Things I Learned From Nevada Fitness Club, Part Three: I Got Moves

Saturday night, November 8, was the annual Vernon County Cancer Relief fundraiser. This is a fun event, but for members of the board it's a night of tightly-executed moves to ensure things go without a (huge) hitch.

This year, I was put in charge of rounding the waiters up and making sure everyone got plates of food. Not as easy as one might think, in spite of the fact that most of the waiters were seasoned veterans at this event. So that happened, and then the usual whirlwind of the plate-clearing and auction, counting the waiters' tip money to see who won, etc.

But this was no run-of-the-mill fundraiser. There were a few loose-cannon situations that, when brought together, caused what I have learned in nine months of Nevada Fitness Club training to save my ass.

Loose Cannon Situation Number One: The Band

We had trotted out the same basic format for easily the last several years of this fundraiser, because it essentially worked. However, with some fresh new ideas in our new board members, a round of brainstorming was set off in one of our meetings that led to the booking of a band, Sober as a Judge, for this year's event.

These guys? Seriously pretty awesome. Do yourself a favor and look them up. They blew the roof off of that place. Kick-ass, for real. But, more importantly to this story, they started the ball of this whole thing rolling.

Loose Cannon Situation Number Two: Childhood friend Misty Caldwell

Misty had not been to one of these events before, but was there repping the amazing woman her mother had been before stupid cancer took her from us way, way too soon. Misty is no stranger to shaking her ass on the dance floor, and as the night went on and the drinks flowed, and the music continued to be righteous, she got out there.

Loose Cannon Situation Number Three: The New Waiter

We had a maverick this year in new waiter Corey Johnson. Mr. Johnson came to win, and said as much to me when I introduced myself to him in the beginning-of-the-night waiter roundup. This guy? Crazy as hell, and super effective. He won, just as he promised he would, and then decided that it was time to celebrate on the dance floor.

These three ingredients mixed together led to a moment of horror when Misty pulled me out onto the dance floor shortly after the winner of the waiter tip-off was announced. Waiter champion Johnson was in a mood to celebrate, and his dancing was very high energy.

Cue the horror music, because I was stone. cold. sober.

I'm not much on dancing when I'm sober. When I've been drinking, oh my gosh, call Star Search, because I will pop and lock myself to champion status...in my mind.

I probably look more like this, though.

But let me say again, this time I was sober. And when I'm sober I pretty much know I suck. I had to think fast, and act faster.
Cue: Nevada Fitness Club.

My advantage was that everyone else had been drinking, and therefore didn't care at all. So I basically did a fit club routine. A little up-center-back-center, a little hop-hop-squat, a little up-and-over, a little one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, and - BAM! - I'd incorporated T25, Combat Cardio, Insanity, AND Asylum.

It got me through without incident, anyway.

And I forgot about the whole thing, until a couple days later at work when our marketing director called me about one of my cases. Before she hung up, she said, "Oh, by the way...you're quite a dancer! I tried to video you, but it was too dark. You've got some moves!"

Later that day, her boss stopped in and said, "I hear you're quite a dancer!"

I demurred, of course, but on the inside, I turned to the hidden camera and said, "Thanks, Nevada Fitness Club!" *winky face*

My point is, you should come work out.

It totally saved my ass.

A Job for Future Jen...

I like to jokingly say that my biggest strength is that I'm fully aware of my weaknesses.

It's kind of true, by the way. I mean, I have other strengths, like I can read fast, and sometimes I think of the right thing to say at the right time. But more often I think of the wrong thing to say. Like the time the customer at the theater complimented my scarf. What I fully INTENDED to come out of my mouth were words along the lines of, "Thank you, scarves are so easy! You just throw them on and BAM! It looks like you tried."

What came out of my mouth instead was, "Thanks! I like to tie things around my neck."

That customer has avoided me ever since. I'm not even kidding. He comes to the movies kind of a lot, and every time, wide circle around me.

Can you blame him? I can't. And it's even worse when I see him and I have a damn scarf on again.

What was I even talking about? OH! Weaknesses.

So, one of my biggest weaknesses, if not THE biggest, is that I'm super, super impulsive. Like, in sometimes dangerous ways, but more often, in completely mind-numbingly stupid ways. Like the time I was a Verizon customer for six hours before realizing they have no signal in Sheldon. Or the time(s) that I ate an entire pound of chocolate in something like 30 minutes. Or the large pizzas.

All the times I spent a lot of money that really would have been better served not being spent, but the sale ended TODAY, or it could be COMBINED with a sale, or something.

When people muse about how many of us live in the past, or live in the future, and how few of us fully embrace the present, well, I kind of don't understand that.

I am a fully-in-the-present kinda girl. All the time. I seize moments on the reg. Or procrastinate on the reg. And every time I recognize that I'm making poor decisions (and I always do when it's happening, because, like I said, it's my biggest strength), I think to myself, that sounds like a problem for Future Jen.

Future Jen hates Present Jen. But then again, Future Jen is by that point Present Jen, and Present Jen is Past Jen, and it's all a little confusing, but the end result is that I'm often filled with regret, and whatever food I can't stop eating at the time.

And, even worse, people can rarely talk me out of my poor decision. My sister, bless her heart, tries all the time. She knows how I'll feel afterward, so she acts as my own little Jiminy Cricket. And even though it almost never, ever works, she just keeps plugging away.

But, again, this is something that I struggle with. I don't dwell on the past, and I don't worry a lot about the future. I basically just try to completely embrace this moment. Yes, this one. Right here.

This past Saturday night, Vernon County Cancer Relief had their annual fundraiser at the Eagles lodge. I love this organization, because I know for a fact that 100 percent of the money raised goes to benefit local cancer patients and families. That's pretty sweet, and a lot of people have benefited from those donations since the organization was founded in 1987.

We generally have a couple of speakers at our benefits, and this year my amazing childhood friend Misty Caldwell Shepherd was one.

Misty had this really, really cool mom. She was peppy and cute and happy all the time, just this petite little woman with enough life in her for someone twice her size at least.

Susie was just always happy. I never saw her mad, although I'm sure it happened. And she was so young and vibrant.

That's why it just absolutely sucked when she found out she had cancer the summer before last and only lived months after that.

The thing about Susie was that she seized every moment. She urged people to live life to the fullest, and she was the embodiment of that. She overcame great obstacles, and she just kept smiling.

We could all stand to be a little more like that. I see that spirit in her daughters, and I know that she will live on in all of the people she touched. And I don't ever, ever think that she had one wasted moment. She was fully present in every one of her days, and if that wasn't true, she sure had us fooled.

And that, THAT is what we should all strive to be. Live every moment, even the ones where you're super full and miserable from eating all the time, even the ones where your heart is absolutely shattered and you don't know how you're going to get through this moment, there's no way, it's too much...

you just gotta OWN those moments.

Because we're beautifully, brokenly, absolutely alive.

So I'm proud to live a life like Susie Caldwell, and be fully present every day. And I know I'm not the only one to take that lesson from her example. I'm going to seize this moment. And then I'm going to seize another.

Although I do need to work on my impulsivity.

Anchor, Man!

As we hit the month in which we declare our gratitude, I can't help but think back over my 2014.

It's been what I would call a series of...shifts.

A couple were good, like hitting Nevada Fitness Club and sticking with it, or starting to take fish oil when I realized my cholesterol rivaled that of a chronic smoker twice my size.

A couple were bad, and made a mockery of who I thought I was. My identity, or what I had considered it to be, took two major hits, pop pop!, one after the other. When I regained figurative consciousness, I realized that I was suddenly, to put it in terms a Cubs fan might understand, in a rebuilding period. Everything I thought I was, everything I planned to do, all of it was...just gone.

It was weird as hell.

Over the weekend, I finally picked up a book that my friend Johanna loaned me roughly two months ago and started reading. It's called "It's Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini, and is about a 15-year-old kid who spends five days in a psychiatric facility. I'm drawn to these types of stories, because I spent seven days in a similar facility when I was a teenager, and for the same reason as the protagonist...depression.

This book was pretty true to my own experience. These places are made up of an interesting collection of personalities, and the real lessons aren't always learned in therapy.

About two-thirds through the book, the main character, Craig, is talking to his therapist, Dr. Minerva. She asks him what his anchors are, what calms him when things around him are anything but. He muses out loud that maybe his friends, or this girl he just met. She stops him, and reminds him that people, and their personalities, are fluid. They're ever-changing. People cannot be anchors, Craig. What else?, she asked him.

I've been thinking about Dr. Minerva's words a lot, because I have been guilty of considering people my anchors. And I have lost those anchors. I know music is one. I know writing is one. But when I returned to Fit Club tonight after a week-long absence, I realized that I felt like I was back home. Better yet, we were doing my FAVORITE workout, Combat. If you have any kind of personal El Guapo in your life, do a Combat workout.

Punching the crap out of your invisible enemy is very therapeutic.

But the best part, the most amazing part, of the workout tonight was that when I walked in, my dad was there waiting for me.

I have a really great dad, and I had a really great childhood. Part of my kid identity was following my dad around softball parks and basketball courts until I was old enough to play. He, and my other dad, Leon, were my coaches, and I was secure in the knowledge that I could count on them for anything.

Practice really kind of sucked.

Running really, REALLY sucked.

Don't even get me started on line drills.

But I was secure in who I was on the court or on the field. I had a role. I knew what I had to do.

Sports, and exercise, were my anchors.

To walk in tonight and see my dad meant everything. Suddenly it was 1992 again, and we were in that same gym, doing aerobics with Sherry Bickel to stay in cardio-shape in between weight workouts.

And I realized that I'm starting to get my identity back. I have my anchors again.

What are your anchors? What are the things that calm you, the things that focus you, the things that bring you back to that happy place in your soul? What makes you feel like you felt when you were a child and everything was an adventure?

Find it. Find it, and get back to it.

postsecret

My sister is a big PostSecret fan. She remembers to check it every Sunday, and will occasionally text me, telling me to read them all and guess which one made her think of me, or guess which one made her cry?

She's a soft touch. Don't let that resting bitch face fool you.

And I have often wondered, over the years, what my secret would be. What is the darkest thing in my soul, the thing I dare not tell anyone?

And how would I phrase it when I don't even know what words exactly to assign to it?

So yeah, I don't have much of one. There is nothing so bad in my life that I haven't shared it with at least one other person.

But there are some that provoke such deep and instant emotion within me that I have to wonder...

Is it possible that I have a secret so deep that I don't even know it?

My marriage is ending. It's ending, and it's a slow-motion train wreck, or a car crash, ithurtspleasemakeitneverhavehappened, and I have known it was ending for over a year, more like, wow, 18 months, and I didn't want it to, I wanted to hang on so tight, I wanted to never let go, I wanted to hold on to my marriage like a kid holds on to a new puppy or kitten.

But squeezing that tightly can cause whatever you're holding onto to die.

The other thing with my marriage was that almost everyone I knew saw the writing on the wall from the beginning. Everyone but me.

Who am I kidding? I saw it. I knew. I knew when I was 18 years old and he called me out of nowhere, told me to come over without any underwear on, and we had sex for about 10 seconds while he looked out the window to make sure his girlfriend wasn't coming home for lunch. With their baby.

I knew it when he told me they broke up, and then my doorbell rang one day and I answered it to find her, her sister, and her cousin standing there staring at me.

I knew it when he called me when I was engaged, then when I was married. One or two or several times a year, every year. Always to ask if I would meet him on some road to have sex.

I knew it when I finally acquiesced, 11 years later, and had an affair while my husband sat, stoned and watching porn, in his man cave.

Crock it to Me!

And just like that, it was over.

Week Four dawned, and with it, my hope. I thought, hey. Hey. It's almost over.

And then I got all excited, and it was almost like Week One again.

Oh, but that I could have known what was ahead. Before I get too excited, let's start with:

Week Four, Night One: Chicken Fiesta!

I did that thing on the dry erase board where you put the upside down exclamation mark in front of the word, but I can't find that option on my keyboard, so screw it. I thought that the simple addition of said exclamation mark made the whole thing infinitely more exotic (read: Spanish). My real goal was to hide the fact that I had fully INTENDED to make white chili again, but realized after I started that I didn't have close to the ingredients that were necessary to close the deal.

So what I did instead was put shredded chicken, white corn, green salsa, fire roasted salsa tomatoes, black beans, chicken broth, and green chilies in the crock and back away slowly. Hunter was taking a nap, so when it was done I tiptoed into his room, eased the bowl next to the bed, and booked it right out of there before he awoke and discovered that there was nothing chili about that dinner.

He ate it, but pronounced it too soupish for his refined palate. He asked what happened to the chili.

Whatever, kid. This ain't the Taj Mahal. You get what you get and you don't throw a fit. Basic kindergarten rules.

Week Four, Night Two: It's Over.

I remember the moment it happened well. I had clocked off and was in the process of thinking about standing up from my desk chair when I got the text. I had, that morning, asked Hunter what he wanted for dinner that night. At some point in the day, and who even knows what goes on in his mind, he had made a monumental decision.

The text read: I'm doing Paleo diet now.

And just like that, it was over. Sure, it was roughly only 12-14 meals, but it was over. Our month-long adventure had come to an end after three weeks.

So I did what any mom would do, and feverishly crammed on Pinterest to learn the Paleo way. I decided that I could master this. I could make this happen. I decided I'd pull something together by Wednesday.

Wednesday morning, Hunter and I had our little morning routine. We were both leaving the house earlier than usual. He left at about 7:15, and I was on my way out the door a few minutes later, when my phone started to buzz in that way that means it's an actual phone call.

It was Hunter. I remember thinking that it was lucky I was still home, because he had forgotten something.

But what he said instead was, "Mom? I got in an accident."

I remained fairly calm. Until I fully realized how close he came to not being okay. My anti-texting-while-driving crusader had reached over to move things out of his passenger floorboard and run right into a culvert, tapping a utility pole, which then split in half. The top half, containing the transformer, got caught up in a tree over his windshield. Wires came down in front of his car, but not on it.

His worst injury was an arm rash from the airbag deploying. He had exited the car, like a big dummy, but had not gotten electrocuted.

Therefore, dinner was not on my mind Wednesday night. So that night was out.

By the next night, he had purchased one of those hot plate things and a lot of eggs, and had determined that eggs would be the go-to staple of his new caveman diet.

But I threw some chicken and veggies in the Crock, as a last huzzah.

He ate them all, and while they didn't get an individual rating, I'd say the overall Crocksperience got the following nod:

But some good came from it. I realized that I was capable of putting together meals that weren't dessert-based. And if anyone wants any of the recipes, hit me up. I'm totally cool with it.

The Hardest Blog.

I've been putting this off for over a week, because to write it is to truly acknowledge it.

To acknowledge it is to admit it.

And I don't want to.

But I guess I'll start...at the beginning. And that's hard, because I don't remember a moment that WAS the definitive beginning.

You were just always there. I don't remember you NOT being there. It wasn't every day, although sometimes it did seem like it. It wasn't on a regular timetable; you didn't come for dinner every Sunday, or anything like that.

You were just a major part of my life, from early childhood well into my high school years. It was heavily concentrated around my participation in the sports you helped my dad coach, but prior to that, it was you and my dad participating in assorted sports leagues together, and me hovering on the periph, wanting desperately to be a part of this camaraderie and knowing that my ticket in was to show an interest, put in the time, and become an athlete myself.

Totally worked, by the way. But with you? I know I had a ticket in regardless.

You just loved me. You loved me so much I felt like you were kinda my other dad. While I know now that you had that impact on easily hundreds of other kids over the years, at the time I truly believed it was just me.

I was fascinated with you from the beginning. I hadn't been taught that people were different, but in Nevada, faces were a sea of white. Yours was much, much darker. Your skin was like nothing I had ever seen, and I couldn't stop staring at you. What made me realize some people saw that as anything other than a cool thing was the looks on some of those white faces when you would introduce me as your daughter. To their credit, most laughed, but the occasional expressions of confusion and something else I couldn't quite place made me realize that it must be very lonely for you in a town like this. And I was just so happy that you spent so much time with my family that I kind of wanted you to myself, anyway.

Kids don't think much beyond what they see.

I don't remember how old I was...seven? when you showed up one Christmas morning. You were on your way to see your actual daughter, but you came by our house first, with a present.

"I'm on my way to see my daughter," you explained, "but I wanted to come see my other daughter on the way."

You gave me a little pewter container. The lid was also a brooch, and there were two earrings that were part of the design and could be removed and worn.

It was fabulous. You had thought of me, gotten something for me, and brought it to me on the most sacred of all days.

I was all yours after that.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes I didn't want to be all yours. When I did join that echelon of people who chose to play sports, and my dad started coaching my first AAU basketball team, you were right there as his assistant. By then I had acquired all of the hormones associated with being a girl of a certain age. I was awkward. I had bad hair. I had braces. I had acne.

I wasn't the same cute little girl who had first attached herself to you physically and emotionally, and nobody was more aware of that than me.

But you would never know it to look at you. You treated me just the same as you always had, even when I got moody and shut you out. You were patient, and you never, ever stopped trying to teach me. About sports, yes, but also about life.

My favorite moments were the ones in which you dropped that almost-always-present patience with us as a team and showed us some passion. The jumping up and down in a circle of fury on the sidelines. The starting to yell, and then stopping yourself mid-syllable, before you got carried away.

You and my other dad were quite a pair. I don't know how many ejections there were in my years as your basketball student, but I know that none of them were players on the team.

And I loved it. I never fouled out of one game...just not aggressive enough. But my coaches made up for it.

Then my sophomore year concluded, and with it, my basketball career. You had gotten married by then, and you had your own family to fill up your days. You were no longer my coach. And, you know, life happens. People drift apart.

When I did see you, though, it was like not one day had passed. We were right back to the way it had always been, and even when I acted annoyed, I secretly loved it.

Then there were a lot of years when I didn't see you at all. Until our paths crossed again in what would prove to be a shitty, shitty battle for us both, although you took the biggest hit.

I was undergoing treatment for cancer when you found me on Facebook. You coached me again, through messages. You told me you loved me, you told me you were so sorry I was going through this, and you told me I could beat it.

When I had made it through to the other side, it was your turn to get hit with the news. Only you didn't have the cotton-candy version of Cancer Lite that I had. You got hit in a bad spot. I knew it when I heard it, and I know you knew it, too.

And I froze. I tried to encourage you, but I was so blindsided and shell-shocked that I could not be, and was not, the comfort to you that you were to me.

That was inexcusable.

But my mom stayed in touch with you, and would tell me how you were, and that you had sent your love, and I felt like we were connected. And I told myself that so many people loved you that you didn't need me.

And then I heard you had made a comeback. And then I didn't hear anything else for a long time, and I told myself that was a good thing.

But I should have remembered who I was talking about. You were never one to play the victim.

So it was with shock that I took the news Friday that you were very suddenly in a coma.

I went home after receiving the coma news and got the news that you were gone that same night.

I handled it badly. I cried until a noise I didn't even know I could make, a noise I didn't even initially realize was coming from me, shattered the air. A half carton of eggs that had the misfortune of being on the counter died that same night. Some Oreos were severely injured.

I left the house and drove in a blind fury until I ended up, completely spent, back in my driveway.

And none of it made any difference. You were still gone. I read your Facebook wall, which filled up with message after message from your former kids, all of whom had very similar stories to mine.

You had that way about you. You had that way of making every single person feel like they were the most important, hell, the ONLY, person in your life.

How could you do that? How could you possess such a gift and share it so freely, so selflessly, with the world, and not be granted 100 years to keep changing lives?

And THAT is what I hate about life. That's what isn't fair. That's what I will never be okay with.

At the funeral Friday, I stood in line to sign your book, trying to shut out the voices around me, each with its own story of your love and light.

My dad approached me, stretching his arm out for a side hug. As he pulled me in, I expected words of comfort. Instead, he said, "Did you get those time cards dropped off?"

He, too, wasn't ready to think about this cruel finality. Denial is so much easier.

My mother was the same way. As a man walked past to find a seat, she whispered to me that he had 10 kids, and did I know that? She had dried tears on her face, but she was desperately warding off the feelings that hovered like an oppressive smog just overhead, threatening to close in and overwhelm us.

We were willing to grasp at anything that might help us forget the reason we were all there.

It worked for awhile. The pastor made the service feel like a church sermon, which lulled me into believing it was nothing more than that. A speaker had so many humorous anecdotes that each and every one of us could relate to that it became easy to get carried away in the memories.

But then, the end. The pictures overhead. The music.

When "Over the Rainbow" by IZ Kamakawiwo'ole - aka the ukulele version - started, that's when the smog descended.

How could you be gone? How could we not be that little girl and that strong, laughing man anymore? How could it be over in what felt like the blink of an eye?

WHY?

So many people loved you, and so many people mourn you like they have lost their best friend.

And they are all right. You were everyone's best friend. But more importantly, as the funny speaker said, everyone believed that he or she was YOUR best friend.

I love you, dad. See you later.

Things I've Learned from Nevada Fitness Club, Part Two

I decided to keep going back to Nevada Fitness Club after that disastrous first night, because I felt great afterward. And that feeling of greatness continued through post-workout Night Two, my introduction to T25.

T25 was great, because even though it is an intense cardio workout, it's only 25 minutes in length, and that's my dream length of time when I'm doing any kind of intense physical activity.

And then there was Night Three: The First Night of Insanity.

Sure, I had heard about Insanity, but only by description, and that description was pretty much always brief and limited to the same wording: "It sucks."

But the same guy who founded T25 created Insanity, so I thought, well, T25 wasn't TOO bad, so Insanity should be doable, as well.

It's that kind of logic that makes me a better creative-type thinker.

It's not like I didn't KNOW what I was going into. But retroactively, I didn't know what I was going into.

The best way I can phrase it is, "It sucks."

I went without Regan, and when I got there I saw one of my new theater employees right next to my favorite spot on the back row. She had recently suffered an ankle injury, so I thought, well, if she's here with an ankle injury, I can definitely handle this. I had NO ankle injury.

Like I said, logic - not my bag.

She basically mopped the floor with me.

"Mopped the floor" was also the position I favored that night, because that's what you could have done with my prone body as I literally covered it in a face-down, spread-eagle type position. I made it through about eight minutes straight and then melted to the ground in a lake of my own sweat.

What kind of monster would come up with this workout? And then act all peppy throughout that many straight minutes of hell?

Hmm, I just don't know. Could it be....SATAN?

It was strange that I limped through a quarter of the workout and still felt so absolutely destroyed afterward. How could anyone get through that entire thing? That many pushups!? That much running and lunging and running and pushing up and who the hell invented the Burpee? Yes, all of these signs pointed to this being Satan's work.

And yet, I continued to go back. And then, slowly, very, very slowly, I lost some weight.

And then some more. We're talking, like, five pounds. But in addition to that five pounds, I started to see some definition. For the first time, I had semi-defined abs. I had sculpted arms. I didn't realize it until I re-connected with a very dear former friend over the summer and he couldn't stop talking about my arms. And then my oncologist, during my annual "Feel-Up in July" event, asked me if I had been working out. It was during a very awkward part of the exam, but still, she asked. And then followed it with a comment that she could really tell in my arms, and that I looked good.

So that was really awesome. By July I had lost 12 pounds, as well, although that was probably too much. I'm only saying that to justify the seven I've gained back, really.

And now, 10 months later, I breeze through (and by that I mean I remain mostly upright throughout) Insanity.

So I have learned that being almost 40 does NOT mean that I can't be in pretty good shape.

The biggest struggle, though, is continuing to find time. And sometimes, with two jobs, that's really, really hard. I'm learning to make this a priority. And I find that it's getting easier and easier to do.

Seriously, come hang with us.