Tag: Mind & Body

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Living

Ready to row: Keeping pace with the pull to stay fit

Members of the Rivanna Rowing Club tout both the physical and mental aspects of the sport. Photo by Ron Paris

Imagine a fitness regimen that combines the fresh air of running with the low impact of swimming. A form of recreation that can be social or solo, casual or competitive, for ages 13 to 103. Housed close to the center of town yet away from traffic or hubbub, the sport requires no prior experience or special equipment of one’s own, yet provides a total body workout like no other.

Welcome to the Rivanna Rowing Club.

While many people are familiar with ergs, the rowing machines situated among treadmills and stationary bikes in their fitness clubs, few realize that rowing on the water is a viable option in Charlottesville. Indeed, Albemarle County is the only area in central Virginia that has a public outdoor rowing club, open to experienced adults as well as juniors and beginners. Five miles of calm water on the Rivanna Reservoir, accessible just off Earlysville Road, provides an ideal venue.

Learn to Row Open House
Sessions at 9 or 11am Saturday, May 13
Meet at the rowing boathouse, 276 Woodlands Rd.
Open to ages 13 and up. Free; no registration required.
More info at rivannarowing.org.

Mary Maher, boathouse captain, is in her 23rd season with the club. She remembers returning from a rafting trip in Colorado and wanting to reconnect with the water here at home. She noticed an ad in C-VILLE Weekly for the Learn to Row program at the Rivanna Rowing Club, took a class and was hooked. These days, all sorts of folks try it out.

“Some people drive across the bridge over the Rivanna and see the boats below and think it looks peaceful,” says Maher. “Others just like to be on the water in a boat, any way they can. We get a lot of burnt-out runners who’d like to try something different. It’s the perfect sport for those who are physically fit and willing to train, but it’s not that hard on the joints.”

Rowing is a total body activity that tones your arms, legs, chest, back and abs. Though most observers assume the arms are doing most of the work, power comes from the legs, driving the body forward and back on a sliding seat as the oars pull through the water. While the training provides rigorous cardiovascular exercise, stabilizes the core and improves joint health, rowing advocates find the intangible benefits just as compelling.

Melanie Dick, 33, picked up the sport last summer and appreciates both the physical and mental aspects of rowing. “It’s very challenging,” she says. “There’s so much to focus on—your pace, your breathing, your hands—that you can’t think about other things like work deadlines or bills. It’s a rhythmic sport, very meditative, because for that hour or so you’re only thinking about rowing.”

Adding to the mystique, a time-honored lingo peppers the speech of rowers. “Weigh enough” is a command to stop rowing (as is “let it run”). You don’t want to “catch a crab” (get an oar caught in the water) or be the “anchor” in the boat (slow everybody down). Rowers enjoy the social camaraderie of the pastime whether they intend to relax or race, and most admit to a near-obsession with the quest to perfect their stroke. They are continually in pursuit of an elusive sensation: the “swing” of a boat in precise harmonic balance.

John Wray, captain of the Albemarle High School men’s rowing team, says it’s the kind of activity that gets in your head. “After you row a hard piece and put the boats up, even though you’re exhausted, all you can think about is going out again,” he says. “When you do it right, it just feels good.”

And feeling good, after all, is the whole idea.

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Living

Negative ions may have a positive effect on your health

Halo Salt Spa offers visitors the chance to do yoga in a room lined with bricks of pink Himalayan salt, which emit negative ions into the air. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Winter is here, which means daylight is scarce and cold temperatures make most people want to spend a majority of their time indoors. This lack of exposure to sunlight can cause what is classically called “the winter blues,” a mild depression that is clinically referred to as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. Many people treat SAD with light therapy but others, including researchers from Wesleyan University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, believe that salt crystals may be a natural way to ward off SAD while also minimizing the symptoms of respiratory issues such as asthma, cystic fibrosis, sinus infections, a stuffy nose as a result of cold, flu or allergies. Why salt? Put simply, the positive power of negative ions.

When heated, salt generates negative ions. Negative ions are invisible, odorless, tasteless atoms that have experienced some action, such as evaporation or being vigorously tossed around in water, that causes them to gain a negative electron rendering them negatively charged. You can easily find them in nature near waterfalls or the seashore. The magnetic charge of negative ions helps to purify the air because it attracts great numbers of positively charged floating particles. Once sucked into the negative ion tractor beam, the particles become heavy and fall to the ground, away from your nose. Salt is also an antiseptic and antibacterial, and when inhaled, it clears mucus from cilia in the respiratory system, making it easier to breathe. Cleaner air and cilia means less junk going into your body, allowing more room for oxygen to go in.

Inhaling negative ions also has mood-enhancing benefits. It is believed that as the body processes those inhaled negative ions, a biochemical reaction transpires that increases serotonin (a good mood chemical) levels, which helps manage depression and, in some ion-sensitive people, triggers euphoria. I am one of those ion-sensitive people. I know this because I feel really awesome when I am at the beach. But I am also a skeptic—I needed to try it for myself.

Andi Senatro, manager of the Halo Salt Spa located off the Downtown Mall, says that clients have reported positive effects from time spent in a salt room. These rooms expose clients to negative ions through exposure to salt rocks and microscopic salt crystals pumped into the air by a machine called a halogenerator. “One client had severe sinus issues and had to give herself a facial massage before bed every night to facilitate drainage,” says Senatro. “She did one session here and could feel her sinuses draining without the aid of massage.”

On a recent visit to Halo, I was led into a quiet room lined with 8-inch-thick bricks of pink Himalayan salt—I immediately felt the kind of settled calm that one feels when entering a sacred space. I snuggled up with two blankets in a lounge chair in the corner of the room nearest a pipe opening that intermittently ejected the salted mist from the halogenerator.

Breathing deeply, I started to feel a little sleepy after about 10 minutes, which is a normal reaction, Senatro says. By the end of the session, I was about as relaxed as I would be after a deep meditation. My nose, which had been only a tinge of stuffy when I arrived, did feel clearer. The verdict: Yes, I was more relaxed and could breathe a little better, but I cannot say definitively that those results happened because I was sitting in the salt room—I might gain the same results from sitting in a quiet space anywhere and meditating.

In defense of salt therapy: Some proponents recommend sitting in the salt room for several days a week over the course of a few months to reap the positive effects and battle depression.

Good news for those of us who can’t make it to the Bahamas for the winter.

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Living

Mary Michaud takes a holistic approach

Mary Michaud’s apothecary is full of Mason jars containing tinctures, flower essences and oils, all used to treat a variety of ailments. Photo by Martyn Kyle

During this year’s Belmont Bash, Mary Michaud spent hours weeding her front yard on Levy Avenue. She thought that passersby kept looking at her funny, and once she’d pulled the last weed from the ground and stood up to admire her work, she saw why: She had left all of the dandelions behind.

“My neighbors probably think I’m crazy,” she says, laughing. But Michaud is an herbalist, and dandelions are medicinal. Dandelion leaves, eaten plain or consumed in salads or tea, are an appetite stimulant that can help an upset stomach; dandelion roots can help improve liver and gallbladder function.

It’s the kind of thing Michaud keeps stocked in her apothecary, one of the many plant-based treatments she keeps on hand for clients who seek her help in soothing all kinds of ailments.

Michaud’s practice, Be Herbal, operates under the umbrella of Ayurveda, one of the world’s oldest medicine systems that originated in India more than 3,000 years ago. “Ayurveda is, literally, ‘the science of life,’” Michaud says; the system’s main principle is vata, which governs movement in the mind and body—blood flow, breathing, digestion, etc. It’s all about energy.

“The term ‘energy’ tends to turn people off because they think you’re talking New Age,” Michaud says. “But when I talk about energetics in the body, I’m talking about blood flow, lymphatic flow, metabolism…processing membranes and fluids coursing through the body. I’m talking about quantum mechanics, really.”

Michaud—a trained clinical herbalist and Reiki master—also holds a master’s of science in nursing from the University of California, San Francisco, among other degrees and certifications. She worked in an immunology clinic in Boston and was a family nurse practitioner in the San Francisco area (where she treated some 1960s rock stars but says she can’t share names) and in Charlottesville for years, practicing, diagnosing and prescribing. She still holds the FNP certification.

Michaud loved clinical work, but she says that with Western medicine, which relies on allopathy (the treatment with remedies, often pharmaceuticals that have the opposite effect of a symptom), “you get to a point where there’s nothing else you can do [for a patient], and that really bothered me.”

She’d always been interested in plants, and in college she dabbled in herbal remedies after visiting the home of an herbalist who had plants hanging from her ceiling. That interest grew during her time in San Francisco, so a few years after moving to Charlottesville, she completed a three-year clinical herbalist training at Sacred Plant Traditions, in 2006. There, Michaud began to truly understand how plants—and the many vitamins and minerals they contain—can help people in ways that pharmaceuticals cannot.

Michaud says that a major difference between pharmaceutical treatments and herbal ones is that pharmaceuticals affect specific receptors in the body whereas herbal protocols aim for larger systems that “give the body a nudge to say, ‘Oh, you remember how to do this.”

Plus, herbal treatments can be tailored to an individual in a way many pharmaceuticals cannot. “Everyone is completely unique. That’s another strength of Ayurveda [and herbalism]. It acknowledges the individual’s uniqueness; two people will have the same symptom and the remedy will be different. It’s very customized, and I feel that to be much more effective,” Michaud says.

All of her clients first fill out a lengthy health history questionnaire, and during their initial 90-minute session, Michaud asks questions that give her “an idea of the energetic of their system.” Is it too fast? Too slow? Hot? Cold? How is their digestion? How is their sleep? How’s their mood?

She’s checking to see how the body’s systems work together as a whole (a person’s “constitution”), looking for a disruption or a blockage that needs to be worked over.

For example, when a woman experiences severe PMS—cramps, headaches, irritability, etc.—it’s usually because at the start of a woman’s cycle, there are extra androgens (a type of hormone) in the body, and the liver can have trouble regulating those androgen levels. A bitter herb tea, made specifically with that woman’s constitution in mind, can gently remind her liver how to process that hormone.    

Michaud’s apothecary cabinet is a wonder to behold: It’s full of quilted Mason jars and glass dropper bottles in many sizes and colors. There are neatly labeled flower essences (imprints of flowers on water), such as mimosa flower—take a few drops orally to help with anxiety, Michaud says—and tinctures (alcohol extracts of herbs), many of which she’s made herself. The Be Herbal kitchen cabinets have enormous glass jars full of thing like gravel root (also known as Joe-Pye weed), peppermint leaf, St. John’s wort, holy basil rama, chamomile, oat straw and violet leaves.

Thanks to her clinical background, Michaud knows how pharmaceuticals work in the body and how different herbs interact with them. She knows the warning signs of serious ailments likely better treated by Western medicine, and will tell a client when he needs to see a doctor for medical imaging and lab work.

“It’s been such a funny road of going through the deep, deep science and then going into the hippie California experience, doing science there, and then coming to Charlottesville and finding the plants,” Michaud says of her journey. “In Ayurveda, there’s the idea of your true nature. When I’m getting the same message from different traditions,” she says, “that’s truth.”

Categories
Living

Insane workout creates community

Micah Spry first noticed his athleticism in high school on the track, and has since channeled his boundless energy into leading Insanity workouts at the Boar’s Head Inn Sports Club. Photo by Martyn Kyle

I was driven to Insanity by my wife. “I don’t know,” she said in all seriousness, “there’s just something about it that I think you might like.” I thought she knew me better. Exactly which part of a high-intensity workout was I going to enjoy? Don’t get me wrong; I’ve never had anything against people who exercise regularly, and many of my friends do, although none of them are my best friends. This, combined with my general lack of self-discipline and inability to stick with things, resigned me to the fact that this would be yet one more failed attempt at self-improvement. Tori said, “I think you’re really going to like the instructor.”

Insanity, a maximum interval training regimen developed by fitness guru Shaun T., is offered at the Boar’s Head Inn Sports Club five times a week. I had joined the club in the hope that because my office door is less than a three-minute walk away, I would surely go regularly. Alas, it served largely as an expensive steam room, summertime lounge pool and an ever-present reminder of my deeply flawed self.

Then I tried Insanity—and met Micah Spry.

Immediately on entering the training room you notice the surprising range of age and athleticism of the participants, from those in their 50s or 60s to enviably fit undergrads and even a high school student or two. All of these different people are chatting away and greeting one another with hugs. Everyone seems strangely happy to be there. Suddenly—with a blast of dance beats and a bullhorn—the most athletic person I have ever seen explodes through the door with a big grin, literally bouncing from person to person, greeting each one by name, and giving him or her a spirited high five (I mean, who high fives?). When he reaches what has since become my perennial spot in the back right corner of the room, he looks me directly in the eye and says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

The aptly named Micah Spry grew up in rural Manning, South Carolina, the only child of Ruth Spry, a single mom who worked in the local Campbell’s Soup factory and raised him with the help of extended family and his godmother, Laura. His physical gifts quickly became apparent, but it was not until his junior year in high school that he ever formally competed.

“I used to just run all the time. I kind of had this Forrest Gump thing going,” Spry recalls. “So, one day my friend Bill Johnson said, ‘Dude, you’re fast. You should go out for track.’ I didn’t really know what I was doing. Basically my thing was to be out in front with everyone else behind me. That was my goal.”

Spry’s strategy worked with stunning results, as he rose from obscurity to become the South Carolina state champion in both the long jump and 100 meters, which he could run in 10.4 seconds. Usain Bolt won Olympic Gold in Rio last summer by running little more than a half second faster, with a time of 9.81 seconds.

Spry received a full athletic scholarship to Shaw University, a small school in North Carolina. A series of injuries hampered his college track career, so he turned his attention fully to his studies, majoring in therapeutic recreation and physical education. After graduation, Spry returned to South Carolina, but finding few opportunities there, he joined the Army in 2001 at the age of 27.

“My mom couldn’t understand why I would sign up when I already had a degree. But I figured that I’d spend a few years in Germany, or maybe South Korea, and then get out.” But everything changed on September 11, 2001—Spry’s 28th birthday—and before long, he was on a plane to Afghanistan.

Spry returned to the U.S. in 2007, after serving two tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. After a month back home he told his mom he was moving to Charlottesville, where his cousins, George and Gary, owned a catering business. Once here, Spry began to realize he was carrying more baggage than he thought.

“I had a lot to deal with when I got back, but in many ways I didn’t acknowledge what was going on,” he says. “I came to understand that I was dealing with PTSD, but I didn’t really know it and hadn’t heard much about it, so I wasn’t running to the V.A. But I started finding myself doing things that I knew weren’t quite right. It was affecting my relationships, my work, my behavior.” Eventually Spry sought and received help for PTSD, and became deeply involved in the Wounded Warrior Project.

He came to the Boar’s Head as a facility attendant, stocking towels and doing general locker room maintenance. Soon he was working with kids in the rec room, and the staff was impressed not only by his physical gifts but also by his enthusiasm and remarkable interpersonal skills. He was invited to obtain certification in a new exercise regimen called Insanity, and there he found his calling. Insanity is designed to bring the heart rate up for intense short periods, followed immediately by a quick recovery. Divided into four “blocks,” the workout alternately focuses on plyometrics, strength and stability, agility and coordination, and abs and core. There’s a science behind it, but if you talk to anyone in the class, the conversation moves quickly from the workout itself to the sense of community in the room.

“It’s changed my life, and it’s all a testament to Micah,” says Nellie Crowder, a dentist who has faithfully attended the class for nearly a year. “It’s like you can’t imagine yourself not doing it—it hurts so good, I guess you could say.” Crowder has even shortened vacations so she doesn’t miss a class.

Spry laughs when asked if he is aware of the impact he has on others: “I tend to downplay it, but yes, I do realize I’m helping people. When people show up to class that’s my evidence that I’m making a difference. And when I hear people telling me that they’re planning vacations, kids’ activities, etc. around the class? That’s something I never would have expected.”

Spry spends his evenings prepping and planning for classes, and even sets his own curfew—he wants to make sure his students “get 110 percent” from him.

“And really, I think I get as much or more from them than they get from me,” he says. “Insanity keeps me sane, I guess you could say.”

Contact Jon Lohman at living@c-ville.com.