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Audacity Works
Audacity Works
Tempting Failure: a story from yesteryear in which Rachel does something stupid
Creatrix: the retreat experience
Sign up at the link above to learn more and be notified when applications open~
Genesis: air, water, life
This is the act I referenced in the episode. Not the time to be depleted.
The Green Door Life: nutrition for athletic performance
Join me as I recount the trials of an extreme bodybuilder's diet I once adopted in the pursuit of visual perfection for a performance. The resulting dehydration wasn't just scary - it nearly sabotaged the show. Note to self- the objective for a bodybuilder is. not. the. objective. for a high-yield athletic aerial act. Seems obvious in retrospect, I was blind to it in the moment.
Don't try this at home. Seriously don't.
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
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Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you. Welcome to Audacity Works. I am your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 48. And which I'm going to tell you a story about, something I did that was very stupid. But first I wanted to take a second to let you know that news is starting to roll out about the retreat experience that I'm hosting here in South Carolina, in the coastal town of Edisto Island, south Carolina. It's going to take place May 23rd through the 28th in 2024. And applications will open Friday, the 13th in October. And, of course, they are opening a week early for my patrons as a courtesy and as a thank you for their support.
Speaker 1:This retreat and I'll talk about it more on another podcast some weeks from now but if you're wondering what it is, you're like, is it an aerial retreat? No, it's not an aerial retreat. There will be nary an aerial apparatus to be found, but it is in fact, designed for aerialists and other people who have a physical creative practice, and the reason I'm not including aerial is because I want you to have a break. This whole retreat has been designed with restfulness and the object of the retreat is to reignite your relationship with the muse. It's been carefully curated to that end and if you want to hear more, I'm going to be putting that out, starting very, very soon, or even today. The link to sign up to know about that is in the show notes. It is still 90 degrees here in Charleston, south Carolina, which suits me just fine. Why would I want to go back to wearing socks? I don't. I will when the time comes, but I'm going to ride this out for as long as I can.
Speaker 1:Now that we've talked about a retreat and the weather, let's get to the meat of the subject. So I want to tell you a story about something I did that was very stupid, and I'll preface this by saying I'm saying that it's stupid because I don't think that you should do it. I know why I did it and I was young and yeah, anyway, it's not wise. I don't recommend it. So now that we have said that, let's a journey back in time. I am 30 years old and I have created the first piece of its kind that I have seen, which is Genesis.
Speaker 1:I ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money because I wanted to have a human sized Petri dish built and then I was going to perform an aerial hoop act out of the Petri dish, which would be full of water, and it was just going to be spectacular. And, by the way, it was, and we're like nearing the date for the premiere of this act, which is definitely the most anticipation I've ever had about a single act up to that time and I also felt I felt it was a lot of other people's triumph as well, because I'd had so much help, like not only the crowdfunding campaign, but like Will Sims from Emerald City, trepeze Arts built me the platform that the Petri dish was going to go on. He installed lights underneath so it would be lit beautifully, and I just I had a lot of help and I wanted to do everyone super, super proud. I had arranged a videographer actually two videographers and I just wanted to make sure that it was the best that it could be and that included I wanted my body to look amazing. Do you see where this is going?
Speaker 1:So one of my students at the time was this badass woman who also participated in bodybuilding contests. So I approached her because I knew that she knew how and I was like okay, so I want to look super amazing, and by amazing I have a specific aesthetic in mind. I want to look really lean. I want you to be able to see all of my muscles. That's like part of what I'm going for for the presentation. She's like all right, here's what she do. And she laid out this diet for me that spanned about two weeks and it was a lot of lean protein, a lot of vegetables, and then, up to the end, had me drinking a certain combination of electrolytes and distilled water. I said, okay, okay, and I wrote it all down and I followed her advice to the letter. Now, I don't know if you know this, but because of osmosis, if you drink distilled water, it basically sucks nutrients out of your body.
Speaker 1:Bodybuilders do this to bring the skin really tight to their muscles and, you know, maybe let some veins pop out. Honestly, I wasn't really thinking it through, I just knew I wanted a certain aesthetic, so I did what she said. By the way, bodybuilders, when they're, when they're competing, most of them feel like shit, like they're not strong at that moment. It's been designed with an aesthetic in mind, not functionality. This is where I should have had a pause. You're like I need extreme functionality. I'm doing aerial hoop out of water. I need extreme functionality. But that thought did not occur to me. I was just way too excited about what was happening. I was like, okay, I've got this plan, it's all going to go great. So, anyway, I followed.
Speaker 1:I followed the advice that I had been given and it came time for the show and I had been pretty much dehydrating for at least a day, probably more. Now bodybuilders will do this way more intensely. I didn't want that intense of an effect, so I was doing like a very miniature version, but it was still enough to have an effect. But it wasn't enough for me to have felt the effect in the days leading up to the show. So we get to show day. I warm up, I climb into my Petri dish, I am full of adrenaline, my whole heart is bursting with joy and just wanting to do everyone proud, and the hoop eventually gets lifted up out of the water. The audience is totally with me.
Speaker 1:And then came the first moment where I just needed to hang by my hands and invert, and I did. And this alarm bell went off in my head that said shit, girl, you are tired and weak. What the fuck. And up to that point in my career I had only ever gotten stronger. I was only five years in getting stronger every day. So to feel in the middle of our performance that I felt weak was terrifying to me. I didn't let it pull me out of the moment. The adrenaline helped where I needed help and I got through the act without, you know, there was no hitch, there was no accident. But I never forgot that moment of like what is happening? Why am I weak in my hands? And I'm so, so lucky that it went well and that there was, there was no accidents. I was very, very lucky and afterwards I kind of I took, you know, 24 hours. You got a bask in the afterglow and what? Because it was still. It was a triumph. It was a success, the premiere of that act, and I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:And then I took a step back and let's decompress Now what could be improved. One don't deplete your fucking body and dehydrate yourself to the point where you feel weak in your hands before you're hanging from them. Oh, I'm so happy that my mom does not listen to this podcast, she would be crawling out of her skin right now. I'm not proud of this, like I don't want to be telling you this story, but I think it's important because you know the way that we talk about. You know nutrition and exercise for an aesthetic purpose. We just throw it around like oh yeah, I'm doing this for you know this aesthetic goal, or we'll cover it up and hide and be like I'm doing it to be healthy.
Speaker 1:But really secretly, we want an aesthetic goal and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I do think there is something wrong with how I approached it. And it felt so normal to me because it was like, of course, you would do all this for an aesthetic goal and I didn't even second guess it. And it's actually really well known and well documented that bodybuilders and other people who use dehydration for an aesthetic gain it's well known that they feel like shit and that they're weak at the time when they're competing. I didn't know that because it's not really discussed. I think outside of you know the inner circle. Maybe they don't discuss, I don't know, I'm not in the inner circle there. But afterwards I felt silly for not having seen that because, in retrospect, like I knew enough about physiology to have put two and two together, but I didn't.
Speaker 1:And I'm, like I said, super, super lucky and I vowed to myself after that I will never do this again. How about this? I'll just do what I do, I'll do the things that I do and my body will look the way it looks. How about that? And that remains my philosophy. I do what I do. This is what I look like. The end that philosophy has worked the best for me. And, of course, I've had a very fluctuating. I say of course, because I figure it's super common for us to have fluctuating relationships with our bodies and we're like oh, I don't like this today. Oh, I like this today, I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of it, I'm not gonna do it anymore. So I'll do the things that I do and this is what I look like. Huzzah, now, this is no shade at all.
Speaker 1:If you engage in these kinds of activities and you compete or whatever, and you know you do, you. This is more of like a PSA, because that information is you know, there's a permeable barrier between bodybuilding and other physical sports, including circus arts and the practice of dehydrating so that you look amazing is not functional for a circus artist, particularly when you are hanging by your own strength and that's the only thing saving you from severe injury or possibly your own demise. So 10 out of 10 do not recommend Now. I had to educate myself about nutrition quite a lot. I had a lot of help. Specifically, I had help from Shannon Morse of the Green Day Life, and if you are struggling with nutrition, you want to learn about the science of nutrition for performance, nutrition for performance. Shannon is so knowledgeable and schooled me for many years and I was a slow study, but she finally did get through to me and now I know how to feed myself properly. Thank you, shannon. But if that is something that you struggle to do, you don't know how to feed your body tissues appropriately for the amount of stress that you're putting on it. You know the information is out there. Also, there's a bunch of shit information, so get it from a source that you can trust. I trust Shannon and just learned a lot from her and now I can make my own choices because she educated me. Looking back on that time, I feel grateful that I had youth on my side. I would just barely turn 30.
Speaker 1:But I think the larger issue here the writing on the walls which is in Neon Pink, by the way, it's not a secret is that training for aesthetic purposes can and very often does have harmful side effects. I'm not telling you to do it or not to do it, I'm just saying it because I think it's true. It can and very often does have harmful side effects. And I'm not just saying the physical ones. Really, the deeper scars are pretty psychological. This is not a secret. We all know this.
Speaker 1:So why does it keep happening? We all know the answer to that too because we have been primed to hate ourselves, to hate our bodies, to want them to be some way different than they are in this tiny little way, or in this tiny little way, like you didn't put that there, someone else put that there. Now why would they do that? And it's not like there's a council of evil people sitting around saying like, well, we'll just put this ad on TV and then so and so will hate herself a little bit more and then she'll buy more things. There's not a council of evil people. All the evil people are also trying to kill each other.
Speaker 1:But I do think that it's not an accident, that it's basically 100%, maybe 99.99% of people, particularly with a physical creative discipline, that don't have a positive relationship with their bodies. You know, it's not a mystery and I've mentioned this before and the reason that I'm bringing it up again is because it bears repeating. When you've been primed to hate the thing, like the flesh vessel that you live in, that doesn't go away just because you have one solid conversation. It doesn't go away just because you know your own value system. You know that you don't believe it and that on an intellectual level you don't buy it. It still lives there like a worm in your brain. That's why I repeat it, my friend Janelle Dinosaurs says it takes many iterations, particularly to break something that's generational. It takes many iterations to break a chain. So consider this little episode. One more swing of the hammer. Do you know? I just realized that earlier, when I was talking about Shannon Morse and the Green Door life, I called it the Green Day life, and that's incorrect. So if you're looking for nutrition, education, for performance, for athletic performance, don't look up the Green Day life, because Shannon and her co-founder, lisa Kirby, are not a 90s rock band. They are in fact called the Green Door Life and I will put that link in the show notes in case that's something that you're interested in and you want to pursue. They also have a lot of great free content on their Instagram and, yeah, anyway, highly recommend.
Speaker 1:I hope that you enjoyed my confessional story. I think that it is important for me to share the ways that I have failed, and there have been plenty of them, so there's more where that came from my friends and I'm sure that you'll hear more of them if you stick around long enough. Happy Wednesday, everybody. I hope that you are enjoying the somewhat different weather. I hope you have delicious food to eat and that you're sleeping well. I hope that you have creative practice that is feeding you and, if not and you're interested in one I hope that you will try lots of things and be willing to look like an idiot, much like myself. Thank you for being here with me and letting me talk into your ear for 17 minutes. I want to say an extra thank you to my patrons for making this possible and for making so much that I do possible. Thank you, as always. If you have requests, you can reach me on Instagram, at Rachel Strickland Creative, or on Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative. Now go fuel yourselves for performance and don't go back to sleep.