Believe it or not, I haven’t always been into exercise.
I remember having a fickle attempt at learning to run about 7 years ago (couch to 5k app.. I must be the only person to ever fail at that) and trying all the fads that popped up promising weight loss without having to actually do much… (those vibrating plate machines that guaranteed results in a 10min workout? sign me up). But it would be a stretch to say I ‘exercised’, and I certainly didn’t have a gym membership or any of that sort of healthy malarky.
But as society shifted away from burning calories on the dancefloor at 5am (where I most definitely had a membership, or 4), to 5am sunrise yoga sessions, I guess I too somehow got swept up in the move to stop treating my body like maybe I could just trade it in for a new one when this one wasn’t in top nick any more.
And, like everything in my life, I didn’t just ‘start exercising’. I wanted to be GREAT at it. I wanted to do the hardest workouts, at the earliest hour, for the most days of the week. I don’t do things by halves. I got a personal trainer. I trained so hard I spewed. I got my skin folds done, and one of those body mass scan things that provides you a hyper colour visual ego blow. I made my team train with me before work (bless, they said they enjoyed it, I guess I’ll never know if this was a ‘work perk’ or a hostage situation). I trained in an altitude room (in high-altitude environments, breathing delivers less oxygen to muscle making every exercise 20% harder). I was up at 5.15am every morning to train there before work. Every. Single. Day. Of course, weekends meant a sleep in… until 6am, because then I would drive all over Sydney to try boxilates (yep, that was a thing), boot camps, UFC fight club, vegan no-coffee-allowed yoga retreats, cross fit… you name it, I did it.
I pushed and I pushed until one day, I just f*cking snapped.
I remember the moment pretty vividly. I was exhausted, I’d had about 5hrs sleep from being at a work function the night before. I was having a really stressful time at work. My relationship was a mess. I was on the rower (a personal enemy of mine) and I was hating it. Not just like “Ugh, another set, surely no, insert passive aggressive eye-roll” kind of hating it. Like, “I am so not enjoying this, I am detesting every second of this workout, I am finding no joy in this and I would give anything to be anywhere else but here.”
And, as I can be known to do, I burst into tears.
I was done. I was spent. I wasn’t even crazy lean or ‘shredded’ because my body was so stressed from everything I was throwing at it every single day (high pressure job, lots of travel, long days in the office, coupled with a full social life) it was in constant survival mode, holding onto every inch of fat it possibly could.
After scaring my trainer with my melt down, a full blown hysterical Kimmy K ugly cry, I went home. And I quit.
Now don’t get me wrong. I learned so many new skills during this 18 month or 2 year endeavour. I met amazing people. I conquered things I never thought I could (30min of burpees, nothing else… just burpees… yep). I was fit. I got the post workout highs where everything was amazing. I gained some very epic playlists from various trainers. I learned what all those complicated sounding exercises meant and was pretty OK at most of them.
But, I didn’t have balance. From where I was standing, I couldn’t even see balance on the horizon. Lets just maybe assume that balance isn’t something I’m naturally…. great at. That maybe I struggle a little bit (cough a lot) in this area. It was a pretty amazing reflection of some of the other areas of my life that needed some work. And it was hard. Some pretty brutal self reflection (aided by some probing questions from my mentor… but thats a blog for another time), some contemplation of what the ‘ego’ drive was in all of this (I mean, does instagram really need another #fitspo photo?). And perhaps, just perhaps, working out what I was a running from.
And it took some time, some professional help (thats a blog in itself, why is there so much stigma around having a psychologist in our armoury?), but it completely reset my approach to exercise (amongst a multitude of other things).
I train now because it makes me happy. I do things I enjoy. In moderation. I use ClassPass to mix yin with spin, sauna’s with boxing, without leaving the bubble of the east. I genuinely look forward to the 3-4 workouts I do a week. And the post workout photos? Well yeah, they still happen, but now they’re filter free, red faced and real. And much less frequent.
The irony is, I’m writing this on the back of a weekend where, with 2 of my friends, we did a 3hr ‘back to back’ session of 1hr boxing at Hustle, 1hr F45 class, then 1hr spin at Upcycle.. and it was a blast. Because it was the exception and not the rule. It was an anomaly, and not the regular. And because, lets be honest, sometimes that ego creeps back in and just wants to see you suffer ;)
