Squash.

The Patient Partner took me to play squash yesterday. Yes, our small, traditional southern city has a squash club! Based on the architecture, the brightly-colored vinyl-upholstered furniture, and the sauna that connects the men's and women's locker rooms, we think it was built in the 1970s. When you come into the lobby, there is one of those Universal weight-lifting modules next to a wrap-around couch. There is a fridge stocked with beer and a brochure from when the place opened, featuring photos of enthusiastic squash players wearing surprisingly bold-colored outfits and sweatbands. You take a rickety-ass spiral staircase down to the courts, of which there are two. Up above the courts, there is a viewing area, including a couple of tables, chairs, and an ashtray.

My question is, Who said, "I know: let's invent a racquet-sport involving a ball that does not bounce!"

Seriously: Have you played squash? It is challenging to hit the ball before it goes dead, and we mostly played with the blue beginner ball, which bounces about twice as much as the yellow-dotted black competition ball. But I had a good time trying to learn to make a legal serve, without hitting the light fixtures in the ceiling.

The PP has been playing squash with our neighbor for a few months now, and for Christmas he got his very own new racquet (thanks, Mom and Dad!). Since then, he has been going over to The Club every other day or so and practicing, so that he has a pretty regular serve and can return most hits (though I did school him a few times with my kill shots). And although you know I live for swimming, there is a real pleasure in whacking a ball around, not that I was imagining that the ball represented anyone or anything in particular. Don't you know me better than that?

I only hit the ball out of the court twice, but given that it was in the same spot both times, I fear that I have a tendency. And as the session wore on, I did get better at being able to place my serve and return the ball. Perhaps this will become a nice way to vary physical activity, so that I avoid overuse of the same muscles all the time.

But let's not discuss how things went when we played with the competition ball, shall we?

Please believe me that I am falling apart.

I was looking back through posts from last winter, and I see that I was bothered then by many of the same things that are bothering me now—a bigger body than I’d like, a body that won’t cooperate with my desire and need to exercise, a body trying hard to recover from injury, a body that has asked me to slow the hell down so that it might try to heal. I see that my New Year's Resolutions from this past January even set more limited goals, exercise-wise, since I didn't want to go crazy with the expectations.

Last year I expected this, since I had just had surgery. I really thought that by this year I might not be feeling this way. I know that those kinds of thoughts do me in, those kinds of expectations, but they sneak their way in there before I realize it, and then I have to extricate them.

I am not complaining about my shoulder. In fact, I am trying hard not to complain. It is just that the left side of my body seems to be part of an organized revolution of some kind. Things started with that shoulder, of course. Then randomly one day, I had a blind spot in the center of my left field of vision—kind of like I had looked at a bright light, but it has never gone away. Then this summer while I was in London, my left hamstring got really tight, and no amount of stretching would help. (Mind you, this cannot be a sports injury, because all I was doing at that time was sitting in the British Library for hours on end, and walking to and from the British Library. Well, and Bollywood dancing, but I digress.) That hamstring pain came and went during the fall, but got worse in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, to the point where it even hurt to kick while I swam.

My coach, knowing how the pain started, suggested that I try a chiropractic adjustment. I went to see the chiropractor last week, and he asked, “Has your left shoulder always been lower than your right?” I said no, and told him the whole Shoulder Surgery Massacree, with four-part harmony, and he said, “Bless your heart,” southern U.S. code for “Your life sucks but I’d hate to say so.” He also suggested that until I see how these adjustments affect my spine, that I not do any strength training, though swimming would be fine.

Anyway, he has done some splendid crackly adjustments on my back, neck, and hips, trying to get things straightened out. But then on Wednesday of last week I went to the pool after seeing him, and as I was kicking—but not even particularly hard—I felt some kind of irksome but not particularly traumatic snap in my—you guessed it—left knee, which then got more and more painful. So after a ridiculously short swim, I got out, took a shower and went home, befuddled, and did a lot of icing.

I mean, exactly what kind of exercise can I do? Nothing that overtaxes my shoulder. Nothing that makes my hamstring or knee hurt. Nothing that might affect my spine.

That leaves . . . knitting.

Which I have been doing a lot of.

But it ain’t swimming. Or walking. Or rowing. Or cycling. Or lifting weights.

Have you tired yet of my now seemingly endless tales of exercise woes?

On Friday the PP noted that his mother and sister are getting themselves a Wii fit for Christmas, and he suggested we consider getting one. I told him maybe, but first let me put in a plea to Magpie, who is giving one away.

Will it change my life? I don’t know. I love games, and maybe having some little active games that we can play in the cold weather that still get the blood pumping would be fun. (Probably can’t knit while playing, though, without risking bodily harm to myself or the PP.) But hey—at this point I am willing to try anything!

In which I am a dumbass.

So I was working out with my trainer today, and she mentioned that there at the gym they are doing this Reindeer Olympics thing, where you put together a team to compete in an array of events, including push-ups, crunches, leg-presses, some running distances, etc. One of the events is 500 meters of rowing on the ergometer, and we got talking about that, and thinking about times, and talking about her time in the event (she was a rower in high school), and before you knew it I was wanting to see how fast I could do the 500 meters.

One minute and fifty point two seconds later, I had beaten her time from last week but I thought I might die. No really, I mean it. I walked a few laps, I got some water, but I could not stop breathing hard and tasting blood from my lungs. She reassured me that she had felt this bad when she did it, too, but she also felt horrible for letting me be, well, such a dumb-ass. Then I spent a little quality time in the ladies room feeling like I might throw up. Anyone with half a brain would not have thought, as I did, about what I could do back when I was in shape, but would rather have remembered how out of cardio shape I am. But no, I was READY! And foolish.

The good news is that erging feels like something I could do for a full-body workout that does not bother my shoulder and also does not strain my hamstring, which has been hurting lately.*

The bad news is that I still feel like coughing every time I inhale suddenly.

But the really good news? The first minute and a half or so of that rowing was the most fun I have had in about two years. Damn, but it felt good to race.

------
* Before you ask, "What did you do to your hamstring?" the answer is: nothing. It started hurting when I was in England this summer, and at that time all I was doing was walking and sitting.

Book Report: Warrior Girls.

Last weekend, the PP gave me my favorite birthday gift so far (even more than the yarn, in terms of enjoyment so far!), Michael Sokolove's Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports. Even though it is That Time of the Semester and I have been knitting up a storm, I have almost finished this book: I have about 50 pages to go, which means I am entering the Protective Phase of reading, where instead of racing along in a book I am enjoying, I slow down, so it does not end too soon.

But the fact that I have not finished it will not keep me from writing about it for you today. What? You never wrote a book report about a book you had not finished? I thought so.

Anyway, you might have come across this guy's writing in other places, such as the big NYTimes magazine article last May. I also heard him interviewed on a nationally syndicated public radio show called "51%," which focuses on women's issues.

His book focuses primarily on soccer to discuss (1) the fact that girls suffer more sports injuries--especially but not exclusively ACL tears--than boys and (2) what might be done to prevent these injuries, short of pulling girls out of sports.

I really appreciate that he makes a big point of noting how beneficial sports and physical activity are for girls. He emphasizes this point throughout the book, noting in numerous ways how essential Title IX has been. I suppose he does this in part to fend off critique from people who might accuse him of denigrating women in sport in suggesting that women's bodies work differently from men's. But mostly he says it because he believes it. He talks frequently of how important sport--swimming--has been for his own daughter, and he seems to make similar observations of other women and girls through his research. He writes at one point:

Girls, through sports, gain the joy of physicality and spirited play that has long been the staple of a boy's childhood. They get to compete in a wide range of sports through high school and college, no longer just field hockey and softball and a handful of others, and they play the games well--better, in fact, than the boys if the measure of quality is team play. Girls indulge in far less posturing than boys, less look-at-me chest beating, less taunting of opponents. Athletics help shape girls into women who are both competitive and collaborative, a formidable combination that most management experts now recognize as the best model of leadership. They take ownership of their own bodies. They go after what they want. Their strength gives them power.

He also writes about how women tend to describe their athletic performance differently. He tells the story of the "Battle of the Sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. He tells how King beat Riggs in straight sets, and then considers her response:

Depending on how you looked at it, either King affirmed some point about women's abilities in athletics or she avoided leaving a negative impact, which seemed to be her view. "I thought it would set us back fifty years if I didn't win that match," King said. "It would ruin the women's tour and affect all women's self-esteem."

Her reaction was telling. Female athletes, even mature, confident champions like King, rarely gloat in victory. They're just relieved they haven't let anyone down.

Much of the book is dedicated to case studies of high-performing athletic girls, pretty much all of them soccer players. He discusses how they pursue their sport during secondary school, looking not just at the characters of these young athletes but also at the sports culture surrounding them--a culture that through its urging to focus on one sport to the exclusion of other activities and its opening of more opportunities for competition than a body can really endure actually breaks their bodies down rather than making them stronger.

[I hereby apologize for the length of that last sentence, but it is my blog and I am leaving it there.]

Sokolove notes that many of these girls suffer one ACL tear after another, yet keep playing. Most ACL "repairs" are really replacements: the destroyed ligament is replaced with tissue from other tendons in the athlete's own body or from cadaverous ACL tissue. The injuries do not make these girls consider quitting their sport until there is no more tissue to use for replacements, until they have usually busted out both knees and usually more than once.

Sokolove devotes a good bit of attention to work that is being done to figure out why girls tear their ACLs at eight times the rate boys do, and why the activity that causes the tear is often so much less intense. Is it a question of how girls' bodies develop at puberty? Girls' wider Q-angles, the measurement of the line from knee to hip? The way they run? The way they land when they jump? The laxity in all their joints that is a side-effect of the need of female bodies to be able to adjust to carrying a baby to term? That athletic girls tend to work "through the pain" more often and longer in order to avoid being called cry-babies? Or some combination of all or many of these things?

The book is a great read, particularly if you are interested in sport culture, injuries, and what it means to grow up as a girl. (Who, me?)

There are a few things, though, that I wish he treated in greater detail. For instance, thinking back to that first paragraph I quoted above, about what girls gain from sports: if sports are so good for girls, and give them a way to negotiate a wider culture that seems constantly to argue that as a woman you never fully have ownership of your own body--or at least of the demands placed upon it--then what happens to injured girls (and women) when they suddenly lose the ability to claim their bodies through sport?

And this: One chapter opens with these two sentences that had me saying (but not quite in the spirit of Molly Bloom) YES YES YES: "A young woman who suffers a serious athletic injury respond in an intensely personal way and has a limited capacity for reflection or self-protection. She is in pain--physical as well as emotional, because she has lost the thing she loves--and her response is to rehab as quickly as possible and get back on the field."

And then that's it, and he is on to the rehabbing. But wait: what about the very important points that preceded the second dash. Is that all there is to say? No insight into ways that a young woman might learn or be taught to manage this pain and sense of loss? In a book devoted to considering how to protect our daughters from this epidemic, might some attention be devoted to helping them manage the illness once they have contracted it?

And finally, I wish there were room in here for thinking about other sports and other injuries. I know that soccer offers the most dramatic example, because so many girls play it these days and because the injury percentage is so extreme. But what about injuries in other sports? Sokolove frequently mentions his own daughter, a swimmer, and how she managed pretty well in her sport with the exception of "one major injury" that cost her a full season. I can well understand why he would not want to write his daughter's own story--or why she might not want him to--but as an injured swimmer I am starving for that story. And given that there must be other injured girls and women out there who have hurt themselves doing something that is not soccer, I am certain that I am not alone.

I suppose what I am really saying here is not that these are problems with Sokolove's book, which focuses on the dramatic examples in order to make people pay attention, but rather that I hope that Sokolove's book opens an avenue for further discussion of these issues.

Suggestion.

It seems that the press will have a hard time, this election cycle, comparing the Democratic and Republican conventions, since the Republican campaign will be at least somewhat disrupted by Gustav. Some will say that the two conventions should not be compared, while others will be itching to do so.

My suggestion: the conventions should be judged as Olympic diving was this Olympics. There should be a difficulty score for each convention. Judges then award an execution score, on a ten-point scale. The highest and the lowest of the judges' scores are tossed out and the remaining five scores are totaled. These scores are then multiplied by 3, divided by 5, and multiplied again by the degree of difficulty of the dive.

EXAMPLE:
Let's say you're going to do a dive--I mean "speech"--on the 45th anniversary of some big thing, and then you do up your platform to sort of resemble the site where that other thing happened. Also, you decide to perform in front of 80,000+ people in a giant stadium, eliciting mutterings of "Paris Hilton" and "Leni Riefenstahl" from critics. If you tank, say, kicking up a lot of splash on your entry, you still get some points for trying something complicated. But if you ace it, then your score is out of the park.

Other factors affecting difficulty might be:
* choosing a running mate that sends the political world into a tailspin of amazement and last-minute research;

* having to contend with a major hurricane that reminds voters of how very competent your party has been in the last 8 years on so many matters;

* losing some of your convention speakers, because they decide they might need to run the government this time (I would contend, however, that this actually LOWERS your difficulty rating);

* etc.

This sort of scoring system should allow political analysts to stop feeling bad about assessing the successes and failures of the two conventions.

Meanwhile, Gustav, please go easy.

Attention sports fans:

Seems to me that neither do you need to be an AC Milan fan, nor need to understand Italian, nor even need to be a soccer fan, to appreciate this guy's glee:

Milan 2-1 Inter commentaire Italien
by t_m
(Props Daily Dish)
I say that without much knowledge you can still guess how sweet it might feel for AC Milan to beat Inter Milan. Perhaps you too have some familiarity with some kind of local rivalry or another?

I wish I had about on-fifth of this guy's ability to express his feelings.

And I cannot stop watching the video!

Empathy.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a student who has missed five out of fourteen classes. You might think that in that conversation I would tell said student that such absenteeism was unacceptable, that she should drop the class, that she should rethink her educational goals and what it takes to achieve them.

You would only be right about the last part, and even there it is not exactly what I said.

In fact, I was surprised when she missed the second day of class, because on the first day it was evident that she was one of the more engaged and adventuresome students I have had, and perhaps one of the most mature in this particular group. I thought it would be great to have her in class, and then when she missed the second day, and then the third day, I figured (and was disappointed) that she had decided to drop but had not gotten to a computer to do so.

But then I heard from her by e-mail. It turns out this student is an athlete, and in the first full week of school she sustained an injury which ended her season and required emergency surgery. (It turns out she has already had similar surgery several times, either on this particular knee or her other.) Then there were complications from the surgery (including, to my personal horror, one of her sutures getting infected) and she missed more days.

Now we get to the part of the term where she has to miss a number of classes because her team is traveling.

We had a long discussion about her options, and it was evident that none of them are really good ones. She said she felt she is "starting to be on the mend," and I thought, right: I thought that many times myself, and boy did I have a long way to go. She said that when she was on the serious drugs she could not even read at all, and man, did I know what that felt like. If she withdraws from the semester (which would allow her to get the other surgery she needs and perhaps actually heal), she will lose her sport scholarship, and that, of course, is how she pays for school. I could see and feel her pain and fear and uncertainty each time her eyes started to well up.

So it is her I was thinking about when I read this article that Magpie mentioned in a comment. I know that knees are not brains, and that bum legs are different from disorientation and headaches and constant dizziness and of course the longer term effects of concussion.

But still.