Running shoes – reboot

Running shoes bought second hand at OKC Salvation Army store, washed, disinfected and restored by me – March 12, 2019 – Marilia Coutinho

I’m a fan of restoring stuff. Most of the time I wouldn’t need to: I restored two pairs of 15 year old converse Allstars that were overused and beaten (I used them for lifting and for daily life). I bought new insoles, shoelaces and they will remain my companions for the rest of their and my life.

Old Converse Allstar shoes – restored on February 2019 – OKC – Marilia Coutinho

When I restored my old pair of Mikuno running shoes, they looked great but something happened: they bruised my ankle raw. I felt some burning but only realized how bad it was when I took them off and the left show was stained with blood.

Restored Mikuno running shoes – OKC 2019 – Marilia Coutinho

My first thought was that the thorough and furious washing and disinfecting had damaged the material, making it tough. When I used my old Nike pair again for the treadmill work, the same thing happened.

That was a mystery. Why were all running shoes causing this bruising now?

My hypothesis is that my footstrike changed.

Some time ago, I bought a pair of water shoes to wear at home/office not only for comfort but as an attempt to fix my footstrike. I am a “heel-striker”, possibly a mix of anatomy and long-time use of hard-sole shoes like boots and thick-sole sneakers.

Water shoes – bought second hand, restored and cleaned – the second one didn’t have the new insoles yet – February 2019, OKC – Marilia Coutinho

I could hear my heel-strike as I walked through the house. Gradually, I heard it less. My footstrike was changing.

While I don’t figure out what exactly happened, I decided to try new running shoes. I bought four pairs at the Salvation Army for less than $20. As always, I proceeded to furiously clean and disinfect them and there they are: two Nikes, one Adidas and one Sketchers (I had never heard of this brand).

I chose to begin with this Nike Darwin:

Nike Darwin, bought second hand on March 2019, OKC, restored – Marilia Coutinho

It is probably one or two sizes bigger than what my size would be. That is one of the tricks I learned: my “true size” is not ideal anymore (or never was). There is no space for my toes and, when I ran street races, back in 2004, my toenails would always get hurt, necrotic and fall off. I learned a trick with other runners: covering the nails with vaseline and tape. As far as I understand now, this was an attempt to adapt to bad shoe design.

The slightly oversized Nike Darwin feels great. I don’t think I ever used shoes like these and I used to buy the most expensive running shoes the running community adopted. They are light and confirm the thesis that walking and running do not require extra heel cushioning. This is a review I found online: https://runrepeat.com/nike-darwin

I will try the others but one thing I notices is that they are all heavier than the Darwin Nike.

Several lessons here:

1. we keep changing movement patterns way after early adulthood and even those we think will never be fixed may be.
2. shoes matter
3. I won’t buy anything new unless I know they are ideal and a used one can’t be found, such as lifting shoes.

More later on this.

Let go, push away, forgive – just getting the job done

Salvation Army Family Store at Oklahoma City, OK

Wednesday I took a bag full of items to donate to the Salvation Army. Among the items were about 15 or more t-shirts from organizations that hurt me through wrongdoings I could never punish them for. Looking at the picture below, it is clear which one kept me in the dark longer but not necessarily hurt me more.

The IPL/USPA are brand names belonging to a company called Denison Powerlifting Inc. It is a powerlifting meet organizing organization but the brands are also associated to certain other services and products – an apparel line, courses, seminars, etc.

Unlike sports federations in Latin American or Eastern European countries, they are not government approved organizations under the ministry of Sports, necessarily non-profit and frequently highly corrupt. Sports organizations in the USA are mostly regular, for-profit corporations.

Nothing wrong with that except for the deceiving marketing that suggests some charitable action (“by lifters, for lifters”). Because of this confusing marketing, these companies cause a lot of personal harm to folks that gravitate towards them for more altruistic reasons.

That was my case: I created a federation in Brazil, affiliated it with them, lost thousands of dollars because I failed to understand this basic fact: it’s a company. If there is no market for the service I am willing to offer, then there is no point in creating a local branch.

When I moved to the USA, the Brazilian branch died. It died a painful death and seriously unethical and harmful actions from individuals naturally attracted to the headquarter’s true nature caused me important losses.

That didn’t end there, though: for reasons not entirely clear to me, the American headquarters attracts shady types even when money doesn’t exchange hands (but it does, a lot). I ended up resigning as international referee, as member of the Executive Committee and never renewed my membership.

Wrongdoings by high ranking officials, some of which also resigned amid scandals, also caused problems and losses for me. Most of all, though, it caused deep resentment. I resent being lied to and being taken advantage of. I will happily donate my (highly qualified) work when and where I see it will contribute for the greater good.

I think this is the pain: I misunderstood the organization.

There is a deeper level of pain, though: I misunderstood the sport and this is entirely on me. For years, I repeated the mantra according to which powerlifting “saved me” (from death). This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Nothing in the sport, as an institutionalized social activity, came even close to helping me, let alone saving me. What saved me was my own, intimate relationship with the lifts.

How it did it is a story for another day, though.

The other two companies I made sure to purge my wardrobe from are strength gyms where I was taken advantage of and severely hurt.

I pushed them away with this donation. I’m not sure if I let go. I don’t think so: otherwise, why would I keep a picture of the t-shirts, a permanent reminder that they once existed and the debt is still open?

I will obviously never forgive them. I don’t believe in forgiveness without a sincere apology and attempt to make amends from those who committed a wrongdoing. It is just off the table. Letting go… perhaps. Not yet, though.

As this little blog is an attempt at honesty and self-honesty in the necessary self-appraisal protocol, I believe my mind still entertains payback.

Getting rid of the t-shirts was a step, though.

We’ll see how this goes.

Making the bed

I make my bed every day.

I was going to write “as I wake up” but that’s not true: the first thing I do is turn off the sleep monitor app, check the recording and monitor my HRV (heart rate variation). All that while still in bed, but with glasses on already.

This, for example, was a bad night:

This was a good night, or as good as it gets:

Before I used the apps I just manually logged in everything, every day.

I crave normalcy, constancy and routine. Maybe because right now it is either that or lethal chaos. Maybe because I didn’t have that at all during my life.

I hate to travel, particularly air travel, particularly international travel. Yet, among the people I know, I’m the one who traveled the most.

I hate disorder. Yet, I have lived in disorder more than in order.

I handle uncertainty under protest and quite efficiently, and I had more than my share of uncertainty.

Making the bed in the morning, before changing out of my pajamas, before anything, though, is my one true sign of clinging to constancy. That’s how later on I can face a welcoming bed for my daily struggle with nightmares and sleep disorder.

The parking lot seagulls

Parking lot seagulls, March 1 2019 – Marilia Coutinho
Oklahoma City, OK

Humans seek constancy and continuity. Even the most adventurist or reckless person needs some level of constancy. Call it normalcy, controlled conditions, it doesn’t matter: to thrive for change, something must be constant otherwise there is no parameter for change.

My father was a bird watcher: he had several pairs of binoculars and would spend hours at the beach house, in the Atlantic Rainforest, watching birds in the woods his kept at his property. He would then look them up classify them and draw them.

I’m an urban bird pattern watcher. I watch birds in electric lines, parks, turnpikes and parking lots. I particularly like the birds at the 29th and 59^th street crossing, where go every week to train at Planet Fitness.

The seagulls are always there, at “their” spot. They have a spot and they have watch towers: the light posts.

They weren’t there today. Instead, pigeons, whose spot is closer to the car entrance to the small plaza, fluffed their feathers against the cold.

Where are the seagulls?

Parking lot pigeons – Oklahoma City, OK – Planet Fitness 59th street
Marilia Coutinho, March 1 2019

I must check tomorrow. It’s important to know where they are, where the pigeons are, where the crows are, where the few ravens are and also those tiny black birds in the electric line.

I open the door, I check in, the same people say hello and know that I need a padlock. Why? Because one day, I locked myself out of the locker and they had to rescue me, cutting my padlock. Since then, I have bought and donated 6 padlocks to the gym. They have a few padlocks they let the members borrow, but the gym is growing. When there are no padlocks, I walk to the neighbor dollar store and buy two padlocks for them. They protested the first time I did that. They gave up: I told them I’d rather they kept it because I was going to lock myself out again and another padlock would be destroyed. That’s what I do.

I need the treadmill to walk when the weather is not appropriate to walk on the park or when I just need to walk and lose myself in the rhythm of the walk and not appreciate the freedom of the open space. I enjoy several of the equipment items I can use there and which would be impractical and pretty impossible to have at my home gym. But most of all, I like the habit, the same place, the same people, the same colors, the same smiles, the same everything.

And I like to open the door to the parking lot and check the seagulls.

The seagulls not being there is a small uncertainty. I can deal with that. But probably not more than a few days.

The last time birds failed their presence was in Blacksburg, when I made the most disastrous mistake of my life (or was it? I’m not sure, I made too many): I accepted the invitation of a man to be and live with him. Except the hidden clauses of the contract had destroyed three women before and almost destroyed me. I lost contracts because of that and I lost Blacksburg, the place I was the happiest in my life.

During all Winter and Spring I jogged every morning along the same track. I watched the experimental cows with those big red tapes on their hind legs peacefully grazing in the fields.

There was a duck pond. One day a duck arrived and had ducklings. My daughter and I went to the pond to feed the ducks every weekend.

When I left with the man to the trip that badly hurt my career and made me cry almost every day, driving him and his son all the way from Virginia to Florida and back, carrying their luggage, with all the signs I should need to understand I was being trapped into slavery, I didn’t see the ducks leave.

I went back to Blacksburg just to pack up. I knew my life was absolutely disrupted when I walked up to the pond and the ducks were gone. They had flown away.

I do treasure the parking lot seagulls. Tomorrow I will check where they are. Probably back there. I will open the door, check in, say hello to the same people I greet every day, get a padlock which I will use to lock locker #43 or #41. Usually #43.

Then I will walk for 60 minutes at one of the right side treadmills of the second row, after which I will perform 5-7 sets of exercises in the machines.

Like most days.

Parking lot segulls, Oklahoma City, Planet Fitness 59th street – December 17th 2019
Marilia Coutinho

Easiest assignment in a long time – still fixing, fixing, fixing…

Sent in my assignment on time and it didn’t bother me that all the collected literature was not synthesized into the less than 3K words I had for the article. It’s a fine article for what I had and it is way, way beyond the standard. I am also fine with that: I can’t downgrade my writing, I can’t make myself compromise with less and it is what it is.

All said and done. Bonus: I realized that perfectionism and paralysis by analysis is holding me back.

Perhaps the cleaning, fixing, restoring and organizing obsession was always the natural expression of whatever was holding my work back. I do have some OCD behavior and it isn’t with work. It manifests itself in space and objects.

So I soaked and over scrubbed two old backbacks. One of them has a hole. It doesn’t matter: it used to be a good backpack. I will fix the hole. They soaked, I scrubbed them with powdered Ajax and rinsed them with vinegar.

Now it’s the old running shoes turn.

Tomorrow I’ll buy more shoe laces for all the shoes I’m restoring. I’m also going to pick up the black leather boots I found in clearance at the military surplus store.

That’s the only new item besides my Olympic Weightlifting Shoes.

But that’s a story for tomorrow.

The mystery of the old Chucks

I have two pairs of old Chucks. The picture above was taken in 2009 while I was preparing the material for my book. It was fairly clean – I probably wiped the white rubber.

There was a second pair. They were so similar that I couldn’t tell the difference. I certainly used them wrongly paired.

When I came to the USA in 2015, still not knowing I would end up as a permanent resident but still with plans to stay a few months, I had only two suitcases to take everything that was important to me. The person who was supposed to come and travel with me, bringing empty suitcases to help me with my belongings didn’t make it. I had to cut my packing even more.

Still, I packed two 10-year-old chucks that I used not just for lifting, but for everything. They were my everyday shoes and I wasn’t such a recluse as I am now.

A few months ago, maybe a year ago, I stepped on chewing gum on the sidewalk somewhere here in Oklahoma City. I was disgusted and annoyed because it is hard to scrape it off shoe soles. So I left that pair at the laundry room, just sitting there.

Sunday, the sewing-craze day, I decided to wash both pairs. Still very annoyed with the chewing gum and the fact that it didn’t seem to soften soaking in the bucket, I started to furiously brush it under very hot water. It seemed to start to come off and also destroy the brush. So I covered with powdered Ajax and kept brushing. Eventually, it came off. All of it.

That’s when I realized they were very different. The insole was completely different and even the soles were of different color.

I bought new shoelaces for them so now I know which pair is which.

Why all this trouble?

Not that different from the previous day sewing-craze, fixing old cheap items that in many other phases of my life, I’d just throw away.

The same day, I removed my medals – world champion medals, medals a lot of people would give anything to have – to a high shelve on the farthest laundry room cabinet. These will be thrown away. They mean nothing to me.

Old bench shirts and suits that my daughter found are being sent to me. I’m excited. They belong to a period when there was some innocence in me concerning powerlifting and I hadn’t realized yet that the sport has nothing to do with my relationship to the lifts. Those pieces of equipment are mine, some were custom-made. They are meaningful.

Maybe like my old chucks.

And then I kept fixing

Saturday I made a big mistake: feeling so much better from the flu, I decided to deadlift. After all, I had squatted heavier than in the past 6 months or so two days before.

Big mistake.

Still at a low weight, my lower back was not just uncomfortable: it hurt. I stopped lifting, came inside and it was too late. The pain was hard to handle. I went to bed after taking much more ibuprofen and naproxen than would be reasonable, plus more valium and less than three hours later my air bed leaked.

I tried to sleep in the living room with S.O. I was not only quite alert but in pain. In a lot of pain. Whiskey did help that Sunday.

Much more interesting than that is what I did. It was still dark and I picked up an old tiny sewing kit, my computer lamp, which S.O. didn’t want shining on his eyes so all operations had to be done at the corner of the room, and all the things I hadn’t fixed since forever.

This image is either prior to the hole on the left side or it doesn’t show it:

This prop-up pillow comes in different prices but it feels and lasts exactly the same. I bought the cheapest on sale by $14 instead of the over $35 ones. Maybe there was a reason, after all: it started to come off at the seams.

I sewed it back.

Then I changed the elastic band on all my old head bands. I do like them a lot but they were also cheap. The elastic was gone. Fixing it meant cutting the elastic part, pulling out the old one, inserting a new one (that I had bought about 3 months ago), sewing each side and then sewing back each side to the head band. I did it.

I had washed them. I washed them for the first time in three years about a month or so ago.

This is just apparently an unimportant fact. Last week I washed all the comforters, one of them also for the first time.

Before that I had organized my goals bulletin board.

I remembered a good pair of leggings that came off at the seams at the crotch. It didn’t have the traditional thinning and coming apart between the legs. It was a good pair of leggings (bought used at the Salvation Army in Springfield). I picked it up and sewed it, too. Then I fetched an old t-shirt that S.O. gave me just to wash the dishes, since I spill water all over me. It has also come apart at the seams. I sewed it back and even fixed the collar reinforcement.

I still haven’t done much progress in writing. I still keep collecting references. Sometimes this unsettles me a lot, makes me anxious or even depressed. I am doing it, though.

The bed that leaked was carefully cut to make thick, great plastic to seal my home gym. It irritated me to remember all the queen air beds I lost and just threw away the whole thing. I would have great quality plastic for the whole gym if I had thought of this before.

My soluble fiber is neatly organized and everyday I take the three of them: psyllium, powdered flax seed and inullin.

I cleaned and organized the shelf. I did the same with the cabinets at the laundry room.

I am fixing things. I’m not sure why.

The weirdest one, though, I leave for tomorrow.

I have very few answers about how to fix my life. I don’t know what the fine structure of the goal strategy will be. That also disturbs me.

Maybe I’m fixing broken and loose things from the outside-in before I can move on.

Who knows these things.

Nemesis

Nemesis is one of children of the Titan Oceanus and Themis is one of the primary Titans. While Themis represents neutral judgement, Nemesis, originally, represented neutral retribution, as in law and law enforcement.

As retribution became more associated with punishment, Nemesis was increasingly seen as the goddess of vengeance and represented in pop culture as such.

Just recently I realized that my disinterest in certain expected outcomes in any career come from the top goal or mission that have oriented me since I know myself. Most of the time, unconsciously.

In classical terms, I don’t have a nemesis: everything I do belongs in a horizon for later lives – not mine. But I am the nemesis of many. Maybe too many. For no choice of mine.

I am truly blind to their existence and to the fact that I hurt them and even destroy them. Finally I understand how I made so many enemies that weren’t even that relevant in my life. Or not at all. They were just in my way and I was their nemesis.

That cannot be changed.

There and back again: having nothing to go back to must be dreadful

And I keep bewildered as to why I haven’t finished the article (which shouldn’t take me more than two days) or not even touched it? Why do I touch the ones that my highly objective goal structure suggests should take a very low priority on my backload?

Because I didn’t quite close all the doors, didn’t quite turn my back (without necessarily having to burn them) all the bridges and haven’t reset the system.

The fact is: I am going back to where I was before. I can’t relive that past or just resume the story where I left it. But there is no denying that what I am doing is actually reclaiming my academic career and, most of all, my agenda.

It also means one other thing that carries much more weight – and pain, and ambivalence: the mission in all its texture and color, including the political one. The unfinished businesses – all of them.

I’m going back to where I once belonged and I’ll let my stories be whispered when I’m gone.

The art of letting go from the inside V the art of shedding without showing

You are looking at two scorpions, right? No, you are not: you are looking at a scorpion looking at his shed exoskeleton. Without a closer look, I wouldn’t mess with it.

What about this woman? Did she shed anything? What did she look like the day before? What if she was blond, had long hair, a big library, a closet full of clothes and cut her hair, dyed it red, gave her belongings away and shed her old life, completely?

This is Juliette Binoche in Trois Colours: Bleue, where she completely sheds her old life after the car accident that kills her daughter and her husband.

How can you tell the stranger next to you didn’t do just that?

How do you do that?

There has to be an internal death. A moment of letting go of your old self because the dead skin you are shedding is still well attached to the living parts. Insects go into ecdysis for that.

I failed. Every last day for 4 days I was held back from resuming my “real” work by something from my zombie self that insists on taking all the space in my brain.

Why that is still happening, I don’t know, but I will find out and I will kill it.

I know what it is attached to. To something that once upon a time I called transcendent strength and was for some weird reason merged with the sport of powerlifting. That’s impossible: the sport is inherently associated to things that are radically excluded from my highest level set of values. I spent 15 years trying to fit an impossible piece into a puzzle that I still don’t understand. That piece is given up. I have unfinished business with powerlifting, but it’s a business – not belonging. I won’t let go of that unfinished business. Everything else that sucks my blood because of the hooks hanging from the powerlifting tree must go, though.