This Race is Feminist AF and I’ll Tell You Why
When NYU professor Wendy Suzuki first got the idea to start teaching an undergraduate course on exercise and the brain, she came up with an ingenious plan: she’d hire an aerobics instructor to be her co-teacher, combining a traditional lecture with an actual workout.
“So I went to the department, and I said ‘I have this great idea!’,” she told me one afternoon a few weeks back. “And they said no - we pay you to teach.”
“And so I went back to my office,” she continued, “and I decided to do the next most obvious thing, which is go get certified to teach the exercise class myself. Obviously.”
Suzuki practices a very particular kind of aerobics, called Intensati, which involves working out while you yell positive affirmations (“I am worthy of my own love!” “Everything I need is within me!”), so it’s not just that she’d be sweating in front of her students. She’d be getting them to do something… kind of goofy.
But this is how strongly she believes in the power of exercise to reshape the brain: she is willing to get up in front of a bunch of undergraduates, in full spandex, and not just sweat, but lead them through mantras. Then: she gives a lecture on neuroscience.
I went to talk to Suzuki because, after I realized that training for a half marathon wasn’t going to make me any skinnier, I wanted someone to convince me the effort was really worth it.
“It's absolutely clear that increased aerobic exercise changes the brain's anatomy,” Suzuki says. For years, she’s studied one particular part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in memory. Suzuki says exercise can actually stimulate the birth of brand new brain cells there, which is a pretty big deal, and why exercise and the brain has become the major focus of her lab.
But she also had a warning for me: “You have to be careful. Because while exercise can improve brain functions and particularly improve hippocampal functions, stress levels can undo that good.” This is based on rodent studies, showing forced exercise can actually hurt the brain.
“So nobody's forcing you to do the marathon,” Suzuki warned me, “but if you do the marathon and you're sleep deprived, and you have thirty things to do, and a podcast to produce, and, you know, a deadline to do that in -- that's a lot of stress. You have to understand that that stress is is fighting with your exercise.”
This worried me, a lot. Suzuki had basically just described my life: constant juggling, always running from one thing to the next. I’d always thought about all that stress as a nuisance, not as something that could actively wreck my brain. And as my runs got longer, the stress got worse. I’d leave my family on a Saturday morning for my long run, and when I came back a couple of hours later, feeling great, the kids would be going bonkers.
It reminded me of something Gretchen Reynolds, the science writer for the New York Times, said about race training when I spoke with her: “It’s very selfish. It has to be selfish.” Training for a half marathon involves hours of running beforehand. “If you have kids and a husband and work, that is a big chunk of time that you’ve just taken for yourself,” Reynolds said. “You have to make sure everyone’s on board for that.”
I’ve always tried to exercise regularly. But I haven’t always succeeded, mostly because life gets in the way. For me, having a race allowed me to change how not just I, but my whole family, talked about what I was doing. It wasn’t negotiable.
This worked both ways: while my family made space for me to train, I found ways to squeeze running in on my own time. I started running to work on Tuesday mornings. One day, I ran to an oncology appointment. (When I showed up at my cancer center sweaty and in yoga pants, i figured: well, it’s kind of this person’s job to deal with my body at it’s worst, right?)
Today, I’ll run as far as I ever have: 13.1 miles around Prospect Park and out to Coney Island. I haven’t lost a pound, and there’s a chance I won’t run so much as crawl across the finish line. But it’s been worth it.
In the end, I ended up disagreeing with Gretchen Reynolds: training wasn’t selfish, but it was self-interested. And for a working mom, maybe that isn’t a bad thing.
[This is part three of a three-part series on the science of exercise and what it takes to run a half marathon by WNYC’s Mary Harris, host of Only Human podcast and health reporter. To see the earlier posts, click here.]
