Orbital Velocity

Day 497: Sheltering In Place... In Mexico

Greetings from sunny Yucatán, where my wife and I are riding out the Covid-19 pandemic. While the story of this project technically ended back in December of 2019, I feel like sharing how my fitness & health regimen is doing in the midst of lock-down -- in a foreign city.

Back on Day 117, I wrote about the fact that my wife suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and that for some years she has been doing a Tax Season work retreat, escaping the winter doldrums of Chicago by traveling to a place where she can get a solar recharge while heads-down in the toughest crunch time of the year. Since her major musculoskeletal and neurological crisis of 2017, I've been joining her on these trips, to give her the support she needs. Even on good days, massage is essential to prevent her thigh and lower-back from entering a positive feedback loop where tightening muscles anger the femoral nerve, which in turn causes muscles to tighten more. And in the wake of the occasional relapse, there are basic physical functions she can't do on her own. She needs me while traveling even more than she does at home.

This year, in light of the pandemic, we wavered on whether we should cancel our scheduled trip to Mexico. On the one hand, staying home seemed like the safe option. That's where our support network is. But if Chicago were to shut down, we would be largely cut off from that support network, and she would no longer have access to any of the routine medical care that would normally make home the safer option. If we went ahead with our planned trip to Yucatán, she would have access to a pool, to do her aqua-therapy exercises, and she would have an abundance of sun to lift her spirits and relax her muscles. We ultimately decided to go for it, knowing we might have to stay indefinitely. As it turns out, Chicago did indeed go into stay-at-home mode, and the U.S.-Mexico border has since been closed. When the State Dept. issued its advisory to come home now or prepare to stay abroad indefinitely, we decided to remain in Mexico.

So far, our decision has worked out remarkably well. To give you some background, Mérida -- the city where we've hunkered down -- has been ranked as the second safest city in North America, behind Québec. The sunny days have helped my wife focus on work -- mostly pro-bono now, as she guides her small-business clients through the challenges of pursuing aid and staying afloat. I'm able to do my own software-development job just as well from here as I could from home. The governments of Mérida and the state of Yucatán have done a better job reacting quickly to the epidemic than have most city and state governments in the U.S. We are able to order most of our groceries from an organic farmers market that quickly transitioned to delivery, and we have become friends with the owners of a small vegan restaurant that has continued to offer takeout. We've seen police officers handing out free masks to people as they enter grocery stores, and enforcing the relatively strict stay-at-home rules. We feel at least as safe here as we would be in our home in Chicago, and we're better able to focus on work. As a bonus, we've also been able to offer our home to college-student friends whose schools were closed, giving them a place to stay for free until they decide what their next move is.

However, it has been challenging to keep up with physical fitness. As I've mentioned in the past, traveling throws me off my routines. Add to that the stress of a world grappling with the worse pandemic in a hundred years, and all the ways it has touched us personally, and it's not surprising that my fitness regimen got kicked to the curb. Only today did I finally do a proper check-in. It's been 49 days since my last one, which means I've once again broken the rule I made for myself: that I wouldn't go more than one month without a check-in.

Maybe it seems silly to examine why I stopped my check-ins? But I'm going to give it a try anyway. Part of it is just travel. I've written in the past about why exactly my routine falls apart when I'm away from home. Lack of privacy plays a surprisingly large role -- it turns out I really prefer to do my check-ins alone, and travel often makes for situations where time alone is scarce.

Another big part of it, this time, is heat! Most days have a high temperature somewhere between 95 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and a low that's just below 80. For this long-time Chicagoan, convincing myself to do as many jumping-jacks as possible in ten minutes -- when it's a hundred degrees -- seems asinine. I sweat plenty just sitting at my laptop and writing. Knowing that I can take a cold shower or jump in our small pool when I'm done should help, but it's rarely enough.

The fact that I can't truly replicate my at-home check-ins also plays some role in my delay. I don't have a scale with which to weigh myself -- but I'm pretty sure I gained weight at the start of our stay, and have since shed most of what I put on. I don't have a measuring tape to see how waistline is doing, but I can tell my pants are about as tight as they were in mid-March. I don't have a pull-up bar, but I did find that I can do something pretty close to a pull-up on the spiral staircase that leads to the roof. Doing jumping-jacks isn't quite the same, because I didn't bring the sneakers I normally wear when doing them. Even sit-ups aren't an exact match, because I haven't found an ideal way of keeping my feet on the floor. Only push-ups are a perfect match for my at-home routine. And it's easy to tell myself these things don't really matter -- yet it's surprising how much of a difference a tiny deterrent can have when one's willpower is spread thin.

But the biggest factor, for sure, has been stress. When I'm not busy working, sanitizing groceries, cooking, filling in for the woman who used to do home-visit massage for my wife, helping my wife deal with the emotional and physical challenges of a relapse (which gave us a real scare a few days into our visit), doing the chores that come with renting a small house, my natural inclination is to do something relaxing. That has usually meant reading or improving my Spanish. Some part of me knows that my stress level will drop if I get more exercise, but that first hurdle seems so tall when you feel drained and in need of a break.

Now that I'm more than a month into this, with no idea when we'll be able to safely and responsibly return home, it feels good to have finally pushed myself -- with some encouragement from my wife -- to do a proper check-in. It does help to reduce stress. And all those little differences between a check-in here and a check-in at home are ultimately irrelevant. By exercising in the morning, under a ceiling fan, when it's only 80 degrees, I can avoid the heat; I just have to have enough mental capacity to plan to do this, and enough willpower to make it happen. As for privacy, staying in a small house has solved that problem. I have plenty of places where I can sneak off for half-an-hour to do my exercises, let my timer beep, and feel like I'm not distracting, annoying, or the center of attention.

As usual, I have no idea whether anyone will ever read this. I hope so! And if you got this far, thank you for reading, and I hope you feel inspired to push yourself a little harder, too. This pandemic is likely to drag on a lot longer than anyone wants it to, and improving your fitness and overall health can make a real difference in your ability to combat the virus, should you get it. For your own benefit and that of your loved ones, do what you can to strengthen your cardiovascular and immune systems -- it might save your life, it might help you get back on your feet faster so that you can helps others, or it might just improve your mood and allow you to brighten someone else's day in this time of darkness and forced isolation.