at Athlete Care yesterday. I'd gone in to see him (my friend Ilse had recommended him highly) about this fallen transverse arch situation I've been living with since June.

Of course the failing of a piece of my body is disturbing. So it's been an odd summer as I try to come to terms with it. I've bought Birkenstock inserts to wear in my shoes and a new cushy pair of runners. But the basic message I got at the foot clinic was that i would need to depend on those inserts, and on wearing shoes in the house and never going barefoot, from now on. Even that I swallowed (grumbling, natch! but I did accept it).

But then my ankle started to hurt, with an intermittent pain, sometimes when I used it, sometimes after. Not good. Clearly whatever adaptations i was consciously making, and my body was making on its own, were doing damage or shifting things around, in a way that seemed to be making the situation worse. Time to rethink, I decided. Was there something going on centrally that was somehow causing all this? Maybe I needed to dig deeper? Cranio-sacral perhaps could help?

But no, really, it all felt lke a functional problem that I was failing to understand. Thus Damien.

His advice? Strengthen, stregthen, work on getting the muscles in the foot and lower leg strong to support the (now weaker) ligaments. He had me stand on two feet and go up onto the balls of my feet as high as possible, then down, and again and again. Then he asked me to try it just on the one left (injured) foot. Yikes! It wobbled and was unsteady. There, he said, that's what you need to stregthen. I'm to go up and down, on two feet before a walk or before getting going in the morning, just to increase blood flow to the muscles, and then do it on the injured foot, up-down-up-down, as often as I can in the day, in reps. The other exercise is to use the foot and ankle to pull against resistance. I mean I can do ankle circles, but it's a more effective strengthener to pull against resistance. (I hook my foot under the edge of a counter and use it to pull me up into a sitting position.)

I'm feeling so energised by this. Aha, I can help myself! Yes, it's a brighter picture altogether, Damien's view (no need for orthotics, once you're stronger you'll be fine barefoot etc), but the energising aspect is that it depends on me, it's up to me, and doesn't rely on outside aids or medications or tricks or... Damien's opinion (and of course not everyone would agree, but one can pick one's advice as one picks anything else, no?) is that most problems are a result of insufficient muscle strength or else overuse, too much pounding. And as we age, we need to focus even more on maintaining muscle strength to support our decreasingly elastic tendons and ligaments.

Sounds like a plan.

Now what's the emotional or intellectual equivalent of this physical advice about sustainable fitness and freedom from injury or impediment?

If I start from the same approach, then I can frame the issue this way: as we age we lose resilience, not just of ligaments etc but also some mental elasticity. We're no longer able to multi-task as easily. If we're too overloaded with different thoughts, we start to forget names or show some other sign of slippage. It's not a pretty sight and it can be very distressing (is this Alzheimer's? is the first panicked thought when it happens).

Clearly the first step is to try to keep our heads clear of unnecessary clutter. That would be for example fruitless worrying about the future or the past or...let's just leave it as fruitless worrying. The other kind of clutter is that which comes when we let ourselves think about too many things at once. With the internet always beckoning, it's easy to slip out of a task and into checking email or looking at the latest tweets. That shifting back and forth builds up debris and clutter that stops us from thinking clearly. It turns us all into ADD sufferers, mental magpies leaping from thing to thing and unable to setttle on anything or think about any one thing in a sustained way.

And that leaves us without the ability to think things through clearly.

I'm just feeling my way here, but the advice I'm trying to give myself, and to live by, is to make a list for the day, and try hard to stick to it, to move from task to task sequentially and not to think much about the next one until this one is done. (And to not check email every half hour either!) The limited forward planning required as I make the list and (loosely) structure my day is very steadying I find.

Those of you who work freelance will probably recognise what I'm talking about. Maybe those of you with jobs that are already structured won't know what I mean. But in your off-hours you may have these distracted and unproductive patterns. Mine are for sure in need of tidying up.

Today for example, my list is a nice easy one. I have five recipes to retest today for Rivers of Flavor: two delectable sweets, a fab pork noodle dish, a salsa variant, and a steamed noodle streetfood from Kengtung. I've got my shopping lists made, and at the other end of the day there are a couple of people dropping by whom I hope to feed with the results of the testing. Getting it done is one goal, but feeding friends is a wonderful motivation for staying on task all day.

Now to jump elsewhere: I went to the Southern Ontario shape-note sing last Saturday. We hold it at the beautiful Detweiler Meeting House southwest of Waterloo, a stone building in rolling farm country that has fabulous acoustics. People came from six states and four provinces, the potluck lunch was a spectacular spread, and the singing warm and intense both. From there I headed to a friend's place north of Lindsey, set in a glade in the woods. I sang to myself as I drove the three hours. I was feeling foolish and over-ambitious, but happily anticipatory too. And it was wonderful to arrive. What an oasis of peace and generous conversation! There was no singing in my sleep, no thought, just a deep plunge.

And that's the other important ingredient to good health, mental and physical: getting rest and sleep. It's while I sleep that my foot and ankle muscles will grow and strengthen. It's when we sleep that our "brain muscles" renew themselves. We're all so ambitious about the things we want to do in the evening. It's as hard to let go sometimes as it was when we were three and were told it was bedtime. "But I'm having so much FUN!"

MORNING PLEASURES & A BOOK TO GET ABSORBED BY

Sometimes a breakfast is so perfect that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to eat anything else but that particular combo in the morning. There’s great bread lightly toasted and eaten with cold butter and home-made marmalade, and good coffee alongside; there’s my home-standard leftover rice with fried greens and fried egg on top flavored in various ways; there’s mohinga streetside in Burma somewhere, with fresh little crunchies to be stirred into a perfect broth and tender noodles; and today there was “jok”, what we in the west often call by its Hindi name “congee”, or else more prosaically call rice porridge.

I was out for a short jog at about seven this morning, the sun still hidden by dense mist on the eastern hills. (Tashi just asked me on the phone if running here in Chiang Mai is very different from running in Toronto (apart from the snow of course, he said). The answer is yes and no. Yes, it’s different because the sidewalks are rough and uninviting so I often run on the street, dodging oncoming cars when there are any, and watching for bumps and obstacles when I am forced onto whatever passes for a sidewalk. And yes, it’s different because the people who are out on the street give me a smile or a wave as I trot past, in a friendly inviting companiable way, whereas in Toronto I am as invisible as every other jogger. And no, it’s not different in a basic way: I am still stuck with myself, my thoughts and anxieties and uninteresting morning ponderings, including my thoughts about whether to take a break and walk rather than huffing and puffing on at a slow jog, all sweaty!)

A guy I met recently here told me that he does a brisk walk very early, before dawn, past the moat and north a bit to the “stadium” that is used by the PhysEd Department at Chiang Mai University. He goes round the track four times before heading home. I’d never been there and so decided to head out in that direction this morning. I took back streets and found my way to the stadium, ran once around, and then took a winding exploratory route back. Fairly close to home I came on a street-side stall run by an older couple, with pots on the boil, a sign that said “JOK” in Thai, and a couple of tables with plastic stools set out on the edge of the road.

I ordered a bowl of jok to eat there (the person ahead of me took his away in a heavy plastic bag), “sai kai, ka” - with an egg please. The woman took a large ceramic bowl in one hand and gave the huge pot a stir with the ladle in her other hand. She scooped up a full ladle of steaming hot smooth white rice porridge and poured it into the bowl, then set it down while she broke a fresh egg onto it. Then on went several more half-ladles-ful of hot jok, some pork broth with a few meat balls, and a generous sprinkling of chopped green onion and slivered ginger. The egg of course poaches in the middle of the dense hot porridge, so the trick is to leave it without stirring too much, until it has cooked enough for you. I like my yolk liquid and my white set, so it take several minutes.

As I waited for the egg to cook, I explored the table condiments: plain vinegar, powdered dried red chiles, sugar, and rice vinegar with a paste of minced green chiles and a little coriander in it. There was also a bottle of soy sauce and a full shaker of white pepper powder. I spooned on some of the vinegar-chile paste and then started to turn the thick soupy porridge, turning the edges in to the centre. Finally, a first spoonful went into my mouth, hot and steamy. Fabulous. And from there it continued, the egg yolk a rich country-egg orange, the strands of ginger warming on the tongue, and the mild green chile paste too... There’s something about the smooth thick texture of jok that is comfort food, like baby food anywhere perhaps?

It’s coolish here right now, especially in the morning, and so, though when I sat down I was hot from running, with sweat patches on the knees of my pants and on my back, I was already feeling chilled by the time the bowl of jok was in front of me. The hot soupy porridge warmed me right back up, a gentler version of the direct hit of hard liquor, hitting my gut and then travelling out to my extremities... Perfect winter food.

As I walked on home I thought about this question of perfect breakfast and wonderful streetfood. The thing is, a simple perfect breakfast at home is easy, manageable, but this streetfood, whether it’s mohinga or jok or some other wonderful breakfast, is not so simple. I mean it takes expertise. Part of the pleasure in eating it is that someone else has made it, and made it beautifully. I can just ask for it and it miraculously appears.

Yes, I would be happy to make good jok for myself and others. But that extra treat of being taken care of, especially when it comes to comfort food, adds a layer of pleasure that’s a whole other ingredient.

And speaking of ingredients, I have a new strategy for jet-lag, something I’ve fallen into by chance. Just before I left Toronto last Friday a close friend lent me her copy, soft cover, but still fat and very attractive, of the 2009 Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It went into my checked luggage, as a book to savour rather than to glance through junk-book fashion on the plane. And so it was waiting for me when I unpacked, and into it I dived, head first.

An engaging beautifully written slightly challenging (keeping the names straight and trying not to miss out any of the lovely details) book is a great companion and walking-staff kind of assistance for the jet-lagged traveller, I discovered. I could read it without falling asleep, so I could stay up until a reasonable bedtime. And it could entice me out of an afternoon nap, when needed, so I stayed on track.

Beyond these rather dreary practicalities, it is the most fabulous book. My friend’s spouse had said he was irritated by the dangling “he”, for the author doesn’t dot every “i” in the course of the narrative, so who does “he” refer to in this sentence? is sometimes the reader’s question. But I found it clean, a wonderfully immediate read, with no obtrusive author’s voice in the way, no knowingness to mar the intimacy I had with the scenes as they unfurled in my mind’s eye.

It is truly stunning.

Of course there’s a wild disconnect between the court of Henry the Eighth (the novel is centred on the amazing Thomas Cromwell, who rose to power in that era) on the one hand, and present-day sub-tropical Chiang Mai on the other. That gap between the world I was transported to by the book and the place I was in when I raised my eyes made my dreaming quite disorderly and wild! But why not? since jet-lagged sleep can be so trippy anyway...

In ingredient terms, then, the recipe for long-distance travel includes melatonin (which I always forget about, but which really helps many people get to sleep, even when their sleep-cycle is out of wack); drinking lots of water on the plane and taking it easy with alcohol; having a comfy place to sleep your first few nights after arrival; and now, the last ingredient, having a fascinating book to sink into when you can’t do much else besides read or sleep and you don’t want to sleep just yet.

But I’d also say, don’t wait for a trip to get started on Wolf Hall. And if you can, read it slowly, luxuriating in the tapestry of it all and the style too. I rushed through it, and wish I had it to read all over again for the first time. Maybe in a year I’ll reread it, in a more leisurely way, and reimmerse. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Happy full moon everyone!