The Accidental Athlete, Part 2

Let’s see, where were we? Oh yeah, you wanted to know how skating has come back into my life? Haven’t slept a wink since reading last week’s blog? Had this day circled in bright red on your calendar? Riiiight! Ah, the overwhelming humility of the blog writer!

OK, so since you asked … it started about four years ago, when I looked at the campus rink schedule and saw that there were lunch hour sessions every weekday. I work fairly close to the rink, so this seemed like a good way to get used to being on the ice again. But there were a couple of unexpected problems.

The first was that I could barely manage to get my skates on and tie them properly. I’d been seriously overweight when I first skated but was much more so now, and those additional pounds were getting in the way. Literally.

Skating boots need to be tied tightly, and there are three ways to accomplish that task. I could sit in a bench and put my foot on the floor and bend down to it. Mmmmmph! Unhhh! No good, couldn’t reach that far. Or I could put my foot up on the bench and lean forward and – no way! Or I could stand up and face the bench and put my foot on said surface and lean over my leg to reach my foot. Ouch!

It took quite a while but somehow I managed, with a lot embarrassing grunts and groans, to get my boots tied somewhat less than snugly. However, after maybe 20 minutes of barely moving on the ice (I seem to have forgotten it all and was back to The Wall), it also became clear that the tops of the boots were too tight for comfort on my pudgy legs, and when I removed them I found a nasty looking abrasion on one calf. That was scary for a diabetic who has to be careful about foot and leg injuries so I took the skates home and put them back in the closet to wait for the abrasion to heal before trying again.

And there they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until last year around this time. Because in the interim, I discovered my gallbladder was harboring cancer, and that some of it was sneaking out into surrounding tissue. Surgery and chemo and radiation followed, and while all that was going on my daughter (Remember her? The instigator of this whole skating saga?) was reading books about cancer and nutrition and urging me to consider making some major nutrition changes.

I tried to read a couple of those books along with her, really, I did, but could just never finish them. Too technical. Boring. Lazy brain syndrome, as in “you read them and tell me what they say.” Finally she secured my agreement to read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and more specifically to read it cover to cover before making any judgments or decisions about what it recommended. OK, OK, I promise already. She’s still relentless, but manages it with more diplomacy than when she was six.

Plus she knew that in addition to needing to minimize the possibility of recurring cancer, I had another major challenge: discontent about having to add insulin to my diabetic medications. It had happened several months earlier. When my doctor said that dreaded word “insulin,” I felt like a failure. After all, I was a Type II diabetic who could, at least theoretically, control the disease with a healthy diet.

Which is what I was trying to do. Or at least, I was trying not to have an unhealthy diet according to commonly accepted standards. Very little red meat. “Sugar-free” snacks. That kind of thing. Yet my weight and my blood sugar numbers had continued to move up until insulin became a necessity. And a little insulin now was likely to become larger and larger doses in the years ahead, with increasingly higher chances of diabetic complications.

Eat to Live is billed as a weight loss book, which it is, but its larger purpose is weight loss through lifelong nutritional changes in order to correct and forestall major health problems such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Bingo, two out of three. I definitely belonged to the book’s target audience. Because of that, and because Furhman’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow and entertaining even when he’s getting into technical details about complicated research studies, I actually read the whole book during one weekend.

About halfway through I was convinced that his advice was sound and do-able and worth trying, but I’d promised you-know-who so dutifully continued reading right through to the last page. Then I got to work. Figured out a basic eating plan. Rid my kitchen of meat and dairy products. Became a regular at the Farmers’ Market, dragging home sacks full of more vegetables than I’d ever thought existed. And cut way back on bread, which was relatively easy since so much of my cheese consumption had been tied to bread and crackers. Because of the cancer I also traded artificially sweetened products for others that were naturally sweetened with agave or fruit juice, for example, and bought mostly organic foods. I’d had enough chemicals squirted into my body in the past few months, thank you.

(About now you are probably wondering whether I have forgotten that this blog is supposed to be about ice skating. Have patience, dear friends, it will all come together. Soon. Promise.)

I was happily surprised to discover that I didn’t miss cheese, formerly one of my staples, and that it was easy to make plant-based meals. I’ve never been much of a cook, more of a put-together-er – open a can of this, stir up a box of that, voila, a meal! Now it was chop a bunch of this, steam a pile of that, mix it all together and dive in.

Within a couple days of filling my body with vegetables and fruits and brown rice instead of bread and cheese and turkey and malitol-filled cookies, I was able to stop taking insulin. This is not an exaggeration. A couple days. Before this diet change my other diabetic medications had no longer been able to control my blood sugar by themselves. Now they could.

Within a few more days my weight started to drop. One pound. Then another. Two more. Could this actually be happening? It could! The scale was telling me a story I had never expected to see again in this life. My weight loss didn’t break any speed records, but it was steady and kept going and going and going until a little more than a year later I was wearing size 10-12 instead of size 22. Which is where I am now. And let me assure you, I’m lovin’ it!

I’m also loving the fact that instead of taking four diabetes pills and a daily insulin injection I’m down to one half of one pill, with blood sugar numbers that make my internist smile.

Meanwhile, back at the ice rink... Bet you thought we’d never get there. Go ahead, admit it!

OK, so last September I returned for another of those noon skates. What a difference! I could actually bend down and properly tie my boots in any of the three positions mentioned above, plus my feet and legs fit the skates better. No more abrasions.
What hadn’t changed, though, was that I still couldn’t skate. My body, vegan diet notwithstanding, had forgotten everything it used to know

Re-learning something is sort of better and sort of worse than learning the same thing from scratch. Unlike my Learn-to-Skate classmates, I am assured that I can do the basic moves because I have done them, to musical accompaniment even, albeit over 20 years ago. This knowledge is a source of both confidence in the future and frustration in the present, but the silver lining is that, with the help of a great coach who has infinite patience, I now have improved on those basics. I have straighter posture and better body awareness, and as I regain my former level I’ll be able to execute maneuvers with more skill and control.

Which is very important, because the way the skaters you watch on TV learned to fly through the air and spin like a top, the way for anyone to learn figure skating at any level, is a very step-by-step process. Each skill, from a lowly one-foot glide to a quadruple axel, builds on skills learned previously, and each is a building block to the next, so it’s important to learn each one well and properly before moving on. Getting to the day when you can figure skate with ease and some element of grace is a slow, laborious process.

Which brings me back to my original question: why am I doing it? There is nothing practical about a sport that requires unique equipment and an artificially created surface, that is an activity most of us can barely manage to approximate when we first try it, and that can only be practiced at specific times which often don’t fit well into work or school or family schedules.

And there’s nothing logical about an accidental athlete in her sixth decade with a lifelong, history of physical cowardice, aspiring to relearn how to spin and jump – teeny tiny half-jumps, but definitely manuevers that involve both feet leaving the ice.

I wonder if a review of skating adventures past will offer some clarity. Adventures like the housekeeper-mouse routine. Or the fire episode. Or the bunny hop that flopped. Or …

To be continued. (Since you asked.)