Exercise to Exorcise

The first time I realized exercise could exorcise the effects of trauma and loss, I had just lost my father to cancer. I was wildly kicking in a kickboxing class, sweat dripping into my eyes, T-shirt clinging to my chest. The exercise instructor looked worried. I was much older than the other participants, and no one else was punching or kicking some imagined enemy with such vigor.

Kickboxing was the perfect release for my rage and grief after 10 days in an understaffed Florida hospital with my dying father. I had entered the gym with trepidation at first after helplessly sitting, watching and grieving for so long.

Soon the gym became my refuge, and I couldn't get enough of it. And ever since, whether in the face of my own bout with cancer, the loss of my sister and mother, or the isolation of the pandemic, I intensively kick, lift, run, Zumba-dance, power-walk, swim or spin to ward off despair.

With each curveball life threw, I knew I needed some sort of jolt into action to heal. One of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems comes to mind when I remember my state of mind shortly before I entered that first kickboxing class:

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
...
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go."

The chill of loss is immediate, but the "letting go" doesn't come easily. Active movement seems counterintuitive and yet, in my experience, it is the solution.

"Exercise may be as beneficial as antidepressants," says researcher and medical psychologist James Blumenthal at Duke University. I would argue it's not just exercise, but exercise that burns, and thus burns out thoughts that lead to a sense of hopelessness.

After the kickboxing class, I began to train for our local Holyoke St. Patrick's 10k road race and a mini triathlon at our local Y. The 10k includes a genuine "heartbreak hill." The pleasure for me was in the training, more than the race itself, because it helped me increase the intensity of my workouts.

Then just one week after participation in the road race, I found myself sitting in a private room with a radiologist after my mammogram; he pointed to a tumor on a screen. I had breast cancer, without any symptoms or warning. Further, I was told I would need chemo and radiation.

The nightmare that followed sent me into a state of fear and desperation. Would I live to attend my daughter's wedding? How would I handle all the side effects of treatments, including losing my lovely long hair? For a short while, I wallowed. Then I remembered my path to feeling whole again.

Running would have been too difficult at the time, so I took to swimming in the pond at our cottage in Goshen, Massachusetts, with the goal of returning to the 10k after full recovery. Swimming while bald was a beautiful sensation, with the silky feel of water washing over my bare scalp.

One day I felt strong enough to lengthen the distance. I called a friend on the other side of the pond and asked her to sit on her dock while I swam across. She was puzzled. "I won't be able to save you if you start to drown in the middle from fatigue!"

But I needed a witness as I met my goal of getting to the other side and back. With someone there, I felt I could meet the challenge. Hope and health would return. I felt alive again. 

Of course, it's a mistake to underestimate one's chemo-driven fatigue. I began a water aerobics class for cancer survivors, not realizing the other participants had finished chemo and were well on their way to recovery. I tried to keep up with their lively jumping jacks, but then, like any defeated overachiever, I practically crept to the locker room with the help of the instructor. I had to learn to tune into my body and moderate as needed. Intensity must be measured by what the body can handle at any given time. 

As I began to get my full strength back, I signed up for the 10k once again, and completed the race with all the euphoria that runners feel, even slow runners like me. I was restored, ready to move forward with all that life still had to offer, despite ongoing side effects, fears and even anger at the irony of having had to accept toxins into my body to fight a toxic cancer.   

The next chapter in my exercise journey came with the loss of my sister. Upon nursing her into death ten years after her diagnosis of breast cancer, our shared condition, I realized I would eventually face my own 10th year with an uncertain fate.

Together we had encouraged each other's denial about the possibilities of metastasis. We even flew to Santa Fe, at the height of her metastasis and shortly before her death, for a gig and a so-called vacation that landed her in the emergency room. We almost didn't make it home for her final goodbyes to the rest of the family.

But now she was gone, and I was alone without my cancer mentor. How could I continue to live with the memory of my sister's metastasis and consequent death? Was I to follow in my sister's footsteps?

Although I had stopped identifying as a cancer "survivor" when my hair grew back, superstition struck in my own 10th year. It was then I came upon the Livestrong program at the local Y, designed for people who had experienced cancer and wished to increase their physical activity following treatments. It would differ from my other efforts because it would require commitment to a group, and I would learn the value of group exercise.

My cancer experience was not recent, unlike others in the group, but it was certainly not forgotten, no matter how hard I tried. This was a chance to work with skilled trainers together with a group of people who all had felt some loss of strength and perhaps the same repressed fear that the cancer might return as it did for my sister.

Participation would require letting the thought of my cancer back into my head. Looking at the others in the group, I was staring right into my past, that immediate aftermath of treatment, when suddenly I was given a premature glimpse into the vulnerability of old age.

I decided to jump in. It was free, after all, and I could always quit. The first meeting aimed to create a good group dynamic for our 12 weeks of working out together. We all shared the sense that we had lost control of our bodies on the day of diagnosis. It was not up to us whether those cells had escaped and set up camp somewhere in our bodies, untouched by treatment or surgery. What would it take to "live strong" despite the possibility of some insidious force within our bodies just waiting to steal our strength?   

Early on, it was clear to our trainers that what we wanted most was strength, not just physical strength but the emotional strength to face the future, whatever it might bring. Regaining physical strength was the one thing we could count on. Eventually we also came to count on each other simply by showing up every Tuesday and Thursday to fight bone thinning, weakened joints and all the other side effects of cancer treatments. 

We shared the common knowledge from a 2019 study on breast cancer survivors: those who were the most physically active in the study had a 40% lower risk of metastasis and death. It was empowering to cheer each other on as we increased the weight we could lift and our pace on the treadmill, oblivious to those who knew nothing of our individual plights. We became a team. 

A Tai Chi instructor visited us in the room where we usually warmed up. I was skeptical. Tai Chi always seemed to me a mysterious form of movement that had nothing to do with concrete exercise or getting strong. But that night, we stood together in shared strength, unspoken connection, and seeming silence, with only the sound of our collective breathing.

We were together in this celebration of body and mind, this flow of movement that countered all the hardships we had endured. We had become a fluid force, united by our humanity, and flowing freely into the lives we wanted to live.  

Leah Blatt Glasser is professor emerita of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of the literary biography In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). She is currently working on her memoir, tentatively titled Between Sisters. Read More