Keep Your Head In the Game: Dealing With the Mind-fuck of Injury & Illness

Unless it’s a truly horrific, traumatizing event (for instance, being run over by a steam roller driven by all those girls that made fun of you in high school), the worst part of an injury/illness isn’t the physical pain. Sure, physical pain can be epic. It can nag and nag and nag. You can get to a point where you’d truly consider eating a rat poison smoothie if you thought it’d bring pain relief. But usually, once you get past the immediate event and the first few days of acute pain, the worst part of any injury/illness is psychological.

You look ridiculous and everyone’s staring at you: Cheap tricks for crip fitness

One of the best ways to shake self-consciousness is to confront it head-on by doing something that looks bizarre and letting the normals stare. Here are a few of my favorite ridiculous exercises for crips, gimps, and other weirdos.

Resolution Rehab: Screw The Scale—Get Me A Barbell

Now this is the kind of resolution I like to hear about. Dana McMahan vows to focus on weight in a good way — i.e. how much she can put on the bar.

“To reach my lifting goals I have to believe in myself, which feels the polar opposite of setting a weight loss goal…

The new me, the one that can squat 200 pounds, comes with a bonus that the post-weight-loss-goal skinny me didn’t come with: an unshakable conviction that I can make anything happen. While I surely feel strong and powerful because I can take on 200 pounds and win, my real strength and power lie in knowing that I can overcome fear and accomplish a serious goal. If I can do that, what can’t I do?”

YEAH BUDDY! Read the rest here.

Run Like a Girl: Interview with Mina Samuels

“This book is about women, sports, and happiness…about the courage it takes to challenge ourselves in how we live our lives.” —Mina Samuels

A Couple Good Reasons (and One Bad One) to Drag Your Crippled Ass to the Gym

It can be hard to remember because your illness or disability sometimes feels like your body’s defining characteristic, but remember that your body is, in the ways that matter, the same a everybody else’s. It wants to move, to act with purpose and focus and silliness and joy. Your body does not care that it can’t do the same things other bodies can, or that it moves differently, or that other people might think it looks weird – it just wants to do what it can do, whatever that may be. What’s different about you is not nearly so important as what’s the same. Your body, just like everybody else’s body, wants to be used. Use it.

Dangerous and stupid, wants money

Stumptuous reader Martha Stallman, once featured as a Stumptuous Fitness Model, has an inspiring story. Struggling with her weight, diagnosed with MS, she was told she might as well give up and hang out in God’s waiting room for the next several decades.

She flipped fat and fate the bird, and went on to kick some serious ass.

Now she’s running the Warrior Dash to support a local food bank.

Check out her story, and if you’re as inspired by it as I am, send a few shekels to the food bank, support Martha in the general project of being awesome, and help stamp out hunger.

As she writes:

“Over the course of my illness I have: gone deaf, lost the use of my hand, lost the ability to swallow, gone blind, been paralyzed on one side of my body, been paralyzed from the waist down, suffered various obnoxious physical indignities both large and small. I come back every time, slower and clumsier and more pissed off, but back nonetheless… But I’m lucky as hell… A lot of folks aren’t as lucky. MOST folks aren’t as lucky.”

Kick ass, Martha!