I'm short. Five-foot-six to be exact. I towered over my grandmother but I definitely have her to thank for these genes. I have short, stubby, muscular legs with T-Rex thighs and bowling pin calves.
When I was a kid I was proud of my shortness. I got in a legitimate argument with my best friend over who was more deserving of playing Zacchaeus (a famously short Bible character) in the third-grade play. My hero was Muggsy Bogues and I would pray to God every night that I would take his place as the shortest player in NBA history. (Mr. Bogues was 5-foot-3.) Today, I have only three inches over the Charlotte Hornets point guard and not one iota of his basketball talent.
Despite basketball's generosity to the vertically gifted, I played on the high school team. However, my membership on that team -- both athletically and socially -- was a bit of a joke. I wore Ramones t-shirts under my practice jersey if that tells you anything. In fact, the older I got, the more I learned to own my shortness through humor. In a college speech course, I recited the lyrics of Skee-Lo's "I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller" before an audience of 30-40 people. They loved it. And before chubbies and showing thighs were a cool-guy thing, I was wearing short shorts to be funny.
It wasn't until I started rock climbing that I mastered the art of self-deprecating humor. Climbing like cycling or running places participants under significant pressure to achieve an "ideal" physique. Body image issues are a pervasive societal problem so it's no surprise that endurance sports, which serves as a microcosm of the society at large, has their own body image issues. And studies show that the demand for the ideal body does not discriminate based on gender either.
Enter any climbing gym in America and you're bound to see and hear traditionally beautiful people with no shirts on talk about diets, nutrition, and weight loss. Those aren't inherently bad things but it underscores how obsessed climbers are with appearance (often cloaked in the language of performance). So there I was, in the gym or at the crag, definitely keeping my shirt on, blaming my "Cee-Lo Green arms," my "Oompa-Loompa legs" or my "prepubescent wookie" body for my failures to send. People particularly loved the "prepubescent wookie" bit. It's legitimately funny. But not to my therapist who, years later, would call me out on this defense mechanism during our first or second session.
To be clear: I am not trying to say my struggle to be comfortable in my own body was the same as the next person's. And I wasn't going to therapy because of it. It just naturally came up during the session because I was so habituated in the ways of making fun of myself. And not knowing or loving oneself can lead to a myriad of unwanted behaviors. What I am trying to say is that a lot of us -- a lot more of us than we realize -- struggle with being at home in our body more than we care to admit. Even or especially(?) if you participate in outdoor endurance adventure sports.
While I was going to counseling I was also training for an ultra-marathon. I wasn't fast. I wasn't good. If I didn't have a "climber's body" (whatever that is) then I most definitely did not have a "runner's body" (whatever that is). (PSA: all bodies are climbers' and runners' bodies.) When I was fifteen, my basketball coach told me I ran like a 40-year old man. By that math, I was running 31 miles like an 80-year old man. But I did it. My short little legs ran 34 miles up, down, and around Lookout Mountain. At the time, my friend Josh and I were only the 8th Strava users to do the Big Daddy Loop Threepeat.
Since the 50K wasn't a race or sanctioned event, I got no running bib, completion medal, or cool t-shirt. What I did get was a healthy sense of self. None of my therapist's "homework" assignments got me to think about my body and myself differently. Ultra-running did. Running helped me live in my body with confidence and compassion. After the 50K, though, my interest in running has been negligible.
I reserve the right to be wrong about everything, but riding a bike is much more fun. While I worked on a draft of this post, I got to ride my bike with Catalyst Sports Adaptive Mountain Bike Tour. Some of these athletes could pedal a bicycle; others used hand-cycles or e-assisted bikes. All of them ripped around the trails with the kind of grin that I think few things other than a bicycle can provide. One rider talked about how the event made him feel human again. Another shared that adaptive cycling helped them learn to love themself after years of hating their body.
I have half a dozen takeaways from riding with these athletes and here's just one: human-powered outdoor adventure sports have a great capacity to heal. Outdoor adventure athletes, brands, and marketing have a great capacity to hurt, sure. But strip all that away -- grades, PRs, and K/QOMs too -- and you're left with something simply amazing, liberating even: the discovery of one's abilities through moving your body outdoors.
My short but capable legs have done a lot of rad things. I'm proud of them and what they've done and where they've been.
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