How many posts? More than 30 posts this month, through a run of heat and wildfire smoke that scrambled a lot of our workout plans — proof that showing up looks different every summer.
Who blogged? Sam, Diane, Christine, Nat, Catherine, Mina, Tracy, Martha, Elan, and guest blogger Chloë.
Recovery and what the body actually needs. A strong thread this month was on healing slower — and more honestly — than planned. Diane’s cardiac-rehab arc continued in Recovery is Weird, where her Garmin body battery finally climbed out of the “depleted” zone even as her intensity minutes stayed baffling. Mina’s Deny Pain, Heal Faster; if only … looked back at a shoulder injury that turned out to be several fractures and torn tissue, and wondered whether not knowing the full diagnosis for a month actually helped her heal with less fear and guarding. Nat worked through the final stage of a back injury in Nat, spinal movement and the Jefferson curl, learning to trust movements she’d been avoiding out of old caution. And Tracy’s C25K is taking longer than 9 weeks and that’s okay traced how a running program stalled out after she lost her mother, and how she’s found her way back to it.
Guest voices on bodies and belief. Chloë’s guest post What I thought my body was for was a standout: a lifelong “mind person” who took up jiu-jitsu in her forties and discovered a forty-year-old assumption about her own physical limits was never actually true — just an old, unquestioned story.
Heat, smoke, and summer plans going sideways. Climate kept elbowing its way into the blog’s usual summer rhythms. Sam’s summer movement plans go awry catalogued a cascade of cancelled rides, smoky air quality, a shuttered pool, and a too-hot dog walk, while Nat’s Summer’s in full swing and Nat couldn’t be happier found the bright side of an early-morning, heat-dodging routine of walking, biking, and lane swims. Sam and her crew still managed a four-day canoe camping trip into Algonquin (“Type 1.5 fun,” by consensus), and Catherine spent two weeks travelling and noticing the small sensory pleasures of summer — cold rivers, gravel underfoot, one very memorable watermelon slushie — in Mid-summer: a time for ordinary movement and extraordinary sensory experience.
Charity miles for good causes. Nat rode the MS Bike Tour (Today’s the day!), a weekend that’s become a fixture in her relationship with Michel. Diane paid forward her open-water swimming in Sometimes Good Things Grow, serving as a swim angel at Bring on the Bay for the fourth year running. And Sam wrapped the month gearing up for the Great Cycle Challenge in support of SickKids, after laying out her whole summer and fall of charity riding in Sam’s August Charity Riding.
Feminism, sport, and language in the news. Martha’s Blowing the Whistle on Gender at the World Cup celebrated the six women officiating the men’s tournament this year — a record, even if still a small fraction of FIFA’s roster. Diane’s My FIFA Protest Has Turned into Something Pretty Great turned frustration with lopsided World Cup coverage into a new love of the Northern Super League. And Martha’s Incompetent, blighted, senile took on the quietly damning language medicine uses for women’s bodies — incompetent cervix, senile vagina — and argued for language that doesn’t blame the patient for the problem.
Retreats, rest, and work-life boundaries. Catherine spent four days at a meditation retreat for neurodivergent people in North Carolina, previewed memorably in Neurodivergent meditation retreat preview: the fans (an ode to industrial box fans in a humid mountain hall). Mina’s When Rest Feels Reckless sat with the discomfort of taking five unpaid weeks away from work, and the old voice insisting she hasn’t earned the rest. Christine kept finding her own way back to consistency, from a “you don’t need motivation, you need a decision” meditation prompt in Meditation Jumpstarts Christine’s New Exercise Routine to rediscovering movement-snack cards from an old favourite book in (Finally) Circling Back to Trisha Durham’s ‘Movement Snacks’.
Sam’s dean life meets the blog. In Is Looking at Art Really the New Running?, Sam brought her day job as Dean of Arts at Guelph into conversation with the blog, digging into the research behind claims that gallery visits can be as good for you as a run — and landing on cautious enthusiasm for treating art as part of a whole-life approach to health.
Trackers, streaks, and small daily wins. Elan reflected on five years of wearing an Oura ring in A Fitbit for My Finger, Five Years On, noting how her relationship to the data has quietly simplified over time. Sam kept her Zwift streak alive through the heat in Sam’s Zwift streak abides!, and the team traded reflections on their most valuable personal habits — sleep, meal planning, morning movement — in The bloggers and our best habits.
Checking in as a team. July 2 brought Happy Halfway Day!, the bloggers’ traditional midyear check-in on their words of the year, and Elan closed out the month interviewing Sam about her long-running “3 good things” practice in Positive is Practice, digging into negativity bias and what it means to notice the good on purpose.
Month-in-review posts are assembled by Claude with prompts from Sam and edited by Sam. If you spot any errors, let us know.
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