Not an Athlete, But Becoming Athletic (part 2)

Derby has this way of absolutely taking over your life.  Mostly in a good way.   There's a common saying in derby of, "I can't, I have derby."  It's totally true.  When there's not practice or a game to play in, there's a game to go watch, or league photos, or a committee meeting, or fill-in-the-blank. 

My original league was on the smaller side, and we got to a point where we were a big fish in a little pond, meaning we had been around long enough that we could beat almost every other smaller league around us.  But the few times we had competed against anyone in WFTDA, the governing body of roller derby, who hosts regional and national competitions, we had our asses handed to us.  When I first started playing again, I struggled to work my way up on the travel team.  There are 14 skaters allowed on a team during a game, and for my first few games back, I was #15.  As I continued to lose weight, and my speed and endurance improved, I began to climb up the roster.  By the time I made the decision to move to St Pete, I was a solid skater for the All-Stars.

However, I moved from a big fish in a little pond to a pretty decent sized fish in a much bigger, better pond.  Tampa has been ranked high enough to compete at regionals for the last few years.  While their position has varied, they have been everywhere from 6^th to 9^th place in the South Central region of WFTDA.  My number 1 goal with playing with Tampa was to make their travel team, the Tampa Tantrums, which I did!  I also made my 2^nd goal of making a roster.  We have a tournament coming up in a few weeks and I am on the roster of 15 they are taking.  Time will tell if I make my 3^rd goal of getting to actually play in a bout with them.

Not an Athlete, But Becoming Athletic (part 1)

I don’t think of myself as an athlete, though I suppose I would be considered one. I play roller derby.  I started when my original league formed back in 2006.  In all honesty, I was never awesome at it. I could knock someone down easily, but my speed and endurance always was a struggle. About three years ago, I hurt my knee, and began reffing. Reffing was great for me in terms of my self-esteem. I was still skating and I quickly became pretty good at it. In 2010, I was the head ref for my league and was reffing just about every weekend.

But then I started to miss hitting. It is an amazing feeling when you hit the jammer (the point scorer) and knock her into the crowd while you just keep on skating. However, I also knew that my speed and endurance had taken an even bigger dive in recent months.  During my last few months as a teacher (in 2010), because I was miserable and being treated poorly, and because I’m an emotional eater, I ate.  A lot. So, even though I went to my personal training classes twice a week, in the early spring of 2010, I was often too stressed out to spend the time at the gym and ate horrible food all throughout the day.  By July of 2010, I was at the heaviest I have ever been and felt fairly horrible about myself.  (See picture from Life After Teaching post)

Three things happened around that time. One, on my 29th birthday, I made a goal to be 80 pounds lighter by my 30th birthday and to finally have a body that I liked. Two, I started attending the newbie practices and working on my skating skills again. In November of 2010, I quit reffing and came back as a skater.  Three, I had the fortune of having Kam as a personal trainer, who is a tell-it-like-it-is hard-ass.  I had recently started working as a health coach with the Nopalea cactus juice that reduces inflammation, a health product.  One day at the gym, Kam took me aside and said something to the effect of, "Jenn, you've been coming to us for over a year and you look the same.  (In all reality, I probably looked a little worse.)  You're working in the health industry, and you need to look the part.  You need to be healthy.  You need to make changes in what you eat.  This starts tomorrow morning."  She told me that I needed to cut out just about everything from my diet except for clean foods.  I immediately hemmed and hawed and made a ton of excuses before giving in and starting a few days later.  The harshest and best thing she said to me was this: "You eat for your goals.  If your goal is to be fat and unhealthy, then you make the choice and eat a certain way.  If your goal is to lose weight and gain muscle and be fit, well, you eat a certain way for that too."

Since then, I began working my butt off. I began eating whole, clean foods, I began working out almost every day, and as a result, over the course of a year I lost 60 pounds, dropped 5 dress sizes, considerably increased my speed and endurance, and regained a ton of self-esteem.  I also gained muscle tone.  I'd always been really strong. But all of a sudden, I began love that my muscles were becoming more defined, especially in my arms and my calves.

The picture on the left is yet another super unflattering example of me at my worst.  The photo on the right was taken during a roller derby bout, of me about 60 pounds lighter, wearing the same bottoms.  Check out the beginning of my shoulder muscles.  (Also, I should mention that in the picture I was legally shoving my teammate into the opposing jammer, not illegally pushing an opposing player, which it kinda looks like I'm doing.)

While I am so proud of how far I have come, I have also gone through plenty of setbacks and struggles. I have been a part of three two-month weight loss type challenges, and done very well at them. However, in between challenges, I struggle and eat food I shouldn't and gain back some of the weight I have lost. 

Back in September, my partner Candy and I decided to move down to St Pete, Florida.  While moving was absolutely the best decision for us (both our families are here, we work with my family, we have an adorable home with a pool and a hot tub just five minutes from the beach, and we now get to skate with Tampa Roller Derby, a league I have looked up to since the beginning of my derby career), moving is also very stressful.  Selling my house in North Carolina was not fun.  We literally spent a solid week make it look like a model home, painting my cute purple trim a less flattering white, and clearing out enough stuff to fill a 26 foot truck (For real, 26 feet.  Lucky for me, Candy drove it down to Florida.) Then we moved all our stuff into storage.  We lived at my folks guest house for two months while house hunting, which meant we didn’t have our own space.  We also didn’t have a set routine and are just now starting to have one again.

From all of this, because I am a stress eater, because I need clean eating to be easy for me, and because Whole Foods and the vegetarian drive-thru are no longer 5 minutes away from me, I began to eat crappy foods, and surprisingly enough, I have gained some weight back.  Like 30 pounds.  So, now I need to get to a point where I am ready to make changes and get my weight back down.

Life After Teaching

I have spent quite a few years of my life defining myself first and foremost as a teacher.  I majored in Elementary Education, got a teaching job during that first summer and poured my life into my job.  I loved it.  I loved the kids, I made other teacher friends, and I felt like I was making a difference in the world.  I felt so fulfilled I didn't even mind all the politics that go into public education.  Until one day I did.

I spent the first five years teaching kindergarten, and I was pretty darn good at it too.  My students had fun, felt cared for, and usually left reading above the level they were expected to.  Then, I got a little bored doing the same stuff every year.  I wanted to challenge myself and be able to really delve into books with students who could understand it, so when the opening came, I moved up to 3rd grade.

For those of you who don't know, 3rd grade is the first year that No Child Left Behind really comes into play. For most states, it's the first time kids have to take standardized tests, and for all states it's the first gateway year, which means that if a student does not pass said standardized test, they have the potential to fail the grade.

Now, my favorite thing about the testing (and please pick up on my sarcasm here) is that kids come in at every level, but all children are expected to pass.  So this means of course the bright child, from the loving parents who are in the world of academia, is going to do just fine most of the time, while the kid with an IQ of 71 (just a point or two too smart to get extra help) who lives in the projects, and for whom child protection services have been called numerous times on the parents for neglect and/or physical abuse, well, that kid is going to score just as high as the other kid right?  No Child Left Behind sure thinks so.  As a teacher, I can easily take on the role of parent to all the kids who need it throughout the school day, I actually don't mind that, but when half your class needs a parent, there is only so much you can do.

Combine a very needy class with an administration who is completely unsupportive and constantly nitpicking at you for things that were totally fine last year, and you've got where I was just a few years ago.  And I was miserable.  It seems like every year, my administration would choose one or two teachers to make feel like they are as small as possible.  And usually,  if you make it past that year, you are fine.  One teacher got through that year and is now the golden child.  (But that also involved lots of sucking up, and that is just not my style.)

I spent my last school year trying so hard to keep just an ounce of self-esteem left, which I did, but just barely.  I had been working out with a small group personal training class but I often chose to go home and sleep as opposed to working out because I was just so exhausted.  And because I am a stress eater, I did just that, as often as possible.  Oh, someone brought cookies to the teachers lounge?  Well of course I'll have one or four every time I stop by there.  Tired in the middle of the day?  Might as well have a Mountain Dew and Milky Way Truffles from the vending machines cause it'll pick me up for at least an hour before I need to go get another one.

By the end of the school year, my self-esteem was pretty much shot and I was at the heaviest I have ever been in my life.  But here's how I know I kept just that little bit of self-esteem left.  I had just enough to know that I didn't deserve to be treated as badly as I was being treated and I quit.

After I quit, life got so much better.  Just like that, I wasn't in trouble all the time.  In a very professional move on her part (again please hear the sarcasm), my principal stopped talking to me altogether (which I did not mind one bit). The school year soon ended, and I was free.

 The above picture shows me, on the right, at my largest, just after the school year had ended, reffing a bout for Tampa Roller Derby.

 Life is funny sometimes.  Several years ago, if you asked me to describe myself in a few words, I would have definitely used teacher as one of them.  I've known other teachers who have left the profession and I have always wondered what they would do with their lives, like I just could not fathom how they could leave or what would happen when the identity of being a teacher leaves you.

Now, I don't miss it a bit. Well, okay, I miss some of my students, and I miss my teacher friends who I don't see nearly as often anymore.  (Two other teachers and I used to take a walk after school every afternoon to the sidewalk just off school property so they could smoke while we gossiped and vented about the day.)  It's funny too because anytime I run into someone I used to work with, the very first thing they say, "You look so relaxed!"

And that is where my journey to health and fitness first got started.

About This Blog

I have been working towards my goal of a healthy, fit body for about a year and a half now.  Through the whole process I have wanted to write about it, and honestly never got around to it.  So, here I am, getting around to it.  Yay me!