“Be a part of your own success story.” As we near the 10th anniversary party for Arena Fitness, it seemed fitting to reflect on the motto that has defined and framed my own fitness journey in the three years that I have been a member of the Arena Fitness family. We celebrate the accomplishments of our own on this blog through the title of “Beast of the Week” and by sharing stories from our own success stories with each other. These celebrations are necessary, because in acknowledging our accomplishments, we remind ourselves that we’re doing the right thing every time we begrudgingly beast out another set of burpees. We can look to others that have attained and enjoyed success, and we can use their stories as guiding lights for making our own. 

But what happens when your story goes the other way? Are these struggles only to be told as cautionary tales, or ignored and dismissed as the efforts of those less dedicated? I believe that acknowledging when we fall is just as important as acknowledging when we triumph, because there is something to be gained in both cases. When we refuse to acknowledge the spectre of failure, we begin to complain that we have no idea why we aren’t succeeding, knowing full well that we just ate a pint of ice cream or were too hungover to get into the gym the day before (though perhaps that’s just me). Not all stories are successful all of the time, and it’s the struggles that make them compelling and interesting and most of all, relatable. It helps us make sense of our own struggles and place them into perspective. 

With that in mind, I’d like to share how my own struggles have been just as illuminating, to me at least, as my successes in their own way. 

I don’t know how or why it happened, but sometime into my first semester of graduate school in 2011, the gym stopped being a place of comfort. That wasn’t always the case: when I had lost 50 pounds, I was in the gym pulling doubles and eating well. I loved coming into the gym and I loved the feeling I’d get after working out. I felt energetic and was no longer getting sick every two weeks. I moved to Nashville for graduate school and still treated working out as a treat that I got to have, rather than something to be checked off a long list of obligations. True, I only worked out once or twice a week at a gym, but I was walking 3+ miles every day. When academic dreams took me back to southern California, I was excited to come back to Arena Fitness and resume the kickboxing and conditioning workouts I had fallen in love with a year before. 

But then it changed. 

arena fitness, self care, selfcare, exerciseInstead of relieving stress, it added to it. Instead of allowing me to sink into the mindless comfort of pusuhps, roundhouse kicks, and planks, it made me overly aware of how I looked and how I performed. I made vows, both public and private, that I would be in the gym more often. I made fitness goals about adventure races, promising I would step up my training. And I didn’t deliver. All of this made me even more desperate to look a certain way, to see a certain number when I stepped on that forsaken scale, to be able to blow through exercises at a certain pace. All of this became more difficult to achieve when I became more and more unable to get into the gym, exacerbated by the first physical injury I had ever had in my life. I had an emotional come-to-Jesus moment with Jon and Joe, I had long talks with my friends, family, and health care professionals, but nothing was working. I was not only hopelessly stressed out by working out, but I was beginning to hate myself, and punished myself further by eating like crap and not doing anything about it. Even worse, the added stress was only adding to my shoulder injury, making me all the more miserable.

So I did what everyone should do when they find themselves trapped in an unhealthy relationship with no hope of change: I walked away. 

I finally realized that I was so consumed with guilt and self-loathing when it came to working out that I would only be able to fix everything by taking it away and trying to gain a new perspective. I didn’t want to try and stay fit through a self-loathing fear that I would somehow become qualitatively different if the numbers on the scale were higher or if my pants size weren’t “ideal”. By walking away, I changed the rules of a game that I would only return to when I was able to engage them in a healthy, pro-self kind of way.

 

I realized that part of the reason I felt out of control was that graduate school is sort of like a liquid: it will expand and fill up every space of your life if you let it, suffocating every other part of yourself or your life. My goals of getting into a top tier PhD program only made that aspect of grad school worst. Graduate students, by the way, are not the healthiest group of people, and a large part of that has to do with our perception of time. We don’t have time to do anything because we really should be doing schoolwork or studying or reading the new publication on our subject at every given moment. It’s really hard to get past this feeling of “I SHOULD BE” all the time, and it’s hard to justify things that aren’t school related, even if they’re acts of self-care, like working out. 

Removing a stressor from my life allowed me to focus, with more clarity, on the things that I could control, like my diet. I am happy and proud to say that I have successfully removed almost all dairy, processed sugar, and bread to my diet. Even more happily, I don’t judge myself harshly when I have a few more bites of a piece of cheesecake than I was planning, or think that my size whatever pants need to be replaced by something smaller. Getting a handle on this part of my fitness journey has allowed me to take a deep breath and begin reconsidering and repairing my relationship to working out. 

As I begin to manage my stress more effectively, I think I can start adding in working out again. I do think that a large part of my prior success with fitness and weight loss had to do with the fact that I loved kickboxing. I would gladly do the planks, the burpees, or the pushups if it made me better at kickboxing. I haven’t found a replacement for it yet while rehabbing my shoulder, one that, like a dance class, will feel like a reward I would gladly take rather than an obligation I should somewhat unwillingly fulfill. This doesn’t mean I am going to stop working out forever, of course; I just have to make sure that I view exercise as a positive force in my life. As of now, I’m not sure what this means for me or what that’s going to look like. But I’m excited for the path that my own success story will take, because I know that this is not the end for me. Not by a long shot.