You played sport in a supervised way, even competitively. You are surrounded by athletes: your sister and your husband are professional cyclists. What happened to make you question your relationship to the movement?
I was truly privileged. Throughout my childhood, I had the chance to do lots of different sports that were supervised, although not competitive. It led me to develop a healthy love and a more lasting relationship with the movement. When I reached adolescence, I had access to sport that was a little more competitive, at an elite level. For me, it was quite unhealthy because I am a very perfectionist person. Sport has become a source of anxiety and exhaustion.
Over the years, my questions came from the fact that I was closely involved with professional athletes and, later, hundreds of women who had different relationships with sport, some really negative, others neutral or positive, then I started to question our collective relationship to the movement.
PHOTO VESA MOILANEN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
We can just run to get moving. There’s no need to make it a competition!
Performance, measurements, supervision, competition can nevertheless suit certain people, right?
I don’t want to fall into absolutism. There is nothing wrong with data and statistics, there is nothing wrong with wanting to perform, even progress in a sport. For many people, it can be healthy, but it can become unhealthy at other times in their lives. We’re getting the message that it’s “performance or nothing”, “measurement or nothing”, “statistics or nothing”. I want to bring the nuance that there are many ways of moving that are super pleasant while being far from performance.
This relationship with sport becomes distorted quite early in our lives. From a very young age, the pleasure of the game you speak of gradually fades to make way for specialization and performance.
Unfortunately yes.
I think we are starting to realize more and more that it can be harmful to introduce this tendency towards performance so young. In physical education classes, it makes no sense to note something as essential as physical movement.
This means that people, from a very young age, are able to tell themselves or are told that there are two categories: good at sport or not good at sport. And from that moment on, people who have been categorized, unfortunately, as “not good at sport”, and I put that in big quotes, will perhaps say to themselves for the rest of their lives: “The movement , It’s not for me. »And that’s a tragedy in my opinion.
In Norway, it is prohibited to hold sports competitions for young people under the age of 12. They play lots of sports, but there are no results tables or points. It’s really more related to play. We see it in sports performances and in practice during adult life that it has a super positive effect.
How can we reclaim movement, get back to the basics and practice it for pleasure?
We are dealing with long-standing conditioning. We feel that we need external resources to guide us. I do not condemn kinesiologists and trainers, we need them, but I think that people need to relearn a certain autonomy in their movement. To do this, there are a lot of things that need to be let go, including the super-close link created between exercise and weight loss.
The first step is to become aware of all the external constraints and to say to yourself: “I don’t have to like running, even if everyone says so. » After that, it’s about experimenting.
I like the idea of movement being an opportunity for adults, with super busy, performance-oriented lives, to play once in a while. I suggest deliberately removing results and measurements, saying to yourself, “I’m going to go for a run without a watch,” even if it’s very uncomfortable at first. And maybe even try new sports knowing that you’re going to be a beginner, to be open to laughing about it.
Outside of your professional activities, what is your way of moving like?
It’s changed a lot over time. In the last year and a half, I became a mother. After giving birth, I did a little rehabilitation to try to start running again. I started writing my book, I was working full time, I couldn’t go running with a watch, it put too much pressure on me. This is new to me and it was uncomfortable at first. Right now my movement is very free and unstructured. This is what works in my life and what makes me feel good. I think eventually I might want to set a goal for myself, or even do a half marathon. Probably if I had forced myself to continue training in an intense and very structured way in the last year, I would surely have suffered a burnout or I would have exhausted myself in one way or another.
Everyone loves to dance
Quebec America
192 pages