Shedding and Shredding: My Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred

When I played varsity wheelchair basketball, the pre-season conditioning/team building/Stockholm-syndrome-acquiring exercise was "ramps." Both the men's and women's teams would meet at Memorial Hall Football stadium at 6:30 a.m., which at that hour would be would be so cold that your fingers would be too numb to grip the pushrims. The coach would put two trash cans on the bottom level-- they smelled like rotten soda and rust -- for everyone to vomit in. For several hours, we would push up and down the steep concrete ramps: short pushes, long pushes, power starts and stops, backwards. You'd get to the bottom, take off another layer of clothes and gulp some water before the coach shouted 'Go!' and you'd push back up past dead birds and oil stains, sometimes past the maintenance guys on golf carts, the exhaust of which would both choke you and give you a contact high. When "Living on a Prayer" came on the boombox exactly halfway through the workout, the entire team would sing along, and the dozens of voices echoing Bon Jovi off the concrete walls made the stadium sound like church.

Anyhow, it was hard work. It was really hard work.  (Josh Birnbaum documented it in the photo essay 'Uphill Battle.' Click on the link and scroll right until you get to the 5th image). But at the top, you'd get to look for a few seconds out over Champaign-Urbana looking all stark-midwestern-pretty in the August light. Your brain would be flooded with exercise endorphins, the breeze from the windows would feel good against your salt-encrusted skin, and you would think: damn, I have done a really hard thing. During the next hard thing -- say shoveling your car out of a few feet of snow to get to practice in the dark at 5:30 in the morning -- you'd think, "Well, hell. I got through ramps. This isn't going to kill me."

For the past three years since the hip replacements, I have missed that sense of accomplishment you get from pushing your body to its physical limits. Because of the two hip replacements, I can never  play wheelchair basketball again: a fact that's taken me a long time to accept. Given that "Take it Easy" is just a Jackson Browne song in my world, I've been trying to find something that will give me the same feeling.

First, I wanted to be a runner. Runners get to achieve personal bests and cross finish lines and show off their well-toned asses in spandex as they glide along the Vancouver Seawall. Not to mention that running is free, and, unlike using the elliptical machine, you don't have to spend hours pondering why the person next to you felt the need to eat 20 cloves of garlic as a pre-workout snack. So, despite the fact that running is a no-go for people with hip replacements, I downloaded a little training plan from the Internet and set to work. I will spare you the messy details, but let's just say that it's hard to really get a sweat on when people are stopping you every 5 minutes to ask if you're alright. If you need a visual image of me running, think of those blow-up noodle-y figures they have at car lots.

So, fine. Running was out. Next, I got a one-month Groupon to a gym that offered a bunch of fitness classes thinking I would try them all until I found one that worked. Spin classes caused my hip to swell up faster than a Real Housewife's lips. At Jazzercise, the instructor stopped the entire class to a) praise my T-shirt (which featured Omar from The Wire) and b) inform me that I "needed to be a little jazzier." (When you walk through the garden, you better watch your jazz hands). By 'jazzier,' he likely meant "try to look less like a giraffe suffering from a severe neuro-muscular disorder,' but in fairness, it's not easy to be jazzy when you're surrounded by small, pert women who have been taking this class so long that they probably wake up in the middle of the night grape-vining. Exercise classes were out.

I tried biking, but the combination of "missing half your ass" and "jamming your ass repetitively* against a hard bike seat" is not a successful one, no matter how many pairs of padded shorts you wear. Plus, when I realized that the learning curve for biking outside involved the risk of getting beat-up by an aggressive Vancouver cyclist (yeah, chime chime to you too, wanker) or getting smoked by a semi, it became clear that cycling wasn't for me. I try to avoid activities that have a high percent chance of turning me into meat-paste.

*Apologies in advance to anyone who found this post by googling the above phrase and is now deeply disappointed.

And so, I arrived at the wonderful world of at-home exercise DVDs. I picked up the Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred (and her 'Shed and Shred,' which I plan to do next) because I watched The Biggest Loser obsessively when I was in bed for 8 months following the first hip replacement, and because years of being coached make me respond well to someone shouting at me. (In fairness, Jillian Michaels is not super shout-y in the videos).

The concept is simple: The 30 Day Shred has 3 levels of punishing circuit-style 30-minute workouts and you do them for 10 days each. I figured they'd be short enough that my hip wouldn't swell up, but challenging enough that I'd feel a sense of achievement when I finished the entire plan.

And I was right! Though I had to make a few modifications for exercises that I didn't have enough hip flexion to do, (looking at you, Mountain Climbers), I quickly fell in love with the program. It was great starting every day with an exercise endorphin high. I could flail around in the comfort of my own home where only my cat and boyfriend would judge me. Actually, being an expert at both 'shedding' and 'shredding,' Mika was more than happy to pitch in. During push-ups, she'd lay underneath me and lick my nose every time I dipped down to her level.  It didn't even matter that, because of my ground floor apartment, people would routinely peer into my living room with perplexed expressions, trying to work out whether I was channeling spirits/ speaking in tongues/ summoning the rain gods. It also didn't matter that my clomping around made the entire apartment complex shake (Arley Stomp! Arley Smash! Arley Do Jump Squats With The Daintiness of Donkey Kong!). I was feeling good.

Now, when you've had two hip replacements and your ligaments are basically held together with duct tape and you've got all of the '-itis'es, there are bound to be hiccups. My 30 Day Shred was actually more of a 33-Day Shred, because I took three days off after my knee took issue to over-compensating for my hip and decided to go rogue. In the days of yore, a sore knee would have translated in my brain into "shut up body! You're not the boss of me! Watch me push through harder until I literally cannot walk and THAT will teach you." These days, however, I've dialed the intensity down several crucial notches. I realized that it's better to do a 33-Day Shred, than a 30-Day-And-Knee-Reconstructive-Surgery Shred. When I returned after the three days, I even helped my knee get through the rest of the workout with ice packs, anti-inflammatories and anti-inflammatory cream. I'm not sure if this is what maturity feels like, or if this what old age feels like.

And so, today, I got ready for the final day of the 30 Day Shred. I imagined how triumphant I would feel. Perhaps there would be an exclamation-point-filled Facebook status update. Perhaps I would cue up "Eye of the Tiger" and dance around my apartment while Mika looked on with deep scorn. My back had been stiff and achy for the past couple days, but during the warm-up I was feeling okay. During the first circuit set I was feeling okay. And then, during the one-handed clean-and-jerks of Circuit 2, I felt a sharp pain in my back. The pain shot down my leg and into my knee. There is the good pain (the kind that leads to you getting mightier) and then there's the bad pain (the kind that leads to bed rest), and this was the latter.

I stopped. I paused the DVD. I limped around my apartment. The pain didn't go away. I got a glass of water. I limped some more. The pain didn't go away. Every step sent a blast of pain from my back to my hip to my knee. I turned off the video and hit the showers, feeling more disappointed than I'd been in years, feeling like I'd fallen on my face a few steps from the finish line. I mean, there is no medal for finishing the 30 Day Shred, but I'd wanted to kick its ass. I wanted to do the thing I had set out to do. I wanted a moment like I'd had on the ramps, where I'd done a hard thing that would propel me to accomplish more hard things (like, say, finishing the novel I've been working on).

Now that a few hours have passed and I am sitting here with an icepack on my back, however, I am trying to see my almost-30 Day Shred differently. Before the hip replacement, I routinely pushed my body further than I should have. I got injured or sick, played through, got more injured, played through, got frustrated because I couldn't understand why things weren't improving, played through, blamed myself for not trying hard enough, played through. I bought into all those Nike commercials about pain being weakness leaving the body. But sometimes pain is not weakness leaving the body. Sometimes pain is just damage happening. Knowing the difference is not the kind of slogan that looks good on a T-shirt, but it does prevent you from having further hip replacements.

And so I will declare my 30 Day Shred to be a qualified success. I did have to modify it. I did take more than 30 days to do it. I did stop with 11 and a half minutes left to go in the final damn workout, turn off the DVD and walk away. But I also achieved more leg strength than I've ever had. I did both walking and traveling push-ups from my toes. I did lose an inch around every part of my body and about 6 pounds overall. And, if I do say so myself, my ass is looking damn impressive...ish.

I guess that's the take-away message for those trying to work out with arthritis, or post hip-replacement. You push until you feel the wrong kind of pain, you take a step back to recover, and then you push on. Your path to success looks like stairs, not like a ramp. You do small difficult things over and over again until they are no longer difficult.

In Defense of Frankie Boyle: Why You Should Make Fun of the Paralympics

I developed a sense of humour one day in October of 1996. This feat was achieved thanks to the following factors.

·      I was 13.

·      I was nearly 6 feet tall.

·      I was in a bright blue half body cast that forced my legs apart at 45 degree angles.

·      To achieve this angle, a wooden hockey stick had been casted between my legs, necessitating snaps in my underwear like the kind used in baby onesies.

·      I most often dressed in long peasant skirts (to avoid the need for snaps) topped with a series of T-shirts that proclaimed me to be a “Big Dog.” (The “Big Dog” shirts had no medical function, though they probably could have been used as a diagnostic tool for depression).

·      I had just started high school, and getting my wheelchair to class required the use lifts installed over the stairs. These lifts emitted warning chimes similar to those of an ice cream truck, which routinely caused stoner boys to sneak from their classrooms expecting a Fudgesicle, then look at me with an expression of deep, soul-crushing disappointment.

On that day, I was late for class and the lift was moving at a glacial speed down the stairway, chiming so loud that three teachers came out to see what the fuss was about. I was frustrated and embarrassed. I was dressed like a lady hobo. I had just started high school and would have to see all these people for 4 more years. There were snaps up my underwear. My cast itched and smelled. And suddenly, I looked down at the piece of wood forcing my legs apart and thought, “Oh my God. Even though it is impossible for me to close my legs, no one even wants to rape me.”

This is a truly awful thing to think, but I started to laugh. My whole perspective on my body had changed.

Since then, I have told many jokes about my disabled body, and very few of them have been kind. I make fun of the fact that I walk like a crack addict, or a zombie. When I was single, I often joked that since sex is one of the few things that alleviates my chronic pain, I should register myself as a non-profit organization so that I can issue tax receipts to men who fuck me.  I have been chided by (able-bodied) people for denigrating myself, but I see it differently: when you can make fun of something, it loses its power over you. I know for a fact that if I hadn't developed the capability to tell off-colour jokes about myself, I would not have survived. I would have wasted away into a ball of seething frustration and ironic T-shirts.

A few days ago, there was a furor over British comedian Frankie Boyle telling some Paralympic jokes on Twitter. (Here's an article on the controversy). I thought they were funny, but then again I also thought it was hilarious when I posted a video of wheelchair rugby heavy hits and someone commented that the hardest hit was the car crash most of them were in.

C4 has had some really interesting discussions on whether you can laugh at the Paralympics. I think you can -- and you should -- but that there are two questions every comic should ask him/herself when doing so.

1.     Is the joke funny? To me, that’s the standard on which any joke’s success should be judged. Does it have that element of surprise, of originality, of intelligence? The offensive Paralympic jokes I've seen have failed not because of their subject matter, but because they just weren't very good. If you're going to take on a taboo subject, you better bring your A game.

2.     Does the joke come from a place of respect or at least understanding? It’s very easy to tell when a comedian has bothered to understand and respect the target of his joke, or whether he is accidentally revealing prejudices. (Note that showing respect doesn't equate to being nice, but it does mean having a purpose other than petty mockery or perpetuating some shitty stereotype). That’s why people who do the “Chinaman” voice or the “person with a mental disability” voice are nearly uniformily unfunny. It’s also why Louis C.K. can tell a joke about sexual assault, but your rapey Uncle Steve can’t.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that jokes are the ultimate form of respect. When you put disability up on a pedestal and treat it as Serious Business, it becomes the elephant in the room. People with disabilities are cast as some “other” who must be treated differently than “normal” people. If Paralympic athletes want to be respected as the elite athletes they are, then they need to accept everything that comes along with it. David Beckham lives with people joking about his Mickey Mouse voice or calling him out if he has a bad game, and so should every Paralympian. (Boyle tweeted something similar to this, saying it was his job to make fun of the Paralympics just like it was his job to make fun of the Olympics, and I agree).

The narrative of a Paralympian as a heroic source of inspiration is boring. If journalists and fans are only allowed to talk about the Paralympics in one way -- if only one type of conversation is deemed politically correct -- then we will never get the well-rounded, nuanced coverage that the Paralympic movement needs. To get this nuanced coverage, we have to test (and keep testing) to see where the line is.

When done well, humour can be a force for change because it forces people to confront prejudices they didn't know they had. The best humour challenges the status quo and upsets the balance of power (see: joker characters in Shakespeare). Frankie Boyle is no Shakespeare, but I would pick someone telling a joke about "Taliban-inspired" Paralympic performances over someone approaching me on the street to praise me for my courage/inspiration/whatever any day.

The Brits are known for their great sense of humour, and I hope it’s on full display at the London 2012 Paralympics. In that spirit, I will be judging the success of these Paralympics based on whether there is a nod to the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch in the Closing Ceremonies.

The London 2012 Paralympics: The Best Show You'll Never See

In 2004, I competed in the Athens Paralympics in wheelchair basketball. I was not a starter. I played mostly in the round robins and the highlight of my entire Paralympic experience was scoring 7 points in the first quarter against Mexico, which landed me very briefly on the high scorer board. My mom has a photo of this high-scorer board. Along with that photo, she also got bruises up the backs of her legs from tensely pressing her calves against the seat, and a sore throat from cheering that took weeks to clear up. A few days later, my family watched me stand on a podium and receive a bronze medal: an experience that they never could have even dreamed of during the early years of hospital stays, half-body casts and surgeries.

The game I was in would never have been shown on TV and at the time webcasting didn’t exist, but my parents were able to share this moment because they had the means to travel from Canada to Greece. Thousands of parents, friends and supporters of the athletes who will compete in the London 2012 Paralympic Games this summer, however, do not. Those who cannot afford to visit an expensive city like London are banking on the fact that the Paralympics will be webcast.  The good news is that they will:  the U.K. Channel C4 will be webcasting many of the events with a professional feed complete with colour commentators. Here, however, is the bad news: unless you live in the U.K., you will never get to see it.

If you ask C4 why they have restricted the feed to a U.K. audience, they will tell you that they don’t want to interfere with other countries’ television broadcasting rights. (That sound you hear is thousands of Paralympians snickering at once). The channel with the broadcasting rights in your country will provide coverage, they say. This is all well and good if you live in a sport-mad country like Australia, but less good if you live in Canada, where CTV (the channel with the Olympic and Paralympic broadcasting rights) had to be publicly shamed into airing the Vancouver 2010 Paralympics’ Opening Ceremony, even though it took place in their own country. And it’s even less good if you live in, say, India or Africa. Or if you play a sport that is not one of the Paralympic marquee sports like wheelchair basketball.

Given that most countries will not be offering up-to-the-minute Paralympic coverage, and given that a webcast is an entirely different medium than television and its picture quality and reliability do not compete with television, the true reason the Paralympics are not being webcast worldwide is a financial one. C4 is so protective of its market that it does not even release made-for-web videos to a non-U.K. audience. It does not see an incentive to work with other broadcasters to ensure that the Paralympic Games can be seen. But there are some very compelling reasons why they should. Here’s why.

Because the people who need to see Paralympic sports are the ones with the least access to it. It is not an exaggeration to say that involvement in wheelchair sports (or any Paralympic sport) saves lives. People who play wheelchair sports at any level have fewer hospital stays, fewer secondary complications, less depression, more independence and greater employment. But it’s more than that. During the Paralympics, you will hear over and over again how an athlete’s involvement in his or her sport was the number one factor in their adjusting to life after acquiring a disability. When you hear Paralympians say that they would not be here if not for sport, this is not an exaggeration in the least. There are thousands of athletes at a recreational level who could tell you the same story.

These athletes could also tell you that they initially resisted becoming involved in wheelchair sports because they did not think it would be competitive. And then, one day, they came out to a wheelchair basketball practice and saw someone sink a long three-pointer, or saw a head-on collision at a wheelchair rugby game, and the spark was lit. Today, thanks to webcasting technology, that spark can be lit at 3 am in front of a computer screen. It can be lit in a developing nation where there is not yet a single sports wheelchair. (During the webcast of the 2010 World Wheelchair Rugby Championships, 1 in 6 viewers were from countries that did not have a wheelchair rugby team). Once every four years, people with disabilities from around the world have a chance to see wheelchair sport played at its very best and so see what they might also be capable of. Without a webcast, many will never get this chance.

Because the Paralympics deserve to be seen. When parasports are shown on TV or reported about in newspapers, if they are shown at all, they are generally framed by able-bodied journalists who are not experts. Lacking expertise in the technicalities of the game, the journalist must resort to the old clichés about how inspirational the athletes are, about how much they’ve overcome. It’s not the journalist’s fault that they are not equipped to interpret wheelchair sports, but the end result is that the sport never gets a chance to speak for itself.  Nor is it the fault of television executives that there is not the market to put a full wheelchair basketball gold medal game on during a time when people would conceivably watch it. Thanks to the webcast, however, people have a chance to see a full game presented the way it is. The game is not a human-interest story, but a fully realized sport with its own intricacies, strategies and feats of athleticism. The viewer can make up his or her own mind.

We’ve seen over and over that when people see wheelchair sports, they fall in love with them. The professional wheelchair basketball league in Europe plays to packed crowds. The 2010 World Wheelchair Rugby Championships made $40,000 in ticket sales. But a barrier exists in wheelchair sports that able-bodied sports don’t face, which is that before you can get someone to watch a game, you must get them past the stereotypes they hold about people with disabilities. A highlight package on the local news will not overcome this barrier, but a webcast can.

Because the Paralympic community deserves more. I work for a wheelchair rugby team and that sport has some of the most dedicated fans around. At every tournament, friends and families and volunteering, fundraising and cheering in the stands. It makes sense. Say that you are a mother who nearly lost a son in a car accident, who was told by a doctor that he had become a quadriplegic, who supported him as he re-learned basic life skills, who watched him transform from someone barely able to sit up in bed to someone representing his country on a world stage. Imagine you have seen all that and you don’t have the money to travel to London. Imagine that someone tells you that you will not be able to see your son competing at his most proud sport moment because some television channel might kind of sort of maybe possibly want to do a 15-minute highlight package two weeks after the Paralympics are over. You would find that answer unacceptable, and so do I.

Now say that you are a Paralympic athlete. You moved thousands of miles away to train with the best coaches. You got up at 5:30 a.m. for years. You routinely push your body so hard that you throw up. You have been to 8 countries in the past year just to qualify. And now say someone tells you that, though the technology exists, your friends and family will not be able to see you represent your country on the world stage. You would find that answer unacceptable, and so do I.

Webcasting is a developing technology and it raises many important questions about broadcasting rights. These must be discussed. But it also raises new solutions, and none of these solutions involve apathy. C4 could sell its webfeed to other broadcasting companies. It could sell individual events 30 minutes after the match is over in iTunes. A major sponsor could step in to cover the cost of the bandwidth and ensure that Paralympic sports can be seen worldwide. From a purely financial standpoint, it’s in C4’s best interest to get this right. It seems better to make the webcast available worldwide and profit off the advertising, than to have Paralympic fans access the webcast via other means.

The Internet is a global medium and the Paralympics are a global movement. Both are evolving rapidly and there are many kinks to work out along the way. But if the Paralympics are about anything, they’re about refusing to accept the easy answer, about proving someone wrong when they tell you it can’t be done or it’s not possible. The London 2012 Paralympics deserves to be seen, and every athlete, supporter and ever stranger should be loud enough to demand it.

And here’s how.

1)   Ask C4 Paralympics to make the webcast for the London 2012 Paralympics viewable to people in every country. You can reach them on Twitter (@C4Paralympics), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/C4Paralympics) or via their website (http://www.channel4.com/4viewers/contact-us)

2)   If C4 will not show Paralympic sport outside its market, then the broadcaster with the official broadcasting rights in each country must do so. In Canada, this is held by CTV. Contact them on Twitter (@CtvOlympics), Facebook (Facebook.com/ctvolympics), or via their website (http://www.ctvolympics.ca/contactus.html)

 There are 100 days to the Paralympics. Let's make those 100 days count.   

How Qantas Saved Christmas

I have a strange life. I live in one of those perpetual tornadoes of weirdness where cats need hip replacements and ass muscles fall off and occasionally you need to be rescued on a Greek island by wheelchair rugby players or tell a masseuse in Turkey that, no, you don't want that kind of massage. This is not something I complain about, since I also have the kind of life where crappy things tend to work themselves out, usually as a result of there being good people in the world.

Case in point: this morning, I wrote a blog post about how I wasn't able to go to Australia to visit some friends because I failed to recognize that the fine print on my itinerary actually said that my credit card had been declined. (You can read the original post here). Just when I thought my Christmas Down Under was doomed to become a Christmas Sulking On the Couch and Overindulging in Homemade Boozy Chai Lattes, a Christmas miracle happened. Or a Twitter miracle.

I sent my original blog post to the Qantas customer service people via Twitter and they actually responded! Those of you who have heard the story of The Time I Went to France and Air Canada's Baggage Wankers Ripped a Hole in My Luggage and Despite Years of Trying I Never Got Compensated Because I Didn't Save the Receipt For A Four-Year-Old Bag (it's not a very exciting story, truth be told), will understand why I didn't expect an airline to really bother. After all, it was partially my faut; I should have read the fine print.

But Qantas responded, and within a few hours I had my trip rebooked at the same price I intended to pay for the original ticket, plus a complimentary pass to the Qantas lounge on my way back for my trouble. I'll be heading to Australia on the 15th and will arrive on the 17th. When I got off the phone with the Qantas people and discovered that I would indeed be able to go to Australia, it was like that moment in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas where the Grinch has a change of heart and throws all the presents down to the town below. (And what happened next? Well in Vancouver they say/ That the Arley's faith in customer service/ grew 4 sizes that day. Also: her butt grew several sizes in anticipation of all the Tim Tam's she's about to eat).

So thank you to Qantas customer service, and thank you to everyone who tweeted/ Facebooked their outrage on my behalf. While it will be strange to not spend Christmas with my family, I'm excited to be able to spend time with some truly awesome friends and explore Australia. Hopefully I will have some adventures worth blogging about! Thanks Qantas!

How the Qantas Stole Christmas

Update: Well, yay.  Qantas rectified the situation. Check out the updated blog post here.

One of the great things about having had a Paralympic wheelchair basketball career is that you have friends all over the world and a place to stay in nearly every country. One of the downsides, however, is that once you're no longer traveling around the world racking up Airmiles points and actually having one of those "real job" things, getting to see some of these friends is tough.

This year, I had planned to remedy that by spending Christmas and New Years with my friends in Australia, most of whom are on the Australian women's wheelchair basketball national team and too busy training for London 2012 to come visit me on this side of the world. I've actually never been to Australia, since the two times I was supposed to go for a basketball tournament I ended up getting sick or injured, so I was excited to finally experience the Land Down Under. What could be better than reconnecting with friends while soaking up enough vitamin D to get me through the rest of Vancouver's grey season?

Because of the last-minute-ness of my book tour, I wasn't able to confirm my travel dates until two weeks before my flight date, so the ticket price to Melbourne was at the top of my price range. I chose, however, to book through Qantas airline's website, since I was assured by friends that it was the most reliable site and Qantas offered the best service of any airline that flies to Australia. I submitted my credit card information and was directed to a screen saying that my flight had successfully been booked. Moments later, an itinerary arrived in my inbox. This itinerary had a booking number and reference number and the word 'confirmed' was written by every flight. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I arrived at the airport packed and ready to go. In anticipation of having to spend some extra time at the Homeland Security Love Fest thanks to the artificial hip, I arrived at the airport 2.5 hours in advance, thinking this would be ample time to catch my flight from Vancouver to L.A., which connected to my flight to Melbourne. Upon checking in, however, I received a shock: I had no ticket.

That itinerary that Qantas sent me? Well, let's take a closer look.

 

Yup...this all looks solid. Booking number. Reference number. And you'd think that if something was important, they'd put it in those nice, bright blue letters. Right? Let's read on!

Confirmed! Confirmed is a good word! Scroll, scroll, scroll. Yup, everything looks solid! This is the point where I thought, "Okay, all looks well. Back to book touring." Mistake! Let's read on.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. The minor detail that I HAVE NO TICKET was buried in the middle of the email in the same tiny capslocked letters that detailed the enhanced screening measures requiring me to stow my aerosols and gels in a transparent resealable 1 litre plastic bag. But hey, at least they used 10 whole asterisks. And we all know that asterisks in 10 pt. font mean business.

 The email continues on for another page in the same shout-y capslocks, before ending with this cheerful note:

"We wish you a pleasant journey" is apparently code for "Can't wait to see the look on your face when you get to the airport and realize that you have no ticket, sucka!"

Well, damn. No ticket. Now, I am a seasoned traveler. I have been all over the world for basketball and routinely fly for work. If I could get myself out of being chased by wild dogs at 3 am at the dock of a Greek island waiting for my stolen luggage to appear on a barge, I could remedy this situation.

I did not panic. I did not shout. I did not melt down. Instead, I called Qantas. We tried the credit card again. No dice. The nice Qantas rep suggested that I contact Mastercard. After 40 minutes on hold and a few dropped calls, I finally got through to Mastercard. Though my limit was well over the cost of the flight, I got my limit increased just to be safe. The representative at Mastercard suggested that Qantas could call them directly to remedy the situation, but that the payment should go through.

Time was ticking. I had only 45 minutes until my flight to L.A. I phoned Qantas again, waited on hold, but by the time that I got through to anyone and explained my problem, it was too late. The representative informed me that they could only process emergency payments in American funds, not Canadian funds, and would have to transfer me to another booking agent...and by that time it would be too late.

I asked if they could put me on the same flight on a different day, since Qantas did such a terrible job of informing me about the declined credit card. The agent said I should have read the fine print and it wasn't Qantas' fault. I asked if there was anything -- ANYTHING -- I could do. Nothing short of starting from scratch. And then she hung up. (Merry Christmas to you too, frosty Qantas lady).

Still not totally discouraged, I headed home to see if I could snag a cheap fare, but sadly the prices had gone up to over $3500, way, way beyond my budget. And even when I did find a single fare on a non-Qantas airline that was not ridiculously expensive, it turned out that Mastercard had put a block on my credit card. WHY? Because I tried to make a large purchase after increasing my credit limit. Face meet palm.

Between the Mastercard shenanigans and Qantas' refusal to offer more than the basic level of assistance, I will not be traveling to Australia this Christmas. I will not be sitting on the beach with friends for New Years. I will not be kayaking, snorkling, hiking or any of the other fun things I'd planned. I will not be taking a much-needed break from work. Instead, I'm spending this Christmas season getting caught up on work. And now, Qantas, I'm mad.

Because here's the thing. Yeah, I should have read the fine print. But crucial information such as the fact that my credit card was declined should not have been in the fine print to begin with. It should have been in a separate email. Or at the top of the itinerary in large, bold letters. Or anywhere but the middle of an email that appeared to be a flight confirmation, surrounded by a couple of asterisks and a few pages of information about security procedures. Had I discovered this problem quickly, I could have easily remedied the situation and would right now be shaking off the jetlag with an ice cold beer and a bit of sunshine.

So Qantas, you may have lost a customer, but I've lost my one chance for a vacation this year and that makes me terribly, terribly sad.  I hope you'll find some way to remedy this situation, or prevent from happening to anyone else. In the meantime, I will be sending this blog post to all my many Paralympic athlete friends around the world in the hopes that they do not make the same mistake as I did. I hope they will bear that in mind when choosing an airline.

Are the Paralympics Patronizing?

Before my hip replacement, I was a Paralympic athlete in wheelchair basketball. I won 2 World Championship gold medals (2002 and 2006) and won bronze at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. Today, the former athlete (and current disability studies enthusiast) in me was intrigued by a blog post entitled "Are the Paralympics Patronizing?" The article (here: http://blogs.channel4.com/paralympics/2011/12/07/are-the-paralympics-patronising/) reflects on a survey that found that less than a quarter of people with disabilities are excited about the Paralympics. This, the blogger says, "questions the core purpose of Paralympic sport."

I'm not so sure.

First, it's tough to make the argument that the Paralympics themselves are patronizing. Separating athletes out based on biological categories has been around since the advent of sports. Boxers and wrestlers have weight classes. Women have their own teams. There are championships for athletes of various ages from junior up to masters. No one is arguing that some 50 kg wrestler should hop in the ring with a 80kg wrestler. Why? Because sport is better when people compete against their equals.

One of our fundamental beliefs in sport is that champions are not born fully formed, but are created out of hard work and dedication.  Separating athletes into fair categories allows such a principle to be carried out. If sports like boxing or wrestling did not have weight classes, the athlete who happened to be born with the most appropriate body type would overpower athletes who trained harder, were smarter or more skilled. Allowing like to compete against like shows us true excellence, since the athlete who has done the most to maximize his or her natural gifts is the winner.

For this reason, the Paralympics as an event cannot be patronizing. What can be patronizing, however, is the way the Paralympics are represented in popular culture. Just as the lack of popularity of women's sport is less a reflection on women's sport and more a reflection on our culture's beliefs about women, the Paralympic movement reveals society's attitude towards people with disabilities. This attitude is often highly patronizing.

One of those patronizing attitudes is the notion that the "core purpose of Paralympic sport" is to inspire other people with disabilities. Athletes compete in the Paralympics to win. It is an elite sporting event and a wheelchair is just another piece of sporting equipment that allows athletes to achieve this level of excellence. When I competed, I did not get up at 5:30 every morning so that some 50-year-old accountant with polio could learn to follow his dreams. I got up at 5:30 every morning to win a gold medal. Athletes able-bodied and otherwise are notoriously bad at being role models (see: Michael Phelps) because their #1 goal isn't to inspire. Their goal is to win.

The problem is that when the "inspirational" narrative that exists in able-bodied sports gets applied to the Paralympics, it's filtered through a thick lens of ableism. Michael Phelps is inspirational because he won roughly 8 million gold medals. A Paralympic athlete, however, is inspirational because she overcame a disability (bonus points if this disability was acquired in a tragic manner) and is exhibiting hope and courage and rainbows and butterflies by just competing at all. To reduce any sport to a Hallmark made-for-TV movie is to cheapen it and the word "inspirational" as applied to Paralympic athletes has been degraded to the point that it's a dirty word.

This, I suspect, is what the bulk of people with disabilities are reacting to when they profess to be not excited about the Paralympics. Even the question is filtered through a bias. Why should one person with a disability be expected to feel a rah-rah sense of allegiance to someone else with a disability, be they Paralympian or otherwise? Why should a person who has no interest in sports be interested in the Paralympics just because he or she has a spinal cord injury or a missing limb? I imagine that by the time the Paralympics arrive, there will be a lot of non-sporty people with disabilities in Britain sick of being asked by well-meaning people on buses or in shops whether they're excited that The Disabled are being put on TV thanks to the Paralympics, in much the same way that conservative African-Americans must have gotten sick of well-meaning white people asking them if they're excited about the election of Barack Obama.

 Personally, I don't care whether only 22% of people with disabilities are excited about the Paralympics. I care that wheelchair sports are represented in a way that allows both able-bodied and disabled people alike to make up their own minds. When Paralympic sports are treated like the sports they are, we see time and again that people who love sports "get" them. A professional wheelchair basketball league is thriving in Europe not because people want to show their kids that people with disabilities can accomplish great things, but because wheelchair basketball is exciting, fast-paced and fun to watch. When a wheelchair is viewed as a piece of sporting equipment, all that awareness and advocacy and empathy stuff takes care of itself.

My hope is that in London 2012, the "I word" takes a backseat to an intelligent, honest analysis of Paralympic sports. The good news it that it's starting to happen, as more and more journalists (Gary Kingston, for example) and bloggers represent Paralympic sports for what they are. This may mean criticizing a team or athlete for underperforming, or it may mean admitting that some Paralympic sports (like some Olympic sports) are not as exciting as others. Without this honesty, however, the Paralympics become nothing more than an extended human interest story. And if that's the case, there will be a lot more people with disabilities changing the channel.

Getting Back On the Bike

This May, I rode a bike for the first time in 17 years.

You might say to me, “Wow, riding a bicycle. Colour me impressed. It’s not like my four-year-old niece goes off-road extreme mountain biking and punches cougars in the face when she encounters them out in the wilderness or my 80-year-old grandma is training for her 18^th triathlon and built her own bike out of the bamboo she cut down herself during her trip to Nepal or anything. Did you bust out your fanny pack for your epic trip around the Seawall?”

Okay, yes, I realize that I am living in the epicenter of the Active Westcoast Lifestyle and everyone and their dog rides a bike here. This, however, is a big deal to me because it’s literally the only thing I can do post-hip-replacement that I couldn’t do before. (Well, I have found a few extra uses besides bike riding for my newfound ability to straddle, but let’s not go into that).

I resisted posting about this for several months because the person who taught me how the ride a bike is someone I was casually dating at the time. It’s a long-standing opinion of mine that blogging about an ex (even a casual, short-term-relationship type ex) is a one-way ticket to AwkwardTown with stops along the way at AiringYourDirtyLaundryInAWayThatWillCauseYouShameVille and TheMinuteYouMentionDatingCreepersOnTheInternetAreImaginingYouFucking-opolis.

I’ve decided to blog about learning how to ride a bike, however, because so much of Young and Hip has chronicled my disappointment with my hip replacement. I often get emails asking me if I regret it, and I worry that I am talking people out of a life-altering surgery. But even though I’m over a year post-hip-replacement (and two years since the first one), my hip still swells up like the ass of a baboon in heat if I try to do such extreme sports as…deep water aerobics. Or walking down the street. Or sitting in a chair for longer than 20 minutes. I still walk with a cane. I can never play wheelchair basketball again. If I work out for more than a couple of days a week, I’m in constant pain. Over the past year, I’ve honestly struggled with the knowledge that this is as good as my hip will ever get.

But back to the bicycling. I met D. on an online dating site. I was immediately comfortable around him, which is astounding because usually on dates I talk like a crack-addicted LOLcat (“O HAI!!”) and knock things over with my elaborate hand gestures. A few weeks after we met, I mentioned that I wanted to learn how to ride a bike. I joked about getting adult training wheels so I wouldn’t fall and bring about Total Hip Replacement 3: Rise of the Prosthetic Fractures. D offered to teach me.

I assumed that he meant that we would rent a bike by the seawall and he would attempt to catch me if I looked to be veering towards certain death. But D. surprised me by researching how to safely teach an adult how to ride a bicycle. Thanks to a few websites and several Youtube videos of old Chinese ladies becoming confident cyclists, he came up with a plan. (Is it a bad sign that one of the nicer things a man has ever done for me involved Youtube videos of old Chinese ladies?)

And so, on one of those rare Spring days when it’s sunny in Vancouver and your Seasonal Affective Disorder calls in sick, D and I went to Stanley Park armed only with the wisdom of the internet. D’s method involved me coasting down a grassy hill first with my feet touching the ground to get a feel for the movement, then again with my feet up, then finally while pedaling. And it was….really easy. Though the writer in me died a little, I had to admit that the cliché is true: you really never forget.

This was a surprise because when I tried to ride a bike several years before the hip replacement, I couldn’t get my left leg on the pedals, it nearly got caught in the chain and A. (who was holding on to both me and the bike) and I ran into a tree. This time, however, I took off riding up a hill. Wobbly, yes. Slow, absolutely. Graceful, sure as hell not. I, however, felt like Lance Fucking Armstrong winning the Tour De Fuck You Hip Replacement Because That Shit Just Happened.

D. and I took a break for lunch and then he rented a bike and we rode together around the Seawall. Because of my lack of speed and the fact that I was wobbling more than Lindsey Lohan after a rough night, cyclists kept chiming at me. At first, I mistook this for a friendly salute, as if they were saying, “Greetings and salutations fellow cycling enthusiast! May your journey be safe and free of ass-chafing!”, but D. informed me that ringing your bell is actually cyclist speak for “fuck you.” (Well chime chime to you too, Vancouver bike commuters).

Soon, however, I was coasting down hills, picking up speed and wondering how long it had been since I’d gone fast. That’s the one thing I miss about sport, and it’s something that elliptical machines can’t replace: just going balls out fast. I will spare you any clichés of feeling free – nothing’s free in Vancouver, let’s be honest – but for the first time my long recovery felt over. I was ‘better.’ Sure, it wasn’t the better I expected or wanted, but even though my hip was swollen and my back was sore and my anti-ass was like “fuck off right here and now,” it seemed like a better I could live with.

I looked at D., who was flushed from pedaling and who had gone to all this effort to teach me how to do something he didn’t even enjoy, and at Stanley Park, which was being all picture-post-cardy, and I thought: Best. Date. Ever. And that feeling continued for several more weeks….until it didn’t. And then it was over. There’s a Gloria Steinem joke here somewhere.

After the breakup, I’ll admit that I spent a day or two sulkily listening to “Blood on the Tracks,” but it doesn’t take long to get over a six-week thing with someone you only saw a couple of times a week. And it’s even easier once you realize that that the only thing shittier than a breakup is being unable to date because you’re stuck in bed post-surgery injecting yourself with bloodthinners and groggily watching some reality TV show about the joys of home renovation.

Because – watch out people! Literary Device Alert! Here comes a very subtle metaphor because I am a fancy, fancy writer! – after two years of medical limbo, I am happy to be back on the dating bike, and the social life bike, and the getting the fuck on with my life bike. (That’s a lot of bikes. What’s the metaphorical equivalent of padded bike shorts?) And even though it means accepting the notion that the cane is here to stay, I’m happy that the Great Hip Replacement Debacle is receding into a small point in the rear view mirror. It’s nice to not to catch myself starting the bulk of my stories with, “So I was at physio and an old lady said…”

So even though it didn’t lead to happily ever after, I’m glad to have a story that begins with the phrase “So I was dating this guy and he taught me how to ride a bike,” even if it ends with the phrase “yes, grandma, I’m still single. No, I’m not a lesbian.” Because several weeks after D. and I broke up, I bought myself a bike. Her name is Dorothy Mantooth and right now I only ride her around the quiet streets in my neighbourhood because cars seem like huge metal dinosaurs chasing me, though I have delusions of becoming a Serious Biker Who Wears Spandex And Refuels With Those Energy Gels.

A few weeks ago, I rode around the Seawall again. I passed a gaggle of elderly ladies stopping every few seconds to take photos of birds. I passed a tourist couple who kept announcing Vancouver’s beauty every 3.8 seconds to one another. I even passed a pair of girls who looked mildly athletic. Granted, I got my ass handed to me by several middle-aged rollerbladers, but let’s go ahead and chalk this up to a solid victory.

So if you’re in the Vancouver area and you see a very tall girl on a white bike making the Seawall her bitch, that is me, and I’m passing on the left. Chime chime, motherbitches!

And if you’re not in Vancouver and you’ve had a hip replacement and are looking for a safe way to relearn how to ride a bike without falling, here is a video of me doing so on a very good day with a guy I was dating. If you want to do a drinking game to this clip, take a shot everytime I say “yay!”