All Bodies Great and Small

For a woman weeks away from turning forty-four, whose Irish heritage shows in glowing white skin, whose battle wounds include scars, stretch marks, and roadmaps of varicose veins, there is one thing more terrifying than opening the credit card statement, and the first mammogram combined: getting fitted for the competition posing suit. 

Yesterday, was that day.

First some backstory: competing in this bodybuilding competition with me is a 33 year-old, blonde beauty, who even after four children has the body of, well, a bodybuilder. She is lean, and muscled in that beautiful feminine way that, coupled with a smooth olive skin, makes me kick myself for encouring her to hop onto this train with me. Being ten years my junior, I knew we'd compete in different classes, but I did not anticipate how, once we trained together, my confidence would shrink like 100% cotton socks in a hot dryer. 

Yesterday we planned to meet Tina at the gym, lock ourselves in the heavily mirrored yoga room, and put together our posing routines. Later we were to meet at Fresh Peaches, a swimsuit mecca specializing in custom made posing suits. 

For our posing practice, Tina said, "I need to see your lower body too, so wear shorts or a bathing suit." 

Posing is an art. It is choreographed like a dance, and can be as exhausting as a full workout. The trick is to flex as hard as you can, position yourself in such a way that all that hard earned muscle actually shows, and then hold it for 30 seconds, all the while remembering to keep the rest of your body as tight as the lid on a jar of pickles. Seems simple enough.

What I tend to do is this: face the mirror, pull arms overhead into a double biceps pose, tuck thumbs into hands, bend wrists in toward forearms, lift elbows, glance and my lower body and realize I am not flexing my stomach, which is hanging flacid, like Homer Simpson's. 

I tighten my mid section, squeeze my quads, look back at my biceps which have since sagged, put them back in position, and then glance at my countenance. I am grimacing, and my tongue is sticking out to the side like a kid who is learning to use scissors for the first time. 

Thirty seconds is suddenly over and it is time to move into a side chest pose. The impression I have made on my imaginary judges is that I stumbled onto stage by accident while trying to locate the snack bar. 

Posing practice is important. It requires a sense of strength, confidence, and rote coordination. You can put your heart and soul into your diet and workout, but if your posing stinks, none of your efforts will show. 

So though I am not entirely prepared, Saturday morning arrives.

My young companion and I enter the gym. She is clad in cute camouflage short shorts, legs tanned and smooth, which confirms  my decision to wear bike shorts as a bad one. My winter white legs look like toothpaste squeezing out of a freshly opened tube.

I reflect on my three year-old's comment after I dressed and emerged from my bedroom this morning:

"Mommy, you look funny."

Indeed.

Posing practice is a small disaster. I mentally shrink into my self every time I look in the mirror, searching for all that muscle I have worked to grow. Instead I see the betrayal of age, the refusal of my lower body to response to countless miles of cardio, countless pounds of lifting, of endless walking lunges up and down the gym parking lot in all kinds of weather. The awkwardness of posing further shrivels my confidence, and when I finally leave the gym to go pick up the kids, I am certain I cannot face getting fitted for a bikini today. 

I cancel plans to go to Fresh Peaches and instead go home. I open the doors and windows for the first time since last year. I turn the stereo speakers toward the open window, crank up the Gourds and spend the rest of the day tidying the yard and hanging out with my girls. 

The yard, buried and frozen for the past several months, is finally becoming exposed again. The melting snow reveals the ravages of winter: a collapsed patio chair, two torn Chinese lanterns that didn't make it into the shed last fall, a Cabbage patch doll abandoned last November next to the swing set. I make a pile of debris to load into the truck and haul away. About 4 pm my phone rings, and I see it is Jennifer, my fellow competitor. I pull myself out of my cleaning zen.

She has just completed her fitting. "It was a great experience, and the people were really nice," she sounds upbeat. "But they're closed tomorrow, and she needs at least 6 weeks to make the suit."

I quickly calculate that I may have missed my window. Well, I guess I'm off the hook. There just isn't enough time for me to get a suit made then. I pull my mouth into a half-smile. There is a brownie with sprinkles on it calling my name. 

Score!

"Good news is that they are open until 7 pm. So you could still make it today."

"Oh." 

I thank my friend for her call, and mentally put down the brownie.  Then I look down at myself. I am unshowered, my jeans are covered in dirt and dog slobber, one child is napping with peanut butter on her forehead and a rat's nest of hair I intended to wash before we went public again. The other child has a friend over and they are playing Twister, content and happy where they are. 

I imagine loading my motley crew in the car and hurriedly entering Fresh Peaches. My vision includes being greeted by a tanned, toned 30 year-old sporting a bikini and a belly ring. She has a tape measure around her neck is and holding a clipboard. Our conversation would likely go like this:

"Hello, I need to get fitted for a posing suit for a bodybuilding competition."

"For bodybuilding?"

"YES."

"Bodybuilding??"

"Yes."

"Bodybuilding???"

"yes."

I look at the clock again. It is 4:20. Fresh Peaches is an hour away. I do what any one in my position would do, I call my mom. She offers to come with me (all women understand strength in numbers when facing combat situations) or to watch the kids. I change my clothes, take her babysitting offer, and on the way out of the neighborhood, stop by my friend's house. She is getting ready to sit down for her happy hour, but she throws on a new shirt and jumps in the car. Again, women understand strength in numbers.

An hour later, I pull into Fresh Peaches and take my sweaty palms off the steering wheel. We enter the building and are struck by a warehouse full of bright colors, endless polka dots, and tropical patterns. String bikinis hang upside down in long rows like festive bats, resting, wings folded. Behind a simple desk at the entrance a white-haired older woman greets us with a genuine smile. 

"Hello, I need to get fitted for a posing suit for a bodybuilding competition."

"Well, my daughter Carrie Ann can do that for you." She smiles. "Carrie Ann...you around?"

My eyes scan the rows and rounders until a figure emerges with a tape measure around her neck. Carrie Ann is beautiful, apple-cheeked, twinkling, and all of about 25. She is also big. Not just plump, but big in a way that makes her seem out of place among the string bikinis that frame the background. 

She is also confident, poised and gentle in her mannerisms. I am instantly put at ease by this woman nearly young enough to be my daughter. 

Carrie Ann is an artist and began making posing suits for bodybuilders when she was still in high school. I stand inside a fitting room, holding up a small pice of fabric, trying to decide if belongs on my chest or my rear, and she stands on the other side of the door offering calming advice about colors, fit, and style. I eventually emerge from the fitting room shivering and goose-pimpled in a sample suit, and she measures my backside and shows me how to adjust the straps.  

She senses my discomfort and tells me stories of other gals' first competitions, how worried they were that they would not be ready, and how much they transformed physically during the last four weeks of training. 

"You are right where everyone is at this stage." She releases me to change back into myself, but continues talking like a sage from outside the dressing room. "I don't know anyone who hasn't done a second competition. It gets addicting."

Rather than just a deposit, I pay for the suit in full.  The experience has been surprisingly positive, but I know myself and that brownie still have battles to come. 

I sit down in the car and my friend and I look at one another. "What a great human being! What a great place!" We drive back home awash in a discussion of how Carrie Ann's attitude AND her physique make her a success. 

My friend plans to return with me for my next fitting and pick out a suit for herself. Summer is coming and it is time to welcome the sun. It is time to see the magic in bodies, not just the perfect ones, but all of them and the amazing souls they house. 

 

 

After 13 years, I finally walked around in Pete's shoes...

It may be a stretch to say this, but I think weight training might be a substitute for marriage counseling. Well, at least in my case. Let me explain. 

My food meltdown of last week culminated one evening when, after locking the gym I walked across the street to the market,  grabbed a Chunky bar, paid for it and exited like an armed robber. I ate it on the drive home, furtively, under the glow of the dashboard lights. Then, with the stain of chocolate still on my fingers, I walked into the house, sat down on the couch, and I consumed an entire box of Teddy Grahams.

I woke up the next morning feeling strangely content. But the memory of the previous night's eating spree suddenly popped in my head like an instant message from a smug Satan, and I squinted and groaned. The night would have been a caloric nightmare in a normal situation, but with less than 8 weeks of wiggle room for my competition, it was like death. I pulled myself upright and climbed the stairs. 

My husband eyed me as I poured a cup of coffee. He nodded at the empty box of Teddy Grahams, lying on its side on the kitchen counter, "Was that you?"

"Shit! Yes." I grabbed my head with both hands to emphasize my hysteria. "I am totally out of control. I think I have lost my mind."

"It happens." He said this calmly, lacking any judgement, and I actually felt a burst of love for him that 13 years of marriage had dulled. 

"It does?" I wanted to hear more. 

As a veteran wrestler, who spent his teen years trying to make weight for countless tournaments, my husband understands hunger. 

"I used to get up in the middle of the night and make muffins," he said.  "Once my dad heard me banging around and got up to see what I was doing, so I hid the batter under my bed. I pulled it out from under there three days later and still baked it. "

I laughed so hard I spilled my coffee. And I suddenly felt lighter.

It is important to understand that one tired old complaint in our marriage is that my husband either doesn't speak, or he speaks about wrestling. 

Ask him what our phone number is and he will pause before he can answer. Ask him to rattle off the weight each of his team members in 1978, and he can do it, with ease. I suspect that when we are both old and Alzheimer's has ravaged our minds, that this man may not remember my name--the woman who slept beside him for most of his adult life--but he will still be telling stories about his first coach, Sam, the man who introduced him to wrestling. 

And I have grown to understand that for him, wrestling and breathing are kin. For over a decade, I have pretended to listen to his wrestling stories, and he has kept telling them. It works for us. 

But this morning I begged to hear more. 

"How did you make weight after you lost control of your eating?"

"You run." He said. "You sweat if back off. You get really good and sweating it off again."

I nodded, my own hope returning as he shared his secrets about his struggles with cutting weight. I imagined him as a hungry, high school kid sitting in a garlic induced coma at the table of his New Jersey home, surrounded by mounds of pasta and "gravy" night after night. 

I listened to him talk until the light rose in the windows and carried away the moment. He expressed his empathy for the kids on the wrestling team at our high school who have to carry bags of candy bars during fundraising season. Sometimes they eat the whole bag themselves, and who could blame them? 

Later in the day, when we'd both gone our separate, busy ways, it dawned on me that wrestling is in that man's blood because he worked so utterly hard at it. It struck me how excruciating it must have been to have that kind of discipline at that time in his life--as a seventeen year-old boy he probably dreamt more about cannolis than canoodling. The power of food. I now understand his journey.

Despite our breakthrough, I've not become a wrestling fan; this is a marriage, not a Disney movie. But I have become a bigger fan of my husband. That morning conversation filled me with hope and put my head back in the game.

And I am understanding more and more that while you are responsible for much of your own success, it is important to listen to your people: family, friends, mentors. Words and stories sink in--and matter. They just might have the power to keep you from quitting when it feels too hard.

No wonder he still talks about that old coach, Sam. 

I eat, therefore I am...(weak)

There is a stray cat who lives in our neighborhood. Each night, when we've gone to bed, he comes to our house and sits under the kitchen window in the darkness, meowing in a deep, lonely voice, calling to our two cats who lie curled up on our quilt-covered legs. Our cats have no interest in befriending the rogue. They either ignore him or climb into the windowsill and hiss at him with an air of superiority. Yet every night he returns. He will not relent. His sad, guttural meow unnerves me, reminds me of the suffering in the world, and it makes me tuck deeper into the covers.

With 8 weeks to go until this competition, that stray cat has come to symbolize my hunger.

 

Until very recently, my ability to place my mind and my body in sync has been difficult yet exhilarating, but when my weeks' countdown reached single digits, some cog in my confidence came loose, shattering the whole mechanism. Lately, every single day, as soon as I am alone, hunger comes crying, moaning to me, begging me. And for some mystifying reason, I open the window allowing it to wander in. 

Peanut butter sandwiches, graham crackers dipped in milk, the first bite of a slice of cheese pizza--the comfort foods associated with childhood become my targets, and I consume in an altered mental state until the wave passes. 

If I am cleaning the gym, talking with people, or training, I feel strong-willed and confident, but the moment I am alone, the hunger comes back to my window, crying, needing, starving for companionship, and demanding attention. It is hounding me, and it is eroding my power. I give in and eat. Then I wallow in guilt--a food slut--that easy girl who can be talked into anything. 

Five weeks ago I would not let a bite of pasta pass my lips, but tonight I stabbed at the last bits on my daughter's plate. Girl Scout cookies that I resisted for weeks on end now have more power than heroin. I have not had one truly clean day of eating in...well, I've stopped counting. I sneak in a chip here, a morsel of cake there...until the day's digressions turn into an avalanche. I am slowly committing suicide to my bodybuilding goal and to the person I'd hoped to become. 

There is no cramming for this deadline, no making up for lost time, and if I don't get a handle on it soon, if I don't squash this monster, I will run out of time. 

I confide in close friends, feeling a bit stupid that with all the world's problems, I am bemoaning by lack of will power to diet. But they take me seriously, and like the wonders they are, offer solutions:

"Create a timeline so you can see your journey and how little you have left to go."

"Give those Girl Scout cookies the finger!"

This helps, and I end these conversations with the ability to shrink this problem back down to a manageable size. Yet even with corrected perspective generated from an outside voice, the hunger returns and perches under the window. It calls out so desperately that my heart grows heavy. I know I will respond to it again. 

If in the end, my destination is wiped out by the power of food, my identity, my definition of myself will be altered just enough. I will become that stray cat--that zombie--that wishful moan of despair and longing.

Tonight, as I retire for the night, I've asked my husband to leave the garage door open just a crack. I hope that cat finds its way into a cozy box, tucked safely up high on a shelf among the Christmas ornaments and camping equipment. 

It needs to take an 8 week-long nap.

.