big muscles
showing up, doing the work, being seen, changing your life.
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As readers of this newsletter know, I’ve spent recent weeks—this last barrel toward our one year anniversary of Life in Pandemia™—reflecting on all that has changed. I can’t stop thinking about all we’ve lost, and how we’re not the same people today that we were a year ago. Inside of my commitment to carrying the lessons of Pandemia forward into the new world we are creating, I am tender and cautious, my expectations quiet, my horizons shy, even as people are getting vaccinated and the promise of an eventual herd immunity draws nearer and nearer.
But today I’m going to tell you about something that is in total bloom.
As COVID 19 descended and everything changed, I was in the best physical shape of my life. I hated wearing jeans because they were too confining for my wonder thighs. I was pumping through big sets of pushups, I was moving heavier weight than ever, and, as is my goofball personality, I was flexing my biceps at anyone and everyone who even glanced in my general direction. After training consistently for almost six years, I was heading toward strict pull-ups, ring dips, unassisted hand-stands, and the ever-for-me-elusive bodyweight clean. There were still plenty of movements that I both sucked at and actively hated, but I would show up those programming days anyway, because I’d finally learned that it was more helpful to pay attention to my weaknesses rather than pretend they didn’t exist.
Then, yeah. COVID. The gym closed. The location shuttered. Equipment got distributed among members as we assessed how the community might stay together. What would our next iteration look like? We rented space at a public park and kept working out, all of us dreaming of barbells as we moved through bodyweight workouts, or dragged whatever equipment we could reasonably carry in our cars—dumbbells, jump ropes, the occasional make-shift pull-up rig tied to the tennis court fence. We did too many burpees. We babysat each other’s kids so everyone got a chance to move. We learned how to breathe behind masks, we discovered which masks stayed put and had the best structure, so we wouldn’t inhale cloth as we panted through a run. We maintained six-feet distance. We got into the habit of sanitizing every piece of equipment. We bumped elbows, foregoing high-fives. We released our CrossFit affiliation after the owner of the organization made racist comments about George Floyd on Twitter, refusing to align with an organization whose values ran so contrary to our people.
We kept going.
As the previous iteration was dissolving, a devoted crew began mobilizing us toward something we’d only ever previously considered as a lark: creating a co-op structure. We pulled together an interim board, and in September (October? November? What is time) we signed a lease on a new facility. Since then, as the new location has been getting built out, we’ve been working out in the parking lot. It’s kind of ridiculous. We have our physically distanced stations. We have our over-the-top, hella extra (and hella compliant!) cleaning protocols. We have a dusted up whiteboard and a speaker with a broken handle where we blast out-of-date bangers (we are old now). We are all a little creaky, and out of shape.
But we’re together.
As the restrictions ease, and we turn our attention toward member-outreach efforts, what I am most moved by are the people. We did this. We stayed together. In this time of dissolution, we came together and formed a co-op—a unique entity, something that didn’t exist before. We have emerged on the other side of The Worst Year™ inside an unconventional model with a totally fresh identity. And though our fitness goals are on the humbler side these days (at least for now), what is flourishing is our commitment to each other.
These efforts are no small thing. In community, though the work is a challenge, it is also a total joy.
*
I’m a writer and I’m sober (and, um, single) which means I spend large swaths of time alone with myself (and my Tater, but he supports The Process™). I sit alone in the dark every morning and I have a long pondering think and I make sense of my thoughts and I do my best to create meaning from the messiness of being human. Maybe it’s obvious, maybe I don’t have to spell it out, but I’m going to anyway, just in case: it’s these values of imagination and possibility and commitment and community that I hold closest as we collectively move out of the awfulness of 2020 and into a new world utterly unrecognizable to any of us.
*
If you’re feeling like a sad, ineffective husk of a human, start moving around heavy weight on a barbell. Lift it up over your head, your whole body extended strong, capable, and then guide it down into a satisfying crash onto the rubber mat below. Listen to your coaches, so you build a solid foundation, one where you can trust your body to move in a way that won’t hurt you. Run through the basics, every single time you warm up. Practice drills, over and over, because yes, you want to lift heavy, but also, you want to be fast, faster than you were before, faster perhaps than the people around you who are admittedly becoming your best pals.
When I first joined my gym, I’d never been much of a “joiner.” I’d never played team sports, I preferred hanging out one-on-one with people over groups, and after years of getting burned by the yoga world, I was suspicious of joining another organization that bragged about “community.”
I was also low-grade miserable and downright desperate for something different.
I started off 2014 having gained forty pounds after being basically the same weight since high school. My skin was constantly erupting in painful, cystic acne. I was grinding along in boring jobs that barely paid the bills. I had given up my dream of being a full-time yoga teacher, and though I was still teaching, I often felt embarrassed sitting at the front of the room, like I was an imposter, knowing that my habits were unhealthy, but at a loss on how to change. I was in denial about my relationship with a good man who was ultimately a wrong match, I was still using alcohol in a misguided attempt to feel OK, and I was living in a converted-garage apartment with so little natural light that my houseplants were starting to die. My self-esteem was already way deep down in the shitter, so when a friend told me about a new onboarding program at her gym, I leapt at the chance.
I started showing up, shy as hell, petrified of touching the barbell, confused by all these people who didn’t know me but would cheer me on as I grinded through the workouts, the last one to finish every time.
It took me over a year to start to open up. I started lingering around after classes, getting to know the people I was seeing almost every day. Even though most movements were still out of reach for me, I was inspired by the strength of the women around me as I watched them sail through wild feats of fitness. I learned so much in those minutes after class, chatting about the movements we’d just done, getting support around nutrition, laughing and joking and playing around.
I stopped treating my time at the gym as a separate part of my life, and began to let the lessons I was learning there seep into other areas. After so long spent muddling through my days, I was curious: what would it be like to achieve some tangible, point-to-able goals? What was I capable of? What could this body do?
*
When I’m inside of a workout, there is no external fluff. It is me, my breath, the weight on the bar (or my body), and my mind. There is a singular focus, a clearcut goal. Having a space where I can show up and focus on something external to my inner troubles, waking up the next day feeling that sweet soreness in the belly of my muscles, reveling in the surprise when something that was previously impossible suddenly is second nature (hello, box jumps, hello, double unders, hello, toes-to-bar)—it’s a good recipe.
But transformation cannot happen in a vacuum. What I needed more than a fast time on the whiteboard was to let myself be seen, exactly as I was, by a group of people who walked alongside me until I was ready to walk alongside myself.
*
I quit drinking in the fall of 2017, and my mild-mannered self fell into the unexpected throes of a smoldering, all-encompassing rage. Once again, the gym was my solace. I could show up messy, and mean, and mad, and throw it into the barbell, grunt and growl and heave my body around until that pent up energy was spent and I could feel myself back in my body. When you quit drinking, a lot of people will tell you to meditate and do yoga, but I was a fire breathing dragon. I was untamed. I was finally listening to myself instead of everything around me, and the demand was move, and the result was a boost in my confidence that was medicinal.
The lessons I’d been practicing at the gym served me well in early sobriety. I already knew how to stay inside of discomfort, and to keep moving and breathing through it. I already knew how to keep showing up, even when I didn’t feel like it, or I was sad, or upset, or stubborn, or frustrated. I already knew how to take care of my physical needs, how to eat well most of the time, how to hydrate and take care of my sleep quality. Most importantly, I already knew how to ask for help instead of disappearing.
*
The work of changing one’s life is marked by periods of plateaus. Community is what bolsters us until we arrive at whatever is waiting on the other side.
I spent almost all of 2019 not being able to clean past 115 pounds. I was improving incrementally everywhere else, but I could not budge the damn clean past 115. One Friday night a coach had me slow way down. She (hi, Coach Kate) ran me through a bunch of drills where I broke down the already incredibly familiar movement in my body, tracing it in slow motion, using an empty barbell, dozens and dozens of times. After this humbling down, I added plates back to the bar, stepped up and BOOM: 135 pounds to the front rack position, no biggie. A twenty pound jump in weight after months struggling under the bar, in a flash. Just like that.
But of course it wasn’t “just like that.” It was a collaboration between me, putting in the long, sloggy work over time, and my coach, my community, guiding me to improve.
When you quit because of a plateau, you miss so much. You miss out on discovering who you are and what you’re capable of. You miss the surprise and celebration of breaking through. You miss getting to look back on who you used to be, and comparing it to who you are now. These are such beautiful things, life giving things. But as the sun brightens the sky outside my window this morning, what I am most present to and moved by—when it comes to moving through plateaus—is that it’s how we build trust in ourselves that we can change.
If I take myself out of the game when it gets hard, or I hit a plateau, I begin to be ruled by limitations, instead of being in conversation with them. My imagination gets fuzzy. I start looking for evidence that something won’t work, instead of being curious of how it might. Life gets small. Opinions and beliefs get rigid. I become skeptical of community, instead of inspired by it.
You can see how if we extrapolate this way the hell out we might not be so surprised to find ourselves in all the trouble we’re in as a society.
Mine is the type of brain that immediately urges me to take grand, radical actions that will effect righteous change at a high level. Maybe your mind goes there too. But if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that change starts with the people in my orbit. I know that when my mind starts to spin out, and I am overwhelmed by all that needs to change, to the point that I might be so overwhelmed that I end up doing nothing, that what I need to do is slow down, go back to what I know works:
Hard work, over time, in community. Movement that is in integrity, and holds it’s people to account. And never, ever letting the chance to celebrate, laugh, or eat pizza together pass us by.
A couple of notes:
⭐️ CrossFit has since come under new ownership and we are encouraged by their DEI efforts.
⭐️ You can join my gym! Check out our next Onboarding here.
⭐️ This post is a day late (sigh). Friday’s thread will be a Saturday thread this week, bunnies.
Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, facilitator and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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Slow motion sober ! It's amazing what's possible by simply slowing down.
This feels very powerful and inspiring. Thank you.