I ENDED UP AT THE YMCA AS A LAST RESORT. Years of chronic neck and back spasms had stolen all the variety and fun I used to find in working out, especially that amped-up endorphin high. By my early 50s, I had spent thousands of dollars trying to mitigate this pain with alternative treatments, after burning through one routine after another: running, kickboxing, spinning, kung fu, weight training, aerobics, Zumba, walking, children’s karate, even alternative therapy such as the Feldenkrais Method. And yet knots clung to my spine like barnacles and flared up after such innocuous activities as doing the dishes or just sitting funny.
Once strong enough to propel me through the air in handsprings, sprint down a track and dodge oncoming players in rugby, my muscles had begun to atrophy by the age of 30. A physiotherapist told me then that it is not uncommon for dancers or gymnasts to remain hyperflexible as they age, but the brain thinks something is amiss when there’s too much rubbery movement, so it orders everything into lockdown. It’s the brain’s way of keeping you safe, even though you feel horribly unsafe because you’re in a spasm. I haven’t been able to do a sit-up for decades.
The maladies of age begin long before white hair and a declining physique greet you across the dividing line of 50. When you reach menopause, you meet your new body. Mine was less peppy and more unpredictable. It had absorbed the shock of getting divorced and made me a cliche of a woman in her 40s. At 50, migraines pursued me daily. Medication to stave them off shaved 9kg from my thin frame. I seized up at the tiniest events. Neuromas – benign growths of nerve tissue – in my feet stung like electric shocks when they got inflamed and made weight-bearing exercise impossible. I traded down kickboxing and spin for the exercise bike, but I was barely moving – never broke a sweat, never got stronger, only got more depressed. I gave up the gym, the outdoors. I decided to try swimming.
Swimming was low-impact cardio that would pump my heart as it downshifted into middle age. It would supposedly make me fit, alert, even-keeled, strong-minded and noble. And on the way to the YMCA’s big, new, shiny pool, I’d see sunshine. My mood would improve.
On my first day of this new me,
