Sabor de Soledad

Fatigue, being a woman, running, veganism, and a lot of other stuff.

I feel like a long, sprawl-y post, so… 

I decided to cut one run out completely for this week. That’s still giving me three days of running, one of which was the new route (four miles and more hills than I’m used to). For the rest, I’m doing one two-miler and one three-miler. Part of the reason I skipped this morning is that I felt wiped out the second I woke up this morning, and the other part is that I couldn’t get food in. 

I took maybe four bites of my oatmeal and knew I just wasn’t going to eat it. Not then anyway. I brought the rest of it with me to work. Yeah, I still haven’t eaten it. I got coffee in, and I’ll need to eat it soon because that much caffeine in my system without a carbohydrate buffer is going to make me a ball of jitters if I don’t start to eat some foodz. 

My stomach problem is now going in the opposite direction of where it went Monday. I’m back to glacially-slow activity in the digestive department. I even felt hungry-ish (not enough to warrant actually eating, but enough to notice that I could if I wanted to) as I went to bed, but I’m just stalling elsewhere, so I don’t want to eat so much right now. 

I brought my oatmeal, some lentil soup, some pumpkin soup, and fruit for my food at work today. There ought to be enough gentle fiber in all of this to ease me back to regularity. 

On top of it, this is my third day of cramps and I think that’s probably the actual primary reason I did not want to eat this morning because my entire torso was focused on a faint, pulsating pain. Aspirin break!

So I’m deleting a run from the week. That way I can still do four runs next week (when I should be back to normal in all of the departments), and I won’t be doing three runs in a row this week (which would drive my fatigue into an otherworldly realm). 

I’m going to be looking at all of the training plans for the half marathon (both of the novice ones, basically, since I think I was overestimating what sort of routine I could maintain), and reconfiguring what I ought to do each week, but probably putting together a less rigid schedule (I literally put all of my runs into Google Cal because I wanted to plan around races… I’ll keep them in there, but they’re not set in stone). 

I also know I need to add strength training and cross. I have a yoga mat, and if I budget better, even before I (possibly) get the new job at work (things are starting to look more promising again, but I can’t afford to let my hopes get too high), I ought to be able to manage a membership to a gym again. I need to see if I will be permitted to have one at the Rec Center at PSU as just a temporary employee at the moment. And if not, there’s got to be somewhere around here that has monthly plans. 

Ugh, using weights in public makes me feel SO self conscious, though. Maybe I would be better served by buying a few hand-weights and using them, and also yoga since that can be excellent for lean upper-body muscles. 

Thinking out loud. See? 

But I also want to get down on paper/Tumblr a little bit about why veganism has been the best choice for me, overall, and not just in the “it’s really hard for me to pig out at work pot-lucks anymore” sense. 

So, like most ciswomen, it kind of sucks having a period. I mean, there are some things that do rock. I used to paint a lot, and the way my art changed when my hormones did was kind of cool sometimes. And when I was a debater, sometimes the way I’d channel my discomfort and sour mood into argument was neat. 

But otherwise, it’s kind of the least fun thing. 

Add on top of that the fact that I might have PCOS (google it), but I’ve never been to a doctor to confirm it, and there are some things I had to deal with for a looooong time: 

I used to skip periods, like, all the time. One year I think I only had four or five periods. 

Or, when I would fly and change time zones, the jet lag would cause a sudden-onset period. I don’t know how that happened, but I literally got my period within three hours of getting to Thailand, England, and China. All of this was before I became a perma-vegan. I had a temporary trial before I went to China, and was a pescatarian for a few months before that trip. But I was still consuming dairy. 

Cramps were awful, especially during my teen years. I would be in the fetal position. Midol might take the edge off, but never fully resolve the pain. I had to miss school a few times. 

My emotions were also crazy and unpredictable and really vitriolic. I read a theory recently about Sylvia Plath’s depression, and how the cycle of her journals and the poetry from “Ariel” seemed to follow her menstrual cycle, and I had similar ebbs and flows. Despair! Rage! Immense feelings of persecution, exclusion, and a feeling that people were being double-faced (even conspiring behind my back). 

I was a wreck, and I had a very, very difficult time keeping/maintaining friendships from the time I was pubescent until maybe the past couple of years. I was explosive and basically a teenager well into my 20s. 

Why does veganism help this? 

Well, for starters, you could set a clock to my cycle right now. Especially in the last six months, I’ve never been more regular. And since I became a vegan, I haven’t skipped periods at all. 

Second, my PMS emotional symptoms are extremely tame. I only knew I’d be getting my period this week because I had my last one marked on the calendar in January. I would not describe any of the emotions I felt in the days leading up to it as indicative of what was on its way.

I’m the sort of girl who only cramps during her period, and never before. And the fetal-position-effect is all but gone. Yes, I still get cramps. Sometimes they’re very painful (the last time they really made me wince was when I was in Chicago and my schedule for sleep was kind of boggled anyway so we could cite an alternate causality for the abnormality of that level of pain), but most of the time on the “this is what pain looks like chart” they’re more like: 

They’re probably at a 2-3 for the most part right now, and they’d have been between a 5 and a 7 before. I would cry. I would CRY. 

And that chart is hilarious. 

Okay, what else. 

So, my emotions are more stable, everything is all sorts of predictable, and I don’t hurt as much. 

So I’m glad I don’t consume dairy and other animal products anymore. I know part of this is because, regardless of my veganism, I’m just eating better as a whole, and I might get the same results if I was eating animal products, but in healthier ways. I bet if y’all consume organic animal products, you’d get similar results. And I know part of this is regular exercise. 

But seriously, if your ladyparts aren’t happy during the menses, try to remove rGBH-laden products from your food and see if that helps: http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/rbgh/

Anyway, thank you for reading about my adjustments to the exercise routine, why my ladyparts are happier than they might be otherwise, and stuff that was probably super unpleasant to read. Wonderful.