run

Week Two, Day 3

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

Do you ever watch videos of pastry baking? I do. All the time. I could write about ten entries about the amount of food videos I ingest through social media, but these have to be my favorite. It’s some of the most relaxing content the algorithm pushes at me. Little bundles of dough and batter, rising as the convection fan whirls in the background, something that was once unfinished, emerges from the oven a whole and complete thing. I always have this thought as I watch these tinty morsels bake; they look like they’re breathing. It’s crazy, I know, but they do. There is the first lift, inhale, they crest to their apex height, hold, and then as the steam releases through the structures of fat and carbs and sugar, they relax and deflate a little, exhale. Except of course if they’re a butter lattice cookie, then fuck, all bets are off. But like a croissant? The number of hours I’ve spent breathing with those golden laminated layers. 

Inhale. 

Rise.

Hold. 

Proof. 

Exhale. 

Consume. 

My dude Runicorn told me to take a deep breath when I opened the app today. I opened it ahead of the run to see if it would do me dirty again with another jog warmup, but, I think I’m safe for today. At first, I thought it was this foreboding suggestion, warning me of the intense workout ahead of me, but then he said that good breathing will help me to stay in control of my run. Leave it to my brain to jump to the worst possible conclusion when my little rainbow-tastic run-bud was only trying to give me good advice and be like my croissant and sourdough friends. 

Runicorn, you’re a real one, and if I’ve never told you before, I love ya. I do. You’re always looking out for me and reminding me of when I need to tune into my body. 

It’s probably telling of my fitness prowess that I don’t think much about my breath in regards to working out. It’s probably even more telling that I connect breath more to baking than I do to running. Maybe I should be blogging about baking. I’m realizing this should probably be a baking blog, but we’ve come too far, damnit.  

Sabrina, one of my oldest, best friends, practically my sister, trained me for a little while when we were in college, and she would always laugh when we were using weights. She was constantly reminding me to breathe. Exhale on the exertion, inhale on the restoration. “Bobo,” she’d say, “you have to breathe!”  An easy concept, right? Absolutely not. My first impulse when working out is to hold my breath and to hold it high and tight in my chest, like if I hold it long enough, I’ll, I don’t know, wake up from the nightmare that is me working out. 

But what’s wild is that, in my line of work, performing requires SO much breath. The most breath, in fact. To sing the shit I usually have to sing needs me to be directly on top of my breath, supported from my diaphragm, and consistent. Otherwise, my instrument won’t work. It literally won’t. Sound will not come out, or at least not a good sound. But it’s never been a problem for me, and I can’t think of a single time on stage where my body has let me down, not including a few poorly placed costume mishaps, but my breath was not the culprit there. You would be amazed the things you can do when there are lights shining on you and people out there in the dark watching. 

So what is this disconnect in regards to my breath and working out? What isn’t lining up here? 

Before the pandemic, I took a seminar with an incredible voice teacher here in the city. A bunch of my friends had taken with him over the years, and I’d always wanted to, but, like so many wonderful things in this world, he was always just out of my price range. So when the studio I take classes with offered me a **free** slot in this afternoon session, I jumped at the chance. 

This teacher’s whole philosophy is that singers and performers are athletes. I remember sitting in that small room with my little notepad and felt my face get hot. I, who am many things, have never been considered, called, or counted as an athlete, not even when I rowed crew in high school, which was my favorite sport I’d even been a part of, but it was always just this thing I did after school. I could never be an athlete. Fat people aren’t athletes. We’re fat. It was too big of an oxymoron for my brain to wrap around. 

Sitting in that room with this accusation that I could somehow be an athlete, I was singularly aware of every single person around me. I was by far the largest person there – which is another fun thing that I do, I clock how many plus-sized people there are in whatever room I’m in – and I felt like maybe I was invited by mistake? You know, like, only the really fit and agile people were supposed to be at this seminar where we are all suddenly athletes, and I felt myself trying to shrink down. I slumped into my seat, rounded my shoulders and wished that I could pop myself out of existence. Because if we were going to be talking about how we’re athletes, we were going to be talking about all of the ways in which I was not one, and I wasn’t ready for that. I hadn’t done the emotional prep, the armor building if I may, to sit through three hours of what I assumed was going to be an awful time.  

I didn’t want to be there. 

And I had so badly wanted to be there only moments ago. But with this new descriptor as “athlete,” I felt like an outlier, and I was waiting for a giant scarlet F to appear on my sweater. 

But I stayed, and I listened, and I took notes, and the more he talked, the more I felt this shift happen inside of me. The way he used the word athlete, the way he spoke about the things our bodies have to do, the running and dancing around, the boxes and set pieces climbed up and over and on, all while maintaining our, wait for it, breath. The stamina that doing a show requires. The way that performing is a full fucking contact sport. 

It blew my mind. 

Because art is art, and sports are sports. 

It’s been that way since the beginning of art and sports, right? 

RIGHT?! 

THEN WHY WAS WHAT HE SAID MAKING SO MUCH SENSE?! 

And furthermore, what could it mean if I was ticking off all of these boxes, right? What could it mean if I could do all of these things….inside of a plus-sized body? Could…could it mean that I might be an athlete?! 

Afterall, he didn’t once mention size. Not. Once. There was no image he was parading around as “this is the physical manifestation of what an athlete should look like,” no. He was talking about the way we train. The type of physical activities we have to be able to do. The way our bodies work in full congruence with our abilities and talents. 

I wasn’t ready to accept it just then, but this revolutionary seed was planted in my mind. 

Was I an athlete?

Fast forward through a short pandemic, and I found myself at The Public, which had been a bucket list theater of mine, working on what could only be described as a dream show with a dream cast and team. The set was stairs. In a single show, and I know this because I counted one night, I did 40 flights of stairs. That’s 80 flights on a 2 dow-shay, and a staggering 200 flights over the course of a 5-show weekend. 

Two. Hundred. Flights. Of. Stairs. 

In a corset. 

Singing some of the most beautiful and challenging music of my career. 

And I was doing it. 

WAS I A FUCKING ATHLETE?! 

AM I A FUCKING ATHLETE?!?!?!?!

Honestly, y’all, I feel like I can say that on stage, without a shadow of a doubt, fuck yeah, I’m an athlete. Because for an industry as hard and fleeting and challenging as mine is, the one place where I feel like my best, baddest, most untouchable self, is on stage. I do what I do and I do it well. If there is a hurdle that is giving me pause, I reassess and I regroup and I find a way to train through it so that I can, quite literally, be performing at my best. It makes sense to me, but then again, performing always had made sense to me. It clicks in my brain and I can see the stage like I imagine how some sports people can sort of float above and see the playing field. It’s exhilarating to know that about myself. To know that I, in this body, can sing and dance, and sprint up stairs to hit my mark. I love it.

But…….

                                               …you put me on the street….. 

………or a treadmill…….

                                              …..and I’m like…….am I an athlete? 

Fuck if I know. 

I’m inclined to say no, but that wee little bebé of a revolutionary seed has more than taken root, and if it’s true on stage, then why can’t it also be true out here in these streets? I know it comes back to mindset, and I think we can all agree that this is the thing I need to **work on** the most. But Runicorn reminding me to breathe, it’s like, I know how to do that. I know how to sustain that breath. So let’s work on breaking out of this mentality that I am somehow less than inside of my body while working out when I know how to feel like a fucking god inside of it on stage. 

The biggest thing I’m going to hone in on today is the way this teacher talked about how our bodies are designed. Did you know, because I didn’t until that day, that we are actually designed to breathe better with our mouths closed? I know, wild. And if you’re anything like me, you’re like, but how do I take in enough air?! And that is the eternal question. Therein lies the rub, as it were. Because most of the time, this is not difficult for me to do. As I sit here typing this, my mouth is not slack-jawed, taking in huge gulps of air. I’m breathing easily and smoothly through my nose. In the past, when I’ve tried to implement this into my workouts, however, I have failed miserably. It’s like my nose is sitting there on my face telling me that it is just not possible to take in enough air through this orifice to support the amount of body it’s trying to power. But it has to be, right? It’s designed to do this. And, going back to what I wrote yesterday, I’m not going to try and force this, ok? I’m not going to only breathe through my nose and then pass out because I haven’t been taking in enough oxygen, but I am going to be mindful of this today. Build the habit of it. 

Many of my runner friends say that running is like meditation for them, and honestly, right now, I think I’m too focused on the pain my body is feeling and the exhaustion rippling through me, but every meditation app I’ve ever used says to start slow. Start small. Focus on one thing. Bring your, ironically, breath to the front and center your goal around that. But start small. 

So today, I, an athlete, will focus on my breath, thanks to my pal Runicorn and his beautiful suggestion for this run. I will become the croissant. I am, the croissant. Just be the croissant.

Thirty-one minutes on the clock. And then two days of recovery. What a fucking gift that will be. 

Ok. 

Starting small. 

Off we go. 

POST-RUN MORTUM

Running Time: 31 minutes 

 Distance Achieved: 2.16 miles

Tunage: Heathers, I just bopped all around it

Runner Milestone Unlocked: Said “on your left” while passing two walkers, felt like a bad bitch

Ok, honestly shocked I hit that distance because I felt like a pile of poo the whole time. My body is tired, y’all. My legs are throbbing, my feet are screaming, and my arms are so sore. Did you know that arms are so involved, because I did not. I felt like I had ankle weights pulling me down and like I was running into a headwind. I was also wicked distracted during the walking bits. I checked my phone on three separate occasions, which I haven’t done on any of the other runs. 

In terms of breathing, though, I gotta say I’m pretty proud of myself. I tried to implement square breathing, where you inhale and exhale for the same amount of time, and I’m realizing right now that I have no idea if this is actually a good thing to do while exercising, hold, please. 

Ok! Hell yeah! Google says that it’s good! Apparently, a lot of runners implement square/box breathing into easier runs!! Which makes a certain sense because, if I’m being honest, that kind of breathing felt very natural to me. For the most part, I was on an in-for-four-out-for-four cycle, but there were times when it was five and five and then three and three. Interestingly enough, I found it to be the most difficult while walking, specifically coming out of the run into the walking portion of the interval training, that was when my mouth most wanted to open, and my breath was at its heaviest. And there were a few times when I did breathe through my mouth, to be sure, but then every time I felt myself doing it, I returned to breathing through my nostrils. 

It felt good to find breath like that inside of what otherwise didn’t feel like a super great run. But again, meditation tells us that the habit will come from the practice, so I will continue to practice this. 

And now I’m going to stretch for the rest of the day and likely take a bath in Epsom salt for the following two days. And a brownie. A brownie feels right for this mother fucking athlete.