I bought a pair of HOKA Ones when I developed plantar fasciitis and I will never wear another pair of running shoes again. They're fantastic. This post is so deeply relatable—as someone who was intimidated by athletics and gyms for most of her life and balked at the Peloton, I'm now a fellow athletic-adjacent person who has kind of become a Peloton addict (even though I was worried I could never snap out of the bike and was wholly convinced that I'd die trying). In solidarity! Thank you for writing this post.
I somehow developed this idea growing up that Jews are not good at sports unless you are Sandy Koufax who even my Hungarian refugee grandmother adored. We watched a lot of sports but didn't do any. I'm not sure how I tied that into being Jewish but that same thinking (to me) was why we didn't go camping or have barbecues. Then I started running at age 58 after I moved to a new job and town where there is a marathon every year. And I run - a lot. Mostly by myself. Except for when I won my age group at 62 in the half-marathon two years ago. Someone congratulated me on being such a good athlete and I realized no one had ever used that word to describe me. I'm still not sure it fits. I have been running in New Balance but I might give HOKA a try.
I’m not really sure why it made me cry; partly because it is so beautifully written, I think. And I’m a sucker for beautiful writing.
And partly because I love that you found joy from something unexpected.
And partly because you’re a purchaser of questionable late-night internet items.
And partly because weeds are simply unwanted plants and all the plants in my world are wanted. What other people call weeds are beautiful. I love a dandelion. All the dandelions.
I have pursued RWF (running while fat) for a couple decades, after an impulse buy of a treadmill that had no more hope of training me for the Marine Corps Marathon (finisher 2001) than it did of becoming sentient and making cocktails. Hokas-a revelation! Sports bras that eliminate the threat of being knocked unconscious by my own body, praise the deity I don't believe in!! Reconciling my sense of loss at being raised by weed cultivators, just shy of Title-9 taking real root, so I could have signed myself up as I did for every other thing, took the Internet and connecting with others who never ask about your 5k time. An hour ago I would've said exercise, and sports, are still not really a thing for me-but then how to explain that this is the essay that drove me to a paying subscription?
A note of caution, hiking is a gateway to all kinds of new body experiences. This winter, at 60, I took up snowboarding. The morning after the first lesson I thought "I could have flushed $1,000 dollars down the toilet and thrown myself down a flight of stairs to feel like this." Now I'm scouring used equipment stores to outfit the granddaughter. Could afford new, but I'll be damned if I'll turn into a cultivator.
I love Annette Lareau's book Unequal Childhood, I read the 1st edition when my children were young/babies (I have older teenagers now, including a college student). I was part weed, part cultivated (80s latch key kid of educated, divorced parents, so the cultivation depended upon whether my father was paying child support and how many jobs my mother was working). Which practically meant that I went to ballet classes just often enough to know exactly how not good I was due to not being able to go regularly nor having started at a young enough age, you know 2 or so.
Lareau's book spoke to me as a young, educated affluent stay-at-home mother (I was determined to be home the way my mother had not been) and yet having been raised mostly weed, the cultivation I did with mine has been interesting to say the least. Which meant, practically, signing my children up and driving to gymnastics, music lessons, horse back riding and ballet and then letting them quit those spaces, even after they reached the 'prestigious' spaces of city youth symphonies, recruitable gymnastics talent (For Div 1 college), and pre-professional ballet.
It didn't matter that my children were well-cultivated and had some measure of 'talent', the environment was insane. My mostly weed self couldn't do what those other parents did in later stage cultivation - which looked liked the heavy, often destructive pruning and wiring one might find in bonsai youtube videos. Watching burnt out children being berated by their cultivator parents, watching the coaching/private lessons my children endured as they were being trained for 'greatness', I decided I would rather let my children be 'weeds' as they approached high school age.
Obviously, still a work in progress here so no results to really share except they seem happier not being cultivated at all times. But we definitely chose to disregard status within those spaces in choosing to leave.
This beautiful essay reminded me of the way people react to disabled athletes—they do not comprehend how a broken body can still move. I swim in a lane at the Y reserved for disabled people because it has a set of stairs you can use to get in and out. Old people who only see me swimming like to tell me to get out of the lane. When I limp around the pool’s edge and then get in and swim like a fish people are very, very confused. I was very, very, lucky to get thrown into competitive swimming when I was 11, right around the time my RA started to flare uncontrollably. Swimming is such an amazing sport for women—low-impact, all over cardio, etc. I had two coaches around that moment in my life who did not think that RA should stop me from being athletic. Before I started swimming, I was just ‘sick girl.’ I was still very sick when I was swimming, but I was an athlete first. I don’t know if my mother planned it this way, but swimming is the one thing I can still do well as the RA takes over. I don’t know how she paid for it, and I know it was and is a rich white kid’s sport. Kids who don’t have access to a pool are robbed of a sport that lasts a lifetime. Those Ivy League swim tests were testing something entirely different than swimming.
I go through phases of following and unfollowing a lot of athletic-adjacent accounts but you and Sue Dynarski are the two people on social media who most consistently #influence me to exercise when I don’t want to. Personally I enjoy that this role in my life is played by two extraordinarily impressive professors 😂
I also got way into hiking during the pandemic — I live close enough to Rock Creek Park that I can just wander in after work — and it’s kind of changed my whole relationship to exercise: you mean I can just do something I enjoy without trying to constantly improve or worrying about being bad at it, and it will make me feel better?! wild
Love everything about this piece. So many thoughts about the athleticism-social class link. Have spent the last many years un-doing childhood cultivated-athleticism and finding my "own-athlete" ways of health and activity. The recs look fantastic - thank you!
“Athletically adjacent,” I love this. Being an Appalachian weed, if I’m around cultivated folk it can feel like the “you look like a rube/one generation from poor white trash” scene when Clarice meets Hannibal.
I love this. I was also a kid who gravitated to the library (like a lot of people in these comments, probably). Last night I was realizing that have discovered physical activity over and over at different ages as my life changes and makes or closes off room for various kinds of activity. As a kid it was swimming, as college wound down I found I enjoyed running around in the park with friends chasing a ball or a frisbee. Grad school and parenthood ground everything to a halt for a several years and then I took up hiking with friends. The pandemic stopped that and I tried youtube yoga and now I play a silly exercise game. Life changes and I have to figure out again what works, but I think I'm finally starting to have the sense that there will be something that does work and that once I find it I will enjoy the heck out of it.
Makes me happy to hear about your hiking forays. My favorite time to hike since moving south is winter (more views, less humidity, fewer bugs) and gear definitely helps with that. I can relate re: plank to cobra cheats over the years - this is something I've been working on during the pandemic as well. Also a Hoka fan here, and thanks for the tip re: Athleta. Here's to the weeds & finally being adults!
I bought a pair of HOKA Ones when I developed plantar fasciitis and I will never wear another pair of running shoes again. They're fantastic. This post is so deeply relatable—as someone who was intimidated by athletics and gyms for most of her life and balked at the Peloton, I'm now a fellow athletic-adjacent person who has kind of become a Peloton addict (even though I was worried I could never snap out of the bike and was wholly convinced that I'd die trying). In solidarity! Thank you for writing this post.
I somehow developed this idea growing up that Jews are not good at sports unless you are Sandy Koufax who even my Hungarian refugee grandmother adored. We watched a lot of sports but didn't do any. I'm not sure how I tied that into being Jewish but that same thinking (to me) was why we didn't go camping or have barbecues. Then I started running at age 58 after I moved to a new job and town where there is a marathon every year. And I run - a lot. Mostly by myself. Except for when I won my age group at 62 in the half-marathon two years ago. Someone congratulated me on being such a good athlete and I realized no one had ever used that word to describe me. I'm still not sure it fits. I have been running in New Balance but I might give HOKA a try.
This post made me cry. And laugh.
I’m not really sure why it made me cry; partly because it is so beautifully written, I think. And I’m a sucker for beautiful writing.
And partly because I love that you found joy from something unexpected.
And partly because you’re a purchaser of questionable late-night internet items.
And partly because weeds are simply unwanted plants and all the plants in my world are wanted. What other people call weeds are beautiful. I love a dandelion. All the dandelions.
Anyway—thank you for writing it.
I have pursued RWF (running while fat) for a couple decades, after an impulse buy of a treadmill that had no more hope of training me for the Marine Corps Marathon (finisher 2001) than it did of becoming sentient and making cocktails. Hokas-a revelation! Sports bras that eliminate the threat of being knocked unconscious by my own body, praise the deity I don't believe in!! Reconciling my sense of loss at being raised by weed cultivators, just shy of Title-9 taking real root, so I could have signed myself up as I did for every other thing, took the Internet and connecting with others who never ask about your 5k time. An hour ago I would've said exercise, and sports, are still not really a thing for me-but then how to explain that this is the essay that drove me to a paying subscription?
A note of caution, hiking is a gateway to all kinds of new body experiences. This winter, at 60, I took up snowboarding. The morning after the first lesson I thought "I could have flushed $1,000 dollars down the toilet and thrown myself down a flight of stairs to feel like this." Now I'm scouring used equipment stores to outfit the granddaughter. Could afford new, but I'll be damned if I'll turn into a cultivator.
omg i love you so much. i laughed aloud reading this. <3
I love Annette Lareau's book Unequal Childhood, I read the 1st edition when my children were young/babies (I have older teenagers now, including a college student). I was part weed, part cultivated (80s latch key kid of educated, divorced parents, so the cultivation depended upon whether my father was paying child support and how many jobs my mother was working). Which practically meant that I went to ballet classes just often enough to know exactly how not good I was due to not being able to go regularly nor having started at a young enough age, you know 2 or so.
Lareau's book spoke to me as a young, educated affluent stay-at-home mother (I was determined to be home the way my mother had not been) and yet having been raised mostly weed, the cultivation I did with mine has been interesting to say the least. Which meant, practically, signing my children up and driving to gymnastics, music lessons, horse back riding and ballet and then letting them quit those spaces, even after they reached the 'prestigious' spaces of city youth symphonies, recruitable gymnastics talent (For Div 1 college), and pre-professional ballet.
It didn't matter that my children were well-cultivated and had some measure of 'talent', the environment was insane. My mostly weed self couldn't do what those other parents did in later stage cultivation - which looked liked the heavy, often destructive pruning and wiring one might find in bonsai youtube videos. Watching burnt out children being berated by their cultivator parents, watching the coaching/private lessons my children endured as they were being trained for 'greatness', I decided I would rather let my children be 'weeds' as they approached high school age.
Obviously, still a work in progress here so no results to really share except they seem happier not being cultivated at all times. But we definitely chose to disregard status within those spaces in choosing to leave.
This beautiful essay reminded me of the way people react to disabled athletes—they do not comprehend how a broken body can still move. I swim in a lane at the Y reserved for disabled people because it has a set of stairs you can use to get in and out. Old people who only see me swimming like to tell me to get out of the lane. When I limp around the pool’s edge and then get in and swim like a fish people are very, very confused. I was very, very, lucky to get thrown into competitive swimming when I was 11, right around the time my RA started to flare uncontrollably. Swimming is such an amazing sport for women—low-impact, all over cardio, etc. I had two coaches around that moment in my life who did not think that RA should stop me from being athletic. Before I started swimming, I was just ‘sick girl.’ I was still very sick when I was swimming, but I was an athlete first. I don’t know if my mother planned it this way, but swimming is the one thing I can still do well as the RA takes over. I don’t know how she paid for it, and I know it was and is a rich white kid’s sport. Kids who don’t have access to a pool are robbed of a sport that lasts a lifetime. Those Ivy League swim tests were testing something entirely different than swimming.
I go through phases of following and unfollowing a lot of athletic-adjacent accounts but you and Sue Dynarski are the two people on social media who most consistently #influence me to exercise when I don’t want to. Personally I enjoy that this role in my life is played by two extraordinarily impressive professors 😂
I also got way into hiking during the pandemic — I live close enough to Rock Creek Park that I can just wander in after work — and it’s kind of changed my whole relationship to exercise: you mean I can just do something I enjoy without trying to constantly improve or worrying about being bad at it, and it will make me feel better?! wild
Love everything about this piece. So many thoughts about the athleticism-social class link. Have spent the last many years un-doing childhood cultivated-athleticism and finding my "own-athlete" ways of health and activity. The recs look fantastic - thank you!
“Athletically adjacent,” I love this. Being an Appalachian weed, if I’m around cultivated folk it can feel like the “you look like a rube/one generation from poor white trash” scene when Clarice meets Hannibal.
Love this post. AllTrails is legit magic. We’ve used it in truly remote places and it’s like “oh yah, there’s a chill trail here no problem”
I love this. I was also a kid who gravitated to the library (like a lot of people in these comments, probably). Last night I was realizing that have discovered physical activity over and over at different ages as my life changes and makes or closes off room for various kinds of activity. As a kid it was swimming, as college wound down I found I enjoyed running around in the park with friends chasing a ball or a frisbee. Grad school and parenthood ground everything to a halt for a several years and then I took up hiking with friends. The pandemic stopped that and I tried youtube yoga and now I play a silly exercise game. Life changes and I have to figure out again what works, but I think I'm finally starting to have the sense that there will be something that does work and that once I find it I will enjoy the heck out of it.
Makes me happy to hear about your hiking forays. My favorite time to hike since moving south is winter (more views, less humidity, fewer bugs) and gear definitely helps with that. I can relate re: plank to cobra cheats over the years - this is something I've been working on during the pandemic as well. Also a Hoka fan here, and thanks for the tip re: Athleta. Here's to the weeds & finally being adults!
it's hard to view yourself as an athlete after being told to fix your feet for so long! was so thrilled to read this today.
"As it turns out, people know things and some of those things can improve the quality of your life."
You know what, I like the post but I just can't accept this, lol
"That is a catchall marketing term for anything offered at a studio that is taught by a Black teacher and involves learning how to use a pelvis."
Chapter and verse.