I talk about Nevada Fitness Club a lot. Actually, maybe I don't talk about it out loud. But it's kind of an ever-present background noise in my mind.
It's because precious little is more important to my Monday through Thursday routine than going to the Community Center at 6:30 and swimming out 40 to 60 minutes later in a pool of my own sweat, riding on a workout high that lasts at least an hour. Or until the fifth spoonful of peanut butter. Whichever comes first (it's the peanut butter).
It was not always this way. In fact, on January 27, 2014, when I went to my first workout, I decided five minutes into what was clearly a routine exclusively for the graceful that Combat Cardio was not for me. The instructor, a man I had previously considered a friend, spent at least 48 of the 50 minutes telling me what I was doing wrong.
"There are other people in this damn class!" I telegraphed to him furiously in my mind, but he was too busy talking about my horrible technique to read my thoughts.
But when it was over, I felt this crazy rush, and knew that air-punching my invisible enemy was the workout for me, after all.
Though the workouts varied, one thing was a constant: my location in the gym. I hugged the back corner, right in front of the door, so I could bail if necessary, and so nobody could see me labor through the moves. I'm kind of a clumsy, gawky person, and I didn't want anyone to see what I looked like trying to do hip-hop and agility drills.
As the months passed, I saw people make noticeable progress...the woman in front of me lost fifty pounds in 2014. But as far as regulars, people who were there with me at the beginning and the end of the year, it was kind of just me and that woman, whose name I still don't know. She's awesome, whoever she is.
Summer ended and the weather cooled, and as it did, attendance picked back up. I kept my spot in the back and waited for the rush of new people when we came back to class January 5, and although there were a few new faces, it wasn't as packed as I thought.
Until this week.
All week long, my spot was taken by a new attendee. Actually, the whole back row was new people. Who were these people!? Why were they in my spot?
Luckily, there was a giant, spotlighted area on the front row waiting for me. At first, this made me angry. What right did they have to stand in my spot!??!? Why did I have to go to the front!?
And then, it hit me. Those people were me a year ago. I had spent the year in the back of the gym, feeling out of my element, out of shape, out of breath. But a lot changed in the past year. I could get through the workouts now. I wasn't winded. I didn't feel like as much of an idiot.
It was time to graduate to the front of the gym.
And it wasn't that bad. Mainly because I couldn't see the people that could see me, but whatever.
Sure, I haven't made the noticeable changes that many in the class have made. Christy has lost 11 inches and 15 pounds; another girl, a runner, shattered her record for the mile since she started working out with us.
I haven't really lost any weight; I don't look that different. My physical changes are limited to the fact that, in the beginning, I spent a lot of time wheezing on the floor.
My real changes came from within. A year ago, I started to work out because I thought I needed something to fill the time while my husband was working on the road. I was accused of over-thinking things in general, and I thought a hobby would prevent that, give me something to fill up my time so my imagination didn't work overtime.
Instead, Nevada Fitness Club sharpened my focus and increased my confidence. To be fair, I had no confidence to start with, so I had nowhere to go but up, but gainz.
It enabled me to stop obsessing and attaching importance to things I could not change, and instead focus on the only thing I COULD change...myself. I'm a different person now, and I have Nevada Fitness Club to thank.
So I'm happy to give up that back-row spot if it means the others can get even a little of what I've experienced from these classes.
I just wish the light wasn't quite so spotlight-y on the front row.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
I Used to Be Smarter...[alternate title: I Think I Just Blew My Own Mind]
I work with kids (think ages 4-12) every day as part of my job. I used to think that I wasn't all that kid-friendly; like, as a person, I just wasn't into it or whatever. Kids are noisy, they're messy. They're unpredictable. They make it hard to sleep sometimes.
I really liked mine (and still do. Mostly. More than half of the time), but I inwardly reacted to kids the same way I react to a horde of mosquitoes...by telling myself to run to a place where they were not, and quickly. I didn't know how to talk to them, I didn't know how to deal with them.
My son kind of cured me of that temporarily, but I found it to be an issue again when I returned to my old movie theater job. I could make all kinds of small talk with adults, even teenagers. But small kids...I would smile in a forced, most likely terrifying, way, and say something like, "HI! ARE YOU EXCITED FOR THE MOVIE!?"
To their collective credit, they took it well, and most had the sense to pretend I wasn't talking to them.
Now I work with kids on the reg, and I have found that, on the contrary, they're a delight. I'm kind of jealous of them. They know what they want. They're not afraid to tell someone. They work actively on their goal if they haven't reached it. Things tend to be more concrete in their world than abstract. They're (mostly) pretty sure of who they are as people. They aren't afraid to tell you what they think of you when asked.
So I guess what I'm curious about is, when does that change?
I remember the Renaissance Festival when I was a kid. It was magic. I loved everything about it...the costumes, the games, the booths, the food, even the car ride.
It was that cloud of nostalgia that gripped me when I took my son to the Festival when he was four...
...and it was NOTHING like I remembered. When did everything get so expensive?! The gas, the money to feed us, the parking, the walking, the highway robbery-style prices of EVERYTHING inside those gates, the price to get IN those gates...it was just depressing and sad. I saw it through different eyes...through jaded, adult eyes that realized it wasn't an educational thing for kids, it was a money-making scam.
It was that same storm-colored lens that became part of my everyday eyesight the older I got. "C" was the letter of the day in my younger adulthood...C for Compromise. As I got older, and more afraid of endings, and more clingy and attachment-happy in my thirties, Compromise went out the window and the letter morphed into "D" for Desperation. Such was my desire for everyone to get along and, more importantly, for everyone in the world to love me, that I became chameleon-like based on the company I kept. Oh, you like that? It's my favorite too! I liked what you liked...no matter what that might be.
Slowly, over the course of the last year, I have started to peel back the layers of this Jen-of-all-trades and realize that I'm not a lot of the things that I thought I was. As I have shed those layers, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes eagerly, I have started to see who I really am.
And it was as they fell that I started to understand the term "inner child."
I embrace the notion that attachment is born of fear. I have learned (just this year! Like, literally the year 2015!) on a core-deep level that all I have to really worry about is me, because I am the only one I can change. I don't have to be responsible for anyone else's happiness. Only mine.
And the most important thing I learned was who I am.
I love my kid, unreservedly and unashamedly. I love to work out four nights a week until I can't form a coherent thought. I love to walk. I love to read. I love a few shows on television. I love learning new things, and getting to talk to different people all the time. I love appreciating beauty in things, specifically nature's surprises.
I also learned who I was not.
What it comes down to is that all of those things I loved, I have loved as long as I can remember (except my kid, because duh). They were the things that grounded me as a child. Swimming until my limbs were jelly, playing hide and seek until the dark necessitated a call from the porch...those were my workouts before I understood what working out was. Losing myself in new books, meeting new people at church...I thrived on those encounters.
As I have come to realize these things, I have started to cast off the heavy cloak that was my previous life. The glass lenses aren't storm-colored anymore. They're not rosy, either...not yet, and they may never be. But I feel, in longer and longer bursts, HAPPY. Happy the way I was as a kid. Happy in the way that means that you can just be, and not label something or think too much about what it really means.
Uncomplicated. Wholly. Happy.
I'm kind of a present-moment kind of chick, so I'm not going to project that this means great things for the upcoming new decade of my life.
But I'm seeing more hide-and-seek games in my future.
I really liked mine (and still do. Mostly. More than half of the time), but I inwardly reacted to kids the same way I react to a horde of mosquitoes...by telling myself to run to a place where they were not, and quickly. I didn't know how to talk to them, I didn't know how to deal with them.
My son kind of cured me of that temporarily, but I found it to be an issue again when I returned to my old movie theater job. I could make all kinds of small talk with adults, even teenagers. But small kids...I would smile in a forced, most likely terrifying, way, and say something like, "HI! ARE YOU EXCITED FOR THE MOVIE!?"
To their collective credit, they took it well, and most had the sense to pretend I wasn't talking to them.
Now I work with kids on the reg, and I have found that, on the contrary, they're a delight. I'm kind of jealous of them. They know what they want. They're not afraid to tell someone. They work actively on their goal if they haven't reached it. Things tend to be more concrete in their world than abstract. They're (mostly) pretty sure of who they are as people. They aren't afraid to tell you what they think of you when asked.
So I guess what I'm curious about is, when does that change?
I remember the Renaissance Festival when I was a kid. It was magic. I loved everything about it...the costumes, the games, the booths, the food, even the car ride.
It was that cloud of nostalgia that gripped me when I took my son to the Festival when he was four...
...and it was NOTHING like I remembered. When did everything get so expensive?! The gas, the money to feed us, the parking, the walking, the highway robbery-style prices of EVERYTHING inside those gates, the price to get IN those gates...it was just depressing and sad. I saw it through different eyes...through jaded, adult eyes that realized it wasn't an educational thing for kids, it was a money-making scam.
It was that same storm-colored lens that became part of my everyday eyesight the older I got. "C" was the letter of the day in my younger adulthood...C for Compromise. As I got older, and more afraid of endings, and more clingy and attachment-happy in my thirties, Compromise went out the window and the letter morphed into "D" for Desperation. Such was my desire for everyone to get along and, more importantly, for everyone in the world to love me, that I became chameleon-like based on the company I kept. Oh, you like that? It's my favorite too! I liked what you liked...no matter what that might be.
Slowly, over the course of the last year, I have started to peel back the layers of this Jen-of-all-trades and realize that I'm not a lot of the things that I thought I was. As I have shed those layers, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes eagerly, I have started to see who I really am.
And it was as they fell that I started to understand the term "inner child."
I embrace the notion that attachment is born of fear. I have learned (just this year! Like, literally the year 2015!) on a core-deep level that all I have to really worry about is me, because I am the only one I can change. I don't have to be responsible for anyone else's happiness. Only mine.
And the most important thing I learned was who I am.
I love my kid, unreservedly and unashamedly. I love to work out four nights a week until I can't form a coherent thought. I love to walk. I love to read. I love a few shows on television. I love learning new things, and getting to talk to different people all the time. I love appreciating beauty in things, specifically nature's surprises.
I also learned who I was not.
What it comes down to is that all of those things I loved, I have loved as long as I can remember (except my kid, because duh). They were the things that grounded me as a child. Swimming until my limbs were jelly, playing hide and seek until the dark necessitated a call from the porch...those were my workouts before I understood what working out was. Losing myself in new books, meeting new people at church...I thrived on those encounters.
As I have come to realize these things, I have started to cast off the heavy cloak that was my previous life. The glass lenses aren't storm-colored anymore. They're not rosy, either...not yet, and they may never be. But I feel, in longer and longer bursts, HAPPY. Happy the way I was as a kid. Happy in the way that means that you can just be, and not label something or think too much about what it really means.
Uncomplicated. Wholly. Happy.
I'm kind of a present-moment kind of chick, so I'm not going to project that this means great things for the upcoming new decade of my life.
But I'm seeing more hide-and-seek games in my future.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
But I Have a REALLY Good Excuse.
This is my first post of 2015, which is just ridiculous. But there was some stuff that happened, worthy of its own post in the mid- to distant future, and I got a little sidetracked.
There were only a few things that kept me on task in the hellish month that was January (have I ever shared that January is my least favorite month? It is. My dad would always be gone all the time starting in January, for tax season, and then I worked retail pharmacy, which was always hell in January with new deductibles, and then the inevitable post-holiday depression, and Seasonal Affective Disorder or whatever, that's definitely a thing, so really, what's to like?).
But I digress.
The point is, those few things that I mentioned above. The ones that kept me on task. I'm here today to talk about one specific thing in that tiny bundle:
My Precious. My Fitbit.
When I unwrapped it on Christmas Eve at my dad's house, I was intrigued. I had heard of them, but in a distracted, peripheral kind of way. Once I got the associated app, and connected it to my laptop, and got it all set up, I was ready to go. I work in a building with a lot of stairs, and I was confident, nay, cocky, that I would easily reach 10,000 steps before I left work each day.
That was before I discovered that I really only walked 3000 steps in a workday. And that was on a GOOD day.
I also have this ultra-competitive sister, who beats me routinely in everything. She totally got one, too.
There were only a few things that kept me on task in the hellish month that was January (have I ever shared that January is my least favorite month? It is. My dad would always be gone all the time starting in January, for tax season, and then I worked retail pharmacy, which was always hell in January with new deductibles, and then the inevitable post-holiday depression, and Seasonal Affective Disorder or whatever, that's definitely a thing, so really, what's to like?).
But I digress.
The point is, those few things that I mentioned above. The ones that kept me on task. I'm here today to talk about one specific thing in that tiny bundle:
My Precious. My Fitbit.
When I unwrapped it on Christmas Eve at my dad's house, I was intrigued. I had heard of them, but in a distracted, peripheral kind of way. Once I got the associated app, and connected it to my laptop, and got it all set up, I was ready to go. I work in a building with a lot of stairs, and I was confident, nay, cocky, that I would easily reach 10,000 steps before I left work each day.
That was before I discovered that I really only walked 3000 steps in a workday. And that was on a GOOD day.
I also have this ultra-competitive sister, who beats me routinely in everything. She totally got one, too.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Relationships
And I want to believe, I want to believe. I want to believe so much that people believe just by looking at me. I want to believe so much that it pours off of me in waves and is visible to a chosen few, who then yearn for something they can't quite place, but want desperately all the same. I want to believe so much that I'll be crowned Queen of Belief at the annual Belief Days event, during which there is a carnival and vendors set up around a town square and the parade is magnificent, especially given the size of the town.
I want to believe.
But I'm afraid.
Even though he'll whisper to me that it's not the same, that he's different, that WE'RE different, that the other two weren't my fault, I won't be able to stop wondering how it could NOT be me when both marriages failed. He'll remind me of the other common denominator in those marriages, and remind me that it will not factor in this time, and I will still worry.
And yet...
at the same time, I feel like I'm actually, finally, really MYSELF. And that I'm ready to be myself first, and part of something bigger second.
I want to believe.
But I'm afraid.
Even though he'll whisper to me that it's not the same, that he's different, that WE'RE different, that the other two weren't my fault, I won't be able to stop wondering how it could NOT be me when both marriages failed. He'll remind me of the other common denominator in those marriages, and remind me that it will not factor in this time, and I will still worry.
And yet...
at the same time, I feel like I'm actually, finally, really MYSELF. And that I'm ready to be myself first, and part of something bigger second.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
All Bets Are Off...it's 2015!
I used to be an overzealous resolution-maker. Every year, without fail, I would resolve to stop biting my nails, to lose 15 pounds, and to somehow get fabulous hair.
Then, in my early thirties, I shunned the resolution. Banned it. Kicked it to the curb.
It had no place in my life. I was just gonna live, and do the best I could, all year. I wasn't going to vow to change every January. The whole idea of it was ridiculous.
In January 2013, I cautiously re-introduced the resolution, and vowed to start doing yoga again.
It worked. All year.
So in January 2014, I upped the ante and started attending Nevada Fitness Club. Suddenly, things like Insanity and Combat Cardio were not only within reach, but mountains I climbed and obstacles I conquered.
And now, here we are on the cusp of 2015, and it's almost too much.
Because there is real shit happening in 2015.
And although I'm going to try a 21-day-to-sugar-elimination program, and although I got a Fitbit and am fascinated with how many sets of stairs I climb every day, there are more pressing things on my 2015 plate.
You see, in 2015, I will stop working three jobs and 60 hours a week.
In 2015, I will turn 40 years old.
And in 2015, my son, the light of my life, will finish high school and start college.
The year 2015 will bring more change than I'd care to think about. I have really enjoyed being a mom, way more than I thought I would when I told people that having kids wasn't really my thing.
I LOVED raising this child. I loved every bit of it, even the post-age-16 years, when I realized that I wasn't going to get out of the difficult times after all.
I remember getting my last driver's license renewal, seeing that it expired in July 2015, and thinking, wow, Hunter will be out of high school by then...that's so far away!
And now it's here. The second half of his last year of public school. It still feels like he should be that little boy with the giant backpack walking into preschool for the first time while I held back tears.
There's a lot to do. Like, actually get him to fill out all the scholarship applications. Like, actually get him to go to school. Like, actually get him to look objectively at more than one college.
But that's a job for 2015 Jen. Right now, I'm still in 2014, trying to remember that although there was a lot of bad in the last 12 months, there was a lot of good, too.
In a few short hours, I will welcome in the year of my son's graduation. And not just my son, but all of the other kids I watched grow up these last thirteen years.
Damn it, you guys. Why are you doing this to us?
Congratulations, anyway.
I'm still going to try that 21-day-to-sugar-elimination plan, though.
Then, in my early thirties, I shunned the resolution. Banned it. Kicked it to the curb.
It had no place in my life. I was just gonna live, and do the best I could, all year. I wasn't going to vow to change every January. The whole idea of it was ridiculous.
In January 2013, I cautiously re-introduced the resolution, and vowed to start doing yoga again.
It worked. All year.
So in January 2014, I upped the ante and started attending Nevada Fitness Club. Suddenly, things like Insanity and Combat Cardio were not only within reach, but mountains I climbed and obstacles I conquered.
And now, here we are on the cusp of 2015, and it's almost too much.
Because there is real shit happening in 2015.
And although I'm going to try a 21-day-to-sugar-elimination program, and although I got a Fitbit and am fascinated with how many sets of stairs I climb every day, there are more pressing things on my 2015 plate.
You see, in 2015, I will stop working three jobs and 60 hours a week.
In 2015, I will turn 40 years old.
And in 2015, my son, the light of my life, will finish high school and start college.
The year 2015 will bring more change than I'd care to think about. I have really enjoyed being a mom, way more than I thought I would when I told people that having kids wasn't really my thing.
I LOVED raising this child. I loved every bit of it, even the post-age-16 years, when I realized that I wasn't going to get out of the difficult times after all.
I remember getting my last driver's license renewal, seeing that it expired in July 2015, and thinking, wow, Hunter will be out of high school by then...that's so far away!
And now it's here. The second half of his last year of public school. It still feels like he should be that little boy with the giant backpack walking into preschool for the first time while I held back tears.
There's a lot to do. Like, actually get him to fill out all the scholarship applications. Like, actually get him to go to school. Like, actually get him to look objectively at more than one college.
But that's a job for 2015 Jen. Right now, I'm still in 2014, trying to remember that although there was a lot of bad in the last 12 months, there was a lot of good, too.
In a few short hours, I will welcome in the year of my son's graduation. And not just my son, but all of the other kids I watched grow up these last thirteen years.
Damn it, you guys. Why are you doing this to us?
Congratulations, anyway.
I'm still going to try that 21-day-to-sugar-elimination plan, though.
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
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