She's also in her mid thirties and just destroyed it at Canada West Regionals. Being two thirds as awesome as Nancy M or Jennifer D would be cool, too. They are also around my age.
I've got a few check points that I'm working towards. I've signed up for the Spartan Race in Calgary as part of Team Meathead. I'm also going to do the Prairie CrossFit Challenge in September, SK Powerlifting Provincials (REALLY want to qualify for Nationals again) in November and then FrostFit in January, if Winnipeg hosts it again.
There were three things that finally pried me off the couch. The first was Amberly during our "Phat Club" days (oh my...) who pointed something out to me after dropping my first 20 or so pounds while eating low fat whole wheat muffins and yogurt (it's the official food of women... watch the video, I'll wait)
Back to Amberly, she asked me how much weight I could have lost if I'd actually, you know, got off the couch. So I did. With Fit to Strip. Yeah....
The next was Kat Carney, who runs the SoulCysters site posting a link to a few research papers on the benefit of resistance exercise on improving insulin resistance in women with PCOS (the couch/pizza ordering existence did me no favours - my body was like a car on blocks parked in someone's front lawn...). That got me dusting off my old copy of Bill Phillips' Body for Life book and doing bicep curls and leg extensions in my half storey.
The third, and most profound, was Mistress Krista's posts about the shaky man in the gym on her Stumptuous website. Neil has Parkinson's and has been doing intense physical exercise and heavy weight training since sometime in 2005. He's caught the interest of Parkinson's researchers with the positive outcomes he's experienced. Parkinson's and Dystonia have a lot in common. Same area of the brain, same neurotransmitter and a lot of the drugs developed for Parkinson's are used to treat people with Dystonias. The drug I had been on, trihexphenidyl, was an anti-Parkinson's agent. Reading his email exchanges (here, here and here) got me wondering if there was a better way to exercise and wondering if intense physical activity could also help me with my Dystonia. Sure enough, it did! His emails also made me realize that doing supersets with a 12lb dumbbell was maybe selling myself short a little.
Krista just posted another update about Neil. According to her post, he's featured in a video created for Professor Bastiaan (Bas) Bloem, who is a world-leading neurologist in the field of movement disorders. Oh, the link to the professor includes a great TED presentation and a really fun presentation of a guy with Parkinson's who can barely walk but can ride his bike just fine... yay for the adaptive power of grey matter! Hmm, this could be why I can clean 135lbs for 2 reps when I'm so symptomatic I can barely stand and putting my own plates on the bar is impossible (thanks for loading my bar, Ang!).
Check it out! Dude's achieved a level of fitness that most people never will. And did I mention he's in his 60's? Yeah, pretty cool.
I know I've been yammering on about Dystonia a lot lately. But I think it's important to try and get the word out there that there ARE people out there with neurological disorders who are seeing benefits from intense physical activity. I know what it's done for me and I also know that, being without a neuro right now, no one in the medical community even knows it. I think it's worth studying and I'm so pleased that Neil's experiences are getting some attention.
I thanked Neil a few months ago for getting me off the couch. I don't know. Maybe someone with a movement disorder will stumble across my blog some day and this will encourage them to give their local CrossFit gym a call.
The alternate title for this post was "So not the way I wanted to raise awareness that it's the start of Dystonia Awareness Week". Heh!
After I crawled into bed last night, post Spring Fling and 5 gin and tonics, I had a moment. Earlier that night Taryn had asked me if I was going to try and figure out where I would have placed if I hadn't had a bad day with my movement disorder and it hadn't meant taking a huge hit on the first WOD. I came in dead last on that one and even though I crawled my way up on the rest of them with a second and two firsts, it wasn't enough to make up for it. I told her I didn't' want to because it would just bum me out even more.
And yeah, I'll admit it. I was bummed out. And my ego was smarting. I'm probably a bit too competitive for my own good. I don't like it when I don't do well and I REALLY don't like it when it's because of my dystonia.
Enter the gin.
My dystonia is a part of me. It's part of who I am as an athlete. I bring it with me to every competition just like I do all of my other skills, abilities, strengths and weaknesses. I did how I did based on what I bring to the table - the whole package. Figuring out where I would have placed if I had been symptom free that day would be like figuring out how I would have placed if I was a different person altogether.
Today, I sat down and sketched out my training from now until sectionals start up again next year. I took a look at my weaknesses and where I want to go and what I want to accomplish. One of those things is showing a little more grace when it comes to being a disabled athlete.
