The Dirt Field

Things have been better lately. You might think I’d have melted down over Thanksgiving, what with it being a holiday focused on food. Sure, there are themes of gratitude and family and sales on off-brand electronics, but all of these are commemorated with eating, which has the potential for disaster when you’re a neurotic, anxiety-prone bulimic. (Side note: I LOATHE THAT WORD. It’s right up there with “panties” and “Portugal” and “cockroach”, the latter of which is so vile I can barely stand to see it in print.)

To mitigate the urge to hugely overindulge on Thanksgiving itself, I made and snacked on extra versions of several of my favorite dishes in the preceding days, so when it came time for the big meal itself, I was less inclined to dive face first into all of the food. It was more like going to a strip club where half of the strippers are your ex-girlfriends; I was all STUFFING! TURKEY! but not all SWEET POTATO SOUFFLE! CORN BREAD PUDDING! since I’d been eating those a lot already and wasn’t excited about them anymore. It meant that the meal was nice and enjoyable but not so weighty and unmanageable that I had to barf it back up or cry over it. So, that was a win.

I did preemptively counteract Thanksgiving guilt by working out each day last week, despite it being a rest week. This included a ridiculous session of intensive cardio at the office gym several hours before Thanksgiving dinner, which left me nearly incapacitated for riding and ultimately led to learning a hard lesson: the body’s capacity for suffering has a limit. By Sunday, I’d so far surpassed that limit that I was actually willing to take a day entirely off exercise for the first time in over four weeks.

My inclination was to also take the day off from eating, but as I said before, things have been better lately and so I didn’t. A good friend talked some sense into me at a party one night last week; he’s a rider I have trusted and admired for several years, and for some reason his words actually sank in where nothing else seemed to have worked. He spoke frankly about the effects of my actions, pointing out that I could lose the spot I’d worked so hard to earn on my team and that my strength as a rider was being threatened directly by my actions. These things seem obvious, but I’ve been able to ignore or gloss over them for the last few months. This time, I finally heard them and started to feel like I could be different. It felt like I could trust his words and use them against the unhealthy voice.

He also told me, “Your weight was never the problem,” and, “We don’t train to lose weight, we train to get stronger.” These phrases stuck in my head so firmly that I think about them several times a day now and repeat them over and over. When I panic about something I’ve eaten or think about skipping food on a ride, I think of what he said and stop the behavior. It’s not 100% effective and there are a lot of bad habits left to break, but this feels like progress. This newfound wisdom made it feel okay to take a day off from working out while still allowing myself to have food.

Also, I used my free time on Sunday to try the Laotian menu at Bangkok Golden and it was so delicious, I ate two full entrees. So that pretty much put a damper on the whole “no exercise = no eat” plan anyway.

It feels good to be getting control of things a little. Sure, I Googled the caloric content of the cough drops I took earlier to help my sore throat, but that knowledge didn’t translate into then running for 30 seconds to burn it off (although I’m still thinking about those 20 calories nearly seven hours later). It feels almost like sanity begets sanity; after a few days of behaving almost normally, it starts to make normal behavior seem like the norm. Or in simpler terms, the farther I get from throwing up a milkshake, the more insane it seems to throw up a milkshake. And then one day in the future, while I’m puking my face off with a stomach virus or food poisoning, I’ll reflect on that part of my past and think, “I used to do this on purpose…WTF. IDIOT.”