Things That Have To Be Said

"Oh, but the difficult is coming..." Dave Matthews

I've been quiet lately. I've had my nose to the grindstone on the bike. I've had my nose to the grindstone trying desperately to lose this very elusive five pounds. I've managed to grind myself right into dust these past few days. All because of a number on the scale and in the waistband of my jeans. Yes, yes, I know... when I'm training hard isn't the time to try to magically lose the weight I managed to gain over the holidays. I should know better.

But all those years of being nagged about my weight as a kid came back to haunt me, like ghosts knocking at the door of my mind. This is hard to write, hard as hell to tell. It's hard to think of those days, and even harder to live my life trying to prove people wrong twenty years later. Why I think I should have to prove wrong a bunch of small-minded idiots whom I haven't even seen since I graduated high school, and have long proven them wrong, is an encrypted mystery. (If you don't think there need to be mechanisms - clubs - to protect people outside the norm from bullying, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong. Those words that supposedly bounce off are the sticks and stones that break your heart and stay with you forever.)

But some days, I can't look at myself and see the strong, smart, funny girl I've become. Some of the days, I wake up, and all I see is the jeans that fit too tight on my thighs built thick from thousands of pedal revolutions, squats and dead lifts, and steps on trails. And so I say, "Just a little more wattage... or maybe just a little less food." Because I'm a person who lives at the extremes, and usually it serves me well. But it can never get the chip off my shoulder.

The years were long, trying to erase the past in less healthy ways than spinning my legs on a bike. I was at war with my body, trying to beat it into submission, to just get it to do what I wanted it to do. Then I discovered the bike, and the magnificent monster-machine-body that I live in and what it was capable of doing if I was good to it. And I worked hard to be the best monster-machine that I could be. I didn't realize, though, that along the way all those adaptations would make it harder for me, with my past and the body image that resulted from the words that rained down on me, to continue that self respect.

Food is very much back to being a give-and-take. It's a gentle tug-of-war, to fuel right and not over or under the line in the tank. It's a fight some days to not give into the voices from my past. On those days, I need to learn to be gentler with myself. I'm not perfect. I can't expect that, in my appearance, on the bike, as a parent, as a wife, friend, daughter. I can't continue using up my glycogen stores on the stress firing in my brain instead of in my legs. But I can be good to myself, and excellent to those around me. I think that kindness is how the chip goes away, or at least hurts less.