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Operation Move

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Personal

We are not tourists

OperationMove · July 8, 2020 · Leave a Comment

On the coast, you always see people at the water early in the morning, before the day has started. Sometimes taking photos, sometimes just soaking it in. Sometimes they have company, sometimes they are on their own. They have seen the water a million times, they live here. They aren’t tourists.

But still, it holds something magical in that it can never be the same, and you can never be the same afterwards either.

In 2013, in the midst of a depressive bout (the only one that I have ever been diagnosed with or medicated for, but it is not an outlier – I’ve had them since forever, this was just the one I could not manage) – I thought about how light changes even what it does not touch. In a dark space, even if the light cannot illuminate the hole you have dug for yourself, it’s presence changes you and changes the space – it’s not for you – but you know it’s there.

It doesn’t matter if it’s water or mountains or trees or clouds or whatever stands before you in the outside space, it is never the same. And you are never the same. The process of being changed is what brings you back to the water or the mountain. 

It is the same reason why people run: to seek out some great unknown within themselves that they haven’t discovered yet, to experience living change from the day before, to know that they are not the same as they were when they woke up that morning, ate what they always ate, performed the same routines that they always have, answered the same “what can I have for breakfast?” question with the same answer they have given for the last 100 times the question was asked. 

So they can look at the water and see the ripples are a different shape and the sun has a different brilliance and the pelican is quite intent on fishing instead of gliding.

When I moved here at the end of 2013, I was quitting smoking and running every day. I was time poor and I had limited light to deal with and no street lights to speak of in the country, so I ran the same route every day. Without realising it, I started a challenge of taking a photo every time I was out there. Sometimes it felt like pulling teeth, sometimes it felt like a creative gift. The structure of finding something new, eventually revealed the truth that even the same 8km loop over and over and over again was not ever the same. Not only was it not the same in it’s entirety but also not the same in any small part of it either. 

It was always changing, and I was too. 

I hung onto smoking for grim life, obviously because I was addicted, but for other reasons as well. Some where obvious: it filled a need – whether that was something to do with my hands or a way to suppress emotions or just a way to be less awkward – but some reasons were less obvious. I held onto bad habits like precious jewels, because it meant I never had to change, not really. I could be safe in knowing I was just not good enough at anything and I could just keep on setting my body up to fail to prove my point. 

Once you allow yourself to be changed, it’s scary because you have to accept that you are capable of anything and that all of those ideas that you carried like invisible weights anchoring you to the places where you never leave and never adapt can’t keep you where you are anymore.

And you change. 

You aren’t a tourist looking at the water on your run. And you aren’t a tourist in your own life. 

 

 

Save Yourself

OperationMove · June 12, 2020 · Leave a Comment

How comfortable are you in your own skin?

A question that’s easy to ignore or shove under the rug or cover over with all manner of things in normal life, and a whole lot harder to do exactly the same during a pandemic. Even for those of us who it has affected very minimally (like myself), the environment shift has been palpable. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t taken a hit to their mental health.

Even when you are really busy, you are just with yourself a whole lot more than you are used to. Even for people like myself, who is pretty used to my own company, well it’s been a lot.

You find out pretty quickly the parts of yourself that you cherish and the parts of yourself that are deeply uncomfortable to stomach. The parts that get hidden under work, or doing things, or rationalised coping mechanisms.

 

Sometimes you are travelling along really well and then your brain decides, hey let’s replay every stupid thing you’ve ever done over the last 40 years with no breaks.

Then you really have to cling to this one idea: never judge yourself for the choices you made in order to survive.

It’s something I always remember from when I had really rough patches of mental health – maximum effort doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes maximum effort is making peanut butter on toast. You don’t know.

It has to be more uncomfortable to stay the same, than it is to change

This is true of any change – whether it’s fitness or nutrition or smoking or drinking or whatever it might be. It’s not going to happen until staying the same becomes untenable.

You can have help and you can have support and you can have strategies but ultimately it’s just you, sitting with yourself deciding if you are worth saving today.

You can’t change what you don’t love. So you have to find a way to love those parts of yourself that you don’t like so much, that make you feel uncomfortable.

Sometimes you’ll go back and forth on it, and that’s okay too. Certainty only comes with practice. A lot of practice.

And sometimes it’s not until you get to the other side that you feel how tired you are. Because all that effort you put into ‘passing’ builds up.

That’s okay too. Just like maximum effort looks very different depending on the day, so does doing your best.

My best is okay, and I bet yours is too.

It’s not enough to go through the motions

Zoey · February 5, 2018 · Leave a Comment

Depression is a curious thing. You are okay, until you aren’t. And I crossed over into not being okay last week some time. The line can be as distinct as that. One minute you are travelling along in your own lane and then things start to pile up on top of you faster than you can manage them.

“You have a huge strength imbalance and a biomechanics problem. This is a disaster waiting to happen. And that’s good news.”
-Treatment Session, 29th January

I go into treatment sessions hoping to find problems. No-one wants to be told there’s nothing wrong, because clearly there is something very wrong which is why I’m still experiencing pain 7 weeks after stopping all aggravating exercise. Problems are fixable. That’s their great advantage. But they are also overwhelming. And sometimes the scale of a problem can seem bigger than your were hoping or expecting or even know how to deal with.

So far I have multiple entrapped nerves, bones that have been pulled out of position by my scoliosis, an extraordinarily weak right hip and a biomechanics problem. They are fixable. But it’s also a lot of things. And unlike a bone breaking or a muscle tearing, there’s no timeline for a body with only one functioning side.

I like to think about what I might be able to do once I have two functioning sides, but it seems a bit too far away to focus on right now.

“This is the hard part. No matter how depressed you feel, you have to keep talking to us. Because nothing is going to work if you can’t be proactive.”
-Treatment Session, 31st January

Well meaning people ask me if I’m enjoying the break. ‘A break from what?’ I ask. I miss the creativity that happens on long runs, I miss taking photos, I miss that pleasantly tired feeling when your brain empties itself over the course of the run and I miss having something to reach for.

“Are you sleeping?”
– Conversation with my mother, 3rd February

Yes. I’m still sleeping. I know what she’s asking. There was always a possibility that if I had a significant injury I might have to go back on anti-depressants, but I’m not at that bridge yet. I’m still sleeping, my thought patterns aren’t disturbed and I’m still functional, everything just feels that bit harder than it should, like everything takes double the power, double the focus, double the will.

“This is going to be really difficult, but you need to find a way to focus on the process.”
-Coaching Session, 31st January

The process. I’ve been listening to “The Obstacle is the Way” on audiobook to help me with this. I loved the process of running, but with swimming and cycling I’m like one of those people who wear “I hate cardio” t-shirts as if all cardio and all types of training are the same, interchangeable and meaningless. I need to find ways to commit to the process that don’t result in me half-assing training because it’s not what I want to be doing.

“In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.”
– Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

This could be the best gift I’ve ever been given. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard. But ultimately it will come down to what can I control? I decide if I do my rehab exercises (and do them with purpose), I decide what I eat to help my body and muscles and tendons recovery, I decide how much sleep I get and I decide how much intention I put into embracing what I can do, doing it well and finding things to love about it.

I still decide. I decide to put my disappointment and sadness and frustration into creating something strong, better and more resilient than it ever could have been before.

Dear Running, Wait for Me

Zoey · January 15, 2018 · Leave a Comment

For a long time now I’ve always thought of running as a close friend. A friend with her own intricacies and quirks and she has a personality all of her own too. And she’s always out there waiting for me to show up. She’s loyal like that. But sometimes, you don’t get the choice to show up.

I’ve been really lucky with injuries. I’ve never had an injury that stopped me running for more than about five days together. I’ve only been injured twice. And in five years, I’ve only ever had periods of about up to 7 days were I haven’t been running two or three times and it was mostly due to getting the flu or something like that. I’m crazy consistent like that, and I’m proud of that. I was pretty impressed when I looked at that back over my training logs. (Side note: this is why you should always keep a record of your sessions!) But it also means that an injury like this one is a brave new frontier.

If you’d asked me at the beginning, when the injury had started, I probably would have said that it was around November because my calf was tight and I started getting heel pain. But now, on reflection I can see it started before that and I just misread the signs. And conversations with my osteopath tell me that it actually started a long time ago, years even. And it’s slowly built up to this point. In the beginning it looked like nerve entrapment in my heel, and that is definitely the case. But it’s bigger than that. I have a scoliosis (curvature of the spine) so I tend to have issues with one side being weaker and with my hips being out of position. When I went to that first treatment with the osteopath, after feeling like I was missing the bigger picture because I just wasn’t improving, she told me that almost every bone from hip to ankle was in the wrong position, my tendons were jammed up and my ankle couldn’t move. I had that moment of supreme relief that there was something wrong, something fixable, and also total overwhelm at the enormity of it.

If you run for long enough, your life tends to take shape around it. You go for birthday runs and new year runs and you do long runs and post run rituals, you mark the new year by planning out events and you might even plan for something big for your milestones (I’m turning 40 this year!). In my case, my life really tends to shape itself around running because of who I am and what I do all day as a coach and community leader. Just because I’m not running, I don’t lift out of running. It’s a huge part of my life, whether I’m running or not. My last run was 4 weeks ago (if I’m counting, which I am) and the prognosis is that it will take about 3 months before my body is ready to get back to running.

Three days a week I go to Crossfit. I park maybe 200m away because it is next to the pathway that I would run on afterwards. I haven’t changed my parking spot. That would feel like I was admitting defeat, admitting that I wasn’t a runner. That is too hard an admission, so I park in the same spot.

The hardest part hasn’t been not running. I’ve taken up swimming and I get to do that in the bay, I’ve turned my husband’s bike into a stationary bike, I’ve taken up deep water running. And none of it is quite the same as running, but it keeps me moving and I love it and enjoy it in different ways. The hard part is knowing that I worked really hard at the top end of my capability for 12 months on improving my fitness for the half marathon. It would be impossible to overstate how much work that was. It was working on my nutrition with a nutrition coach for 12 months, it was talking myself into really challenging workouts, it was spending spare time on looking after my body so it could do what I was asking it to do, it was pushing myself well beyond what I thought was possible. It was taking risks to push the boundaries in races. I loved every moment of that (or almost every moment), so it wasn’t that the work was laborious, but it was work. And when I crossed the line in Melbourne at 1:40 and change I was taking over 40 minutes off my half marathon times in 2016 and it felt like not only a great reward for all of that work but an amazing opportunity to take all of that work and build on it this year to something even more amazing. But I don’t get to build on it, which is the hard part.

What I get is to lose all of that fitness and go back to the beginning. That’s how de-training works. You don’t really lose any fitness for a couple of weeks and then after that it takes an epic nose dive. After a couple of months of decreased volume to recover from Melbourne and then an injury of about four months with no running, that’s a lot of de-training. I’ll lose the fitness and I’ll also lose my volume base and I’ll have to start with none of the things I worked for last year, except the mental strength to know what I’m capable of. The good news is, I know a really good Learn to Run program.

When cornerstones get taken away it’s easy to flounder. It’s easy to lose motivation for nutrition, especially when a huge part of my motivation for nutrition IS running. It’s easy to lose motivation for rehab because the light at the end of the tunnel is a long way off and it’s easy to lose motivation for the new types of training you are doing because it can feel like a whole bunch of stuff that you are exceptionally crap at. I could get lost in that some days.

There are opportunities though, if I’m willing to look. An opportunity to get my body back to the way it’s supposed to function so I get to find out when I am fully functional, how fast could I go? Opportunities to take time to work on my strength imbalances and core strength. Opportunities to work on the things that will make me stronger, faster and better but won’t do anything for my ego because they are boring and there is no PB at the end. And there is something about being given the chance to rebuild myself from the ground up that appeals to the running coach in me.

Getting sad about it reminds me what I truly value. Getting angry about it reminds me what I’m willing to fight for. And the process will teach me something I couldn’t learn if I wasn’t injured.

How do you like being solo?

Zoey · November 25, 2017 · Leave a Comment


For people who are newer to this blog and the operation move community, you might not even know that it used to be a partnership. For others, it only becomes obvious maybe if you are listening to the podcast from the beginning and you are obviously listening to two people instead of one.

The other day a friend of mine asked me how I was adapting to being solo. And the answer is, I’m adapting.

Sometimes I get reminded, like when people send me an email or a facebook message and address it to “Dear Ladies”. Well, there’s just one of me now.

Some weeks I feel like I have it all together, and other weeks it feels like there’s too much to do and I’m barely hanging on. The other day I was going back looking for a particular post I’d written on one of my different websites and I was struck by how many other things I used to do with writing and how they’ve all fallen by the wayside. It’s not that I don’t have time. Everyone has time, you know? But I choose to prioritise my time for Operation Move rather than other projects. But you have more leeway when you aren’t a solo act, and that became obvious looking back through my archives. I’m glad they are still there, though. It’s not a painful reminder so much as a revelation of ‘wow. I used to do that.’

Sometimes it feels like the elephant in the room, that I’m not talking about. But then I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels that way. The truth is that separating out any partnership is a thousand different things, not just one decision. It’s email addresses and passwords and old blog posts and header photos and covers of e-bboks and administrative remnants and messages about old podcast episodes. It’s a million reminders that pop up in your Timehop. And it’s dates that are no longer recognised. I end up feeling like an adoptive mother because I didn’t create the sisterhood: but I nurtured it, defended it, protected it and advocated for it like no one else would.

I’ve been in a few business partnerships and I always tend to settle into the behind the scenes type role. I do a lot of the grunt work and the technical stuff. And someone else worries about the presentation. So although I was hidden to a certain extent, it also meant I was protected from some of the harder decision making parts and some of the harsher realities of running a business as well. Being on my own, I had to get really good at a whole heap of things that I didn’t know how to do, really fast. And I had to get REALLY good at managing my own stress levels so I didn’t implode.

But now the things I like about it is I get to pursue my own vision, if I make a mistake I’m the only one who suffers for it and it feels more mine now than it did before. In the past when I’d take over for periods, it always felt like limbo, like I was a placeholder. And it feels different now.

In a sense, I think going solo has allowed me to be more unapologetically myself.

My friend said to me she thought that with the logo redesign a website-redesign might be cathartic for me. And I think she is probably right.

 

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