Conflicted about public speech

Hi. I always threaten that this will be my last post, and yet it somehow never is. I am a conflicted blogger because I have things I want to say and at the same time I am acutely aware of how powerful public speech can be. However, I did delete my doula blog. While it is important that I have an online presence, I believe that the bulk of what people come to know about me should come from direct communication, preferably in person but also by phone or email. It's not that I don't want broadcasting methods like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc to stand in for one-on-one communication, it's that I am just not very good at that kind of broadcasting, or I don't know what it's good for or how to use it properly. When it comes down to it, I'd really just rather spend my time talking to people.

You can find my doula web page at: http://www.nycdoulaservice.com/ourservices/hana.html.

Feel free to email or call me directly if you want to know more about me. I think this is really it for now.

Officially Resting from Wrestling

I’ve decided to let this blog lapse. I’m no longer a wrestler (although I am still a writer and reader) and would like to separate that part of my life a little bit from what I am working on now. You can find my new blog at: www.hanaleora.blogspot.com. Here is the first post.

I have always been concerned with helping women develop their full physical strength. As a wrestler I constantly came up against assumptions that women couldn’t or shouldn’t be physically powerful. At the same time, I competed in tournaments with hundreds of extremely strong women from all over the world. I always saw their strength as fundamentally feminine, rather than a masculine overlay to their gender; it was one of their basic characteristics and an expression of a potential that every woman has, whether she develops it or not. The women I had the privilege of coaching knew this instinctively as they learned how to lift, throw and take people down and as they became stronger through weight training, running, swimming, and competing. Even little girls, if they haven’t yet been taught what’s proper (and often even if they have), take great pleasure in huffing and puffing up a hill on their bike or knocking their brother down.

I’ve now been trained to coach women in a different kind of physical force. I’m about to start a (moonlight) career as a doula, a nonmedical labor assistant who helps women give birth. Ancient people knew that birthing women needed extra help for physical and emotional support, whether that help came in the form of family and friends or other women in the community. It is only recently that modern hospitals began allowing male partners into the delivery room and even more recently they have been allowing doulas in. A doula can make a huge positive improvement in the woman’s ability to deal with pain and the length of the labor, and can decrease the number of intrusive interventions. In a way, she takes the place of the traditional birthing community.

My father was a family doctor who delivered low-risk women with a minimum of intervention outside the hospital, and I consider myself a folk expert on women’s reproductive health. With a high rise iron worker, a marathon runner, and a postwar PhD in the family, I come from a good legacy of strong women. It is natural that I come to this kind of work eventually. But other than those forces of good, I am compelled by two pressing issues: one, the shocking lack of confidence most women have in their bodies, especially when it comes to matters of physical prowess, and two, dismal maternal mortality and morbidity rates that already rank the US lower than over 40 other countries and appear to be underreported. As a doula, I can help women one at a time, but I’d also like to make as big an impact as possible with my writing.

Please tell me what you think – I welcome any and all comments about these issues, and ideas on how we can do more.

Fads and feet

The New York Times printed an article yesterday about barefoot running. I have not tried running in the barefoot shoes, only hiking – but advocates of running tout it for the same reasons I love my barefoot shoes, mainly that they allow the foot its full range of natural movement.

There are too many “natural” trends going on right now and I wonder if any of them will become anything more than fringe subcultures. I’ve heard that CSA (community supported agriculture) memberships are in such high demand that I’d do well to get on a waiting list now for next spring. I’ve also heard that the memberships are extremely expensive and have not yet investigated whether this is true, but I’ve seen farmer’s market prices with my own eyes. The Lincoln Center farmer’s market tends to be slightly better than Union Square, but still very pricey when compared with most supermarkets. It appears that this natural-food-craze has driven up the price of a limited supply of vegetables without really increasing the supply – or maybe I’m just being cynical.

Americans have always been obsessed with health and personal physical fitness. I could recite an endless list of fads including Atkins diet and carb-o-phobia, bans on trans fats and a New York ban on salt (in the works?), as well as NY’s ongoing ad campaign against sugary drinks. All of these have some appeal to me as someone interested in health and lifestyle, but they are way too narrow and seem to go too far in the opposite direction. Maybe they are the inevitable result of a system that thrives on megacultivation of food monocultures processed into packages and sold by the careful application of marketing genius. What comes out the other end of the system may challenge it but ultimately does so by similar means – sensationalism, contrarian beliefs and overall the insistence that there is only one “right” way.

I still think that all my shoes benefit my feet in different ways. I’m not going to throw away my running shoes – but don’t be surprised if you see me trying out the lightfooted barefoot run around the reservoir now and again.

Hiking in the barefoot shoes

I went hiking last week in the barefoot shoes. Walking in them in the city is fine, and it’s nice to feel barefoot, but at the end of the day the pavement is only hard and flat. Rigid shoes fit this kind of standardized walking landscape because the straight edge of the shoe matches the flat plane of the sidewalk or subway platform or floor. Walking on flat planes makes it easy to let your foot roll in and to let the arch collapse, because there’s nothing really to stimulate it or make it work. It does to your feet what a desk job does to your back. This is why many shoes provide “support.”

Hiking, on the other hand, is the equivalent of lifting weights or playing sports for your feet, and I’m not convinced that feet need all-enveloping support for this activity, provided they are moderately strong. Most people’s foot muscles have atrophied from disuse, so they would need some strengthening before they could fully participate, but I think that big blocky hiking boots are unnecessary and even detrimental to feet that have regained some of their natural strength.

Barefoot shoes allow the foot, and especially the toes, to flex and extend to match the uneven terrain of the trail. They allow the various parts of the foot to be used in different ways and move independently rather than all as one unit. They allow the wearer the pleasure of feeling the give and texture of the ground underfoot, the shoes really facilitate using the feet as tools, rather than just blocks. The foot is a complex arrangement of bones, ligaments and muscles and should be used as such.

Also, we found a delicious laetiporous sulphureus on that hike, at least 5 pounds worth.

Sounds like a sex toy, but isn’t: a natural history of my feet

New shoes might seem like a silly reason to blog, but these are no ordinary shoes. They’re barefoot shoes – a rubber sole to protect your sole from sharp things, and not much else. They don’t provide arch support, they don’t bounce, they don’t have air pockets or springs or cantilevers. They just free the feet from being confined in boxes or walking on the blocks that we usually strap to our feet.

For a long period of time when I was a little kid, I refused to wear any shoes except for completely flat sandals, and it drove my parents crazy. They blamed themselves when I went to the podiatrist at age 12 with flat feet, saying that they should have forced me to wear “real” shoes – in spite of the fact that multiple people in my family have flat feet. The podiatrist made orthotics for me and forbade me from wearing sandals, telling my parents that if I wore the orthotics all the time, I might just be able to avoid foot catastrophe. My lack of natural arch support put extra pressure on my first and fifth metatarsal joints, pressure that has been connected with the formation of bunions. The podiatrist hoped that the orthotics would redistribute the pressure and keep the bones of my foot in something like their “natural” geometry.

For the past 15 years I’ve worn the orthotics on and off, and I’ve also spent a whole lot of time running around barefoot or in shoes that provide no “support.” I think it is telling that I spent lots of time on my feet wrestling – lifting people, pushing and competing – in shoes that had completely flat soles. I developed strong feet wrestling and climbing and I think I’ve done pretty well. I’ve developed very small bunions that only hurt when I wear high heels and my feet are relatively healthy.

So the barefoot shoes are the logical next step. I’ll probably have to strengthen my feet slowly before I can really run in them, but I’m not a big fan of jogging anyway. I’d rather sprint, play games, and go on hikes.

I’m not going to abandon my other shoes. They all have their uses, even the high heels, and as long as I don’t wear any of them too often or too long, my feet should keep getting healthier. I think this barefoot shoe represents a technology of an interesting type – one that allows our bodies to do what they’re built to do. There aren’t many of these around, but I’d like to see more. Such technology should be simple but useful; the first one that comes to mind is fertility awareness. People may think I am a Luddite because I don’t take birth control hormones, relying instead on my body’s own hormonal cycle, when in fact I use an electric thermometer and a computer, as well as medical knowledge, to help me. Without that technology, I’d be flying blind.

And the best thing about these shoes is their name: Vibram Five Fingers.

Why I quit (1)

It's no shame to reject something great if you would have to do it all by yourself.

Going to Europe for six weeks?

Drinking a nice bottle of wine?

Having a baby?

Competing in the Olympics?

These are great, fulfilling, wonderful things to do, but they ring hollow if you imagine doing them all by yourself, or worse, with someone you don't like.  That's one of the reasons I quit wrestling and why I'm not going to start again.

There is some intrinsic value in accomplishment for its own sake.  It gives me infinite pleasure to practice a skill that I have spent a long time acquiring; to show that skill in front of others; and to take pride in what I can do.  If I had started wrestling by myself then maybe I would appreciate these things more.  But I had the best coach and mentor money could buy (that's a joke – he did it absolutely free) and after having trained with him, all I see with others are diminishing returns.

Hard Work Is Cumulative