In this first article in a series dedicated to the mind and body’s battle against daily stress, Lillie shares her discoveries on the importance of movement for health.
At 4 a.m. on August 19, 2019, my life was turned upside down. I was wrenched from sleep by sciatic nerve pain so horrible I wanted to throw myself out the window to end it. My whole left leg went into muscle spasm for minutes, until it finally stopped moving. The pain, coming from my lower back, subsided a little, but I felt as if I’d lost control of my leg. What the heck just happened?
Nobody could tell me sadly. However, gradually, my muscles regained a certain responsiveness, thanks in part to cycling. A few weeks later, I still couldn’t walk without limping or sit on a chair without feeling a great deal of sciatic pain. But I could ride my bike. So, of course, I rode my bike. I even rode from Turin to Nice with my husband Alain for the 2019 edition of the Torino-Nice Rally, our big goal for which I’d been training for months. I wasn’t fast, and I was sore, but I did it anyway. And the more I rode, the better I felt. By the seventh day, I thought I was on the road to total recovery, still without understanding exactly what had gone wrong.
Torino-Nice: day five at Altopiano della Gardetta (also known as “Little Peru”) and I’m feeling great!
Then everything fell apart. I went back to work and a few days later the pain returned with a vengeance. Convinced that I’d been doing too much sport, my doctors told me to stop. Once I stopped, the pain just got worse. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t walk for more than a few minutes. For 5 months, I spent most of my days glued to my sofa, staring out of my window at the mountains, wondering if I’d ever be able to climb them again.
In February 2020, my health problem was finally diagnosed. It made perfect sense, but was hard to accept: I have an autoimmune neuromuscular disease. My body reacts to stress by contracting my muscles; when shortened, they pull on all my joints, causing crippling pain. In other words, I had a burn-out, and my pain was psychosomatic.
It’s been almost a year since the diagnosis. And it’s been almost a year of daily therapy, both physical and psychological. I had no idea how closely physical and mental health were linked. Now, for every emotional difficulty, it’s my body that reacts. It sucks, but it reminds me to focus on the good, not the bad, side of my life.
So how do I do it? The key is, and I know it’s going to sound cliché, but it really isnt; be in the present. I calm the mind through movement, through experience, through reconnecting with nature. At the end of this article, you’ll be able to watch 2 short videos that I found on the internet that perfectly sum up what I’ve learned the hard way.
80% of adults will suffer from back pain in their lifetime, and it’s the leading cause of disability in our society. However, the highest prevalence of back pain is between the ages of 35 and 55. If back pain were only associated with physical deterioration of the spine, why would the prevalence be highest at a relatively young age? Many specialists argue that it’s a stress-induced disease. We live in a society that is not necessarily compatible with our well-being.
I deprived myself of moments when my body and mind needed to relax. I deprived myself of free time to do what my conscious brain deemed “necessary” to do, for my work, for my family, for society. I forgot to be a simple living creature: an animal that was created in nature.
Thanks to an e-bike, I could still take my son on mini-adventures to motivate me to keep moving.
We’re designed to move: an organism made up of hundreds of muscles, tendons, joints and bones that work in perfect harmony. We’re not meant to sit at a desk for hours on end, lost in thought. The more negative thoughts took over my brain, the more disconnected I became from my body. And when I stopped offering myself little getaways to slow down, to calm my spinning brain, my body collapsed.
Now that I’ve accepted that my mind is responsible for my pain, I trust my body as a machine designed to move. I no longer fear movement, even if it can still be painful: I understand that this pain is caused by my emotional state and has nothing to do with my physical state. Now that I’m concentrating on the body rather than the mind, the pain is gradually disappearing. I’m far from pain-free, but I’ve reconnected with my body and the control of my muscles.
On the Tremola with my e-bike to celebrate my 41st birthday.
But now I have a new battle… to keep moving. Every day, the more I move, the better I feel. Every day I don’t move, I feel the pain coming back. My biggest fear is going back to being disabled. So I need a goal to keep moving, to get out of the cycle of pain and become a functioning human being again.
So, of course, I started looking at the challenges of cycling. The Etape du Tour? No, twice is enough. To be honest, none of the big cyclosportives appeal to me, because they’re too familiar. I live in the mountains. I have to climb 800m just to get home. In all honesty, I just want an excuse to cycle all day, for days on end, in search of adventure, beauty and calm. The best times I’ve had in recent years have been cycling with my son, who is now 5. Simple but meaningful moments along the Swiss cycling network. The sole aim was to cycle, see beautiful places, eat and find a campsite for the night. Nothing else mattered. It was just beautiful.
So, what am I going to try to do? Find out in the next episode of this series.
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