The Times had an Op-Ed today on testing female athletes for high testosterone levels.  It convinced me that this is a troubling practice.  It’s one thing for a sport to choose to ban “doping” with supplements, but to ban a female athlete because she has too much naturally occurring testosterone or to force her to have an operation or take hormone suppressants to reduce those levels in order to continue competing in her sport strikes me as unfair.

First, as the op-ed points out, it’s not clear that higher testosterone leads to better performance.  Second, there are all kinds of naturally occurring advantages people have that society is profoundly uncomfortable handicapping.   And just to be clear, when I say society or culture here, I’m primarily talking about western, first world, etc. because that’s what I have grown up in.

What is feels like to me is a discomfort with people who don’t conform to traditional gender models, here complicated by the fact that it’s also about sex, which people feel they can somehow make an absolute binary.  As our culture grows more comfortable with people expressing themselves on a gender continuum, we still cling to this sense, “yes, she may dress like a boy, but she is essentially a girl.”  Women even being involved in sports is seen as a threat by some people.   few people are willing to say “A woman’s place is in the home”, but plenty of people are willing to take digs at women’s sports by saying things like, “Nobody watches women’s [basketball/soccer/tennis].”  Usually, they say these things when there’s a women’s basketball game on.

Being “male” is still seen as a de facto advantage in sports.  Even competing in sports causes a woman to take on attributes that are seen are more masculine than feminine.  Having more biological “maleness” in the form of testosterone becomes profoundly threatening not just to other female athletes who may perceive you to be advantaged, but to everyone who wants to preserve a strict definition of what it means to be biologically male or biologically female.

Weigh-In This Week: 182.

For some reason now that the weather is heating up my digital scale is working better (and then it snowed after I started writing this post and my scale is no longer giving me a body fat calculation).  Still stuck in my low-180s holding pattern, but at least it’s holding and not rising for now.  It’s getting hard as I get closer to this half-marathon not to want to eat everything in sight.

From: Hyperbole and a Half. Go buy Allie’s book. I’ve lent it to at least three people already and am feeling guilty about cutting her royalty stream.

For the second time since moving to Columbus, I have been accused of being a “foodie.”  Not by people trying to be mean.  If anything, by people who are amused at my obsession with what some food stuff is and how it’s made, where its from, and “Is that cheese spelled mobier or moRbier, and how do you pronounce that anyway?”*

We had dinner with a colleague of mine and her husband last weekend and when it came out that we were homebrewers who also liked cider (we made a very drinkable dry cider this past fall), the husband insisted we take home a bottle of their homemade apple cider.  I love that sort of thing.

It occurs to me that we are really only a couple of generations removed from a time when most people were capable of producing at least some of their own food, and that these past 50 years or so of the pattern of food distribution may seem like blip on the radar in the future.  (Also, the metaphor will be anachronistic as technology will have moved beyond radar.)

I’m traveling today and there’s nothing like walking through an airport and passing dozens of fast food restaurants to remind me of the importance of making and consuming my own food.  Heidi Swanson — who runs a food porn, I mean cooking, website — from San Francisco often posts about the food she makes and packs for trips.  In the past, I’ve looked at her 101 Cookbooks site and rolled my eyes a little thinking about making a cake for a roadtrip.  Now, I’m feeling more ambitious, or at least wishing I’d packed some dried fruit for this trip.

Weigh-in wise, I’ve been hovering around 179-182 for the past couple of weeks.  Since I’m about to attend a 3-day conference and may not get my long run in this weekend, I’m guessing that number’s not going to improve this week, but maybe with some care I can mitigate the damage.  I did pack two changes of running gear.  So, goals for the rest of this week at the conference:

1. Drink at least 8 glasses of water/day.

2. No more than 2 alcoholic beverages at a time.

3. Go for at least 2 runs, even if they’re not my long run.

* Cheese.com (really, it’s a website) tells me:

Morbier is a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese named after the small village of Morbier in Franche-Comté. The cheese has an ivory color, and it is a bit soft and fairly elastic. It gets immediately identified because of its black layer of tasteless ash, which separates horizontally in the middle. Earlier, Morbier was made by a layer of the morning and the evening milk, but it is made by a single milking nowadays, while ash is added to it to follow the tradition. The cheese takes about 45 days to 3 months for full maturation with yellowish, moist and leathery rind.

I’m disappointed the ash layer is for show and doesn’t delineate separate milkings.

Granted, I co-taught an intensive 4-day class over Spring Break last week, which required more planning than I had anticipated (teaching always does) but how have 3 weeks gone by since my last academic conference and now my next one is in two weeks?

This Vampire Weekend song is what I’ve been using to try to relax lately.  I’m not even a huge New York booster, but I find this song lovely and evocative.  It’s fun once you realize that the song is about the act of making music — the main hook, the title, and a bunch of other references are about other songs and musicians that have influenced the band.  I love the line, “Maybe she’s gone and I can’t resurrect her.  The truth is she doesn’t need me to protect her.”  For the Internet’s take on the references in the song, check out Rap Genius.

Also, not unexpectedly given I’ve been getting less exercise and haven’t been tracking my foods, my weight has plateaued and is possibly creeping back up a bit.  I’ve set my Loseit App to send me meal tracking reminders, so we’ll see if that helps.  I was 181.4 this morning, and have been mostly in the 181-183 range the past few weeks.  I’m trying to get over the artificial nature of the BMI scale and to not discount the progress I’ve already made.  If I do make it to 170, it will be the thinnest I’ve ever been at my adult height and within the “normal” BMI range — and guess what, I still won’t be “thin” by any conventional standard.  But is “thin” really the goal?  Not so much.  So why does it even bother me that at best I’ll be a size 10/12 and still “big” even after losing over 30 lbs?  (An aside, I went to go buy work shirts last weekend and ended up getting a size 10/12 at Coldwater Creek.  Hurray for women’s sizing.)

Never got around to posting this last Wednesday.  Still, may be the last time in a while I see 170s on the scale, so worth posting.  Also, ran a 5K in sand this weekend.  Didn’t feel too bad at first, but I definitely felt it in my lower legs on the second half.

February 5, 2014 – Broke the 180s, for about a minute.

What City Should You Live In

Buzz Feed has a quiz for what city should you live in, and my result was…Portland.

That doesn’t come as a huge shock to me.  I took it twice with slightly different answers and still got Portland, so then I got suspicious and provided more or less random answers to get Cape Town, so there are different city results!

My parents live across the Columbia River from Portland, near Vancouver, Washington.  I’ve spent some time in Portland and, yes, I think it’s a great place to visit and would probably be a fun place to live.

The Fox and the Hound

Tinni and Sniffer

Tinni and Sniffer the Fox.  This was originally forwarded to me as an email with lots of commentary about how much these animals love each other.  They’re cute.  They’re buddies.  They are probably happy to consider themselves part of a pack, but love?  That feels a little anthropomorphic to me.

Weigh-In

Numbers are continuing to drop. I think the long runs on the weekend are helping.