In light of the New Year, many people will be flocking to gyms nationwide in an attempt to "lose weight" get "more lean" or "fit" or any number of other health-related resolutions. Particularly, many women everywhere will be attempting to transform their bodies into a version that the majority of society will accept as "attractive." Before I throw my two-cents into what I personally think these resolution-achievers should do, I want to share my story with you.
I'd like to open this by acknowledging that I am incredibly hesitant, slightly uncomfortable, and extremely nervous to share the following words with you. I am leaving myself and my story open to ridicule and discussion from whatever opinion you develop after having read it. That being said, any opinions regarding what I could've done differently does not change what I did, and what did happen to me. It's what I lived, what I felt, and any thoughts about how it could've gone differently doesn't change what did happen. But first, an introduction.
My name is Jess and I'm a 2nd Lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and I had a Biblical-prodigal son-religious type of experience with CrossFit.
The Marine 2nd Lieutenant part almost didn't happen. The CrossFit part is why it did.
I've been dieting since I was ten years old. I've generally erred on the 'slightly heavy side' of the body type scale, and for as long as I can remember, my mother and I have been experimenting with ways to lose weight. So, I have 15 years of experience with the "battle with the bulge" as I like to call it. When I turned 17, I was inspired to change my mind about becoming an artist and felt compelled to become a United States Marine. From there, I enlisted in the Delayed Entry Program. Because I've loved airplanes and flying since I was 7, my NJROTC Commander, USN and Master Chief, USN, suggested that I apply for an NROTC scholarship so that I could one day become a Marine Officer, and then a Marine Aviator. If I wanted to be a Marine, I needed to do two things: Pull ups, and run three miles in under 27 minutes. I wanted to run it in under 21 minutes, a perfect score. So in my senior year of high school, I joined Cross Country and Track, in addition to my NJROTC physical team activities, in order to achieve those goals. Pull ups were not required of women at the time (2007), but I knew they would help at bootcamp with climbing a rope.
Halfway through my college education, I tore all of the tendons and ligaments in my right ankle after falling while attempting to catch a rebound during a game of basketball. I can't say anything regarding the events that occurred after this, other than I did not allow the injury to heal properly, and that I gained a substantial amount of weight. When it came time for me to leave for OCS the summer before my senior year of college, I failed my 3 mile run portion of my PFT. I was also severely out of height and weight standards for the Marine Corps. As a result, I did not go to OCS that summer and was then sent before a board to determine whether or not my scholarship should be taken away. I was retained in the program so long as I did not again fail a height/ weight and/ or a PFT. Three months after this occurred, I failed both and in December of 2010, I was subsequently disenrolled from the NROTC program and had my scholarship revoked.
I have always accepted full responsibility for my failures here. I did not meet the standard, and therefore I was not fit to be a Marine, much less a Marine Officer. But this is not because I didn't try. I cannot stress how hard I tried. I did everything I thought I could do, at that time, to succeed. I adjusted my diet, I worked out regularly, yet nothing seemed to work. Prior to this I, like anyone else who wants to get in shape, bought all of the women's or men's fitness magazines about what exercises to do in the gym. I looked up workouts online, I went on three, four, or six mile runs weekly. I even ran a marathon in the fall of 2008. Yet after I broke my ankle, every attempt I made at regaining my fitness utterly failed.
I cannot express how distraught I was after being disenrolled. I saw all of my dreams disappear, and it was my fault. I had tried, but my attempts were not good enough to get me to where I needed to be. The sadness was genuinely crushing, and when I say that breathing was the last thing I wanted to do, it really was the last thing I wanted to do. I now owed the government the money they spent on my education (over $100,000), and I still had one semester to go to graduate. I did not see how I was going to graduate, or become a Marine Officer like I had dreamed of being since I was 17.
I had been CrossFitting the last few months with my friend Melissa Kiel out of her garage. She was planning on opening a gym, but needed a little bit of help on the side to help her get her business, East Ormond Beach CrossFit, up and running. I was officially disenrolled on Wednesday, and that Saturday, I was scheduled to attend the CrossFit Level 1 Certification in Jacksonville, FL. I did not want to go. I was overweight, I was out of shape, and I was depressed. I was mentally in no state to go work out with a bunch of really fit people who were looking to become professional trainers in their respective gyms. Yet I had already paid the money, and my friend was out of the country, so I couldn't call her to cancel and say "Sorry, I'm not the help you need." So I went and I learned about cues, proper squat technique, how to clean, jerk, and snatch. I learned about how to create workouts and workout plans, and I learned about the definitions of fitness, work capacity, and power and how they apply to the goal of any given workout. At the end of the day I did a very, very scaled version of Fran (normally 21-15-9 thrusters at 95lbs for men, 65lbs for women, followed by pull ups). We took the group photo and I did my best to hide in the crowd because I was so embarrassed to be there. Yet, I managed to have a good time while I was there and all of the people I talked to were wonderfully nice and supportive, which in the last year and a half of my life while being overweight, was a rare thing. My friend would be there on Sunday to re-certify her certificate, and I had already endured one day, so I figured "why not" and studied for the exam and showed up the next day. She and I both passed, and it was the first time in a year and a half that I felt optimistic.
I know the CrossFit certification program frequently gets ragged on because it certifies "trainers" in two days, but I will say that in my experience, it was the best thing to ever happen to me. For me personally, I did not feel adequate to be at that certification. I had casually been CrossFitting off and on prior to for about two years, I was overweight, and I was 21 years old. But for me, the life-changing part of that weekend was the fact that the Certification instructors were nice to me. For the last 21 years, I had experienced that if you were "fat" you didn't deserve to have people be nice to you. I had yo-yo-ed with my weight enough to have reason to believe this was true. People were nice when I was skinny, they were out-right cruel when I was not. So for a group of people who were incredibly fit, that I respected, to be nice to me, completely changed my life. In particular, Chris Russel of CrossFit Jax was a trainer that weekend. I had known of him through the CrossFitters I worked with in the local South East region. He was an enlisted man in the Navy and opened CrossFit Jax with his wife while he was stationed there. I couldn't have been more ashamed of myself than that weekend: Here I am, a young Marine Officer hopeful, who wants to someday lead enlisted Sailors and Marines like Chris, yet I cannot maintain standards? Who am I to someday lead a man like this? I felt like I wasn't worthy, and I would've felt completely justified had he looked at me as though I wasn't; but he was nice to me. He taught me to say "armpits forward" when you do an Overhead Squat. His kindness had a profound impact on my life that I will never be able to fully thank him for. After that weekend, I inhaled every CrossFit Journal article I could. I wanted to learn everything I could about CrossFit and exercise and fitness. If the CrossFit Certification didn't make me a trainer, it made me hungry to learn how to be one.
To keep an incredibly long story short and to the point, I lost 20lbs and shaved 6 minutes off of my 3 mile run time. I went from no pull-ups, to kipping pull-ups, to dead-hang/ strict pull-ups. I finished college, and a year after I graduated I went to OCS. The rest, is history, and I'm currently in the middle of flight school.
So what does this have to do with women and New Years resolutions? Well, for the many years before I started CrossFit, when I was on the search for the elusive pull up, I frequented my local globo gym. If you walk into your normal gym at any given hour, you'll notice that there tends to be a "female" side with the ellipticals, and a "male" side with the bench press benches. Even in the military, when I workout on base, the women rarely touch the weights. Why? Because it's generally an incredibly intimidating thing for a woman to do: workout next to a 200lb muscle man, who will either ignore her, hit on her, eye-ball her, or look at her as if she doesn't know what she is doing and to please get away so he can do presses in the squat rack. This is not the case for every woman, but the female friends I have typically tell me that they try to stay away from that area of the gym and just do their cardio.
Today, more so than ever, women's bodies are frequently under attack. Regardless of your political beliefs or affiliations, you have an opinion about what a woman can or cannot do with her body, and 50% of you are not women. Women today are either too skinny, or too fat, or too muscular. They are never enough for any given person. Being a woman in today's society, where you are constantly visually accosted with an "ideal body image" in the media, and you are shamed if you do not fit that criteria, creates a slew of insecurities. For a woman to be 100% comfortable in her own skin is the rarest sort of confidence, and I want to help change that.
I cannot think of a globo gym where my 50 year old mother will be celebrated for being there. Where she will be cheered on after she finishes her workout, where she finds community and reward by belonging to a group of individuals who are wildly different from her, yet support her wholeheartedly. Despite her age, her level of fitness when she started, or any other judgements you can make about a person by just looking at them, she has love and friendship in River Market CrossFit, the gym I trained in prior to leaving for OCS. My 50 year old mother is more confident in her body today and has more self confidence than she has ever had in her life. I respect all forms of exercise, and have many friends who respectfully enjoy their globo gym, or their 50k runs, or their yoga, and they are all fit and wonderful and happy in their bodies. But I want to address the women (or men) who aren't there yet, have tried this gym and that gym, or have gone running but then lost interest, and are still not 100% happy with themselves or their bodies. For these people, I suggest CrossFit. I am completely biased when I say that I think it will change your life. Though if after 30 days it isn't for you, at least you can say you tried the Kool-Aid. But for the majority of you who want to make a change, and want to stick with it, and want to feel confident in yourself, and your body image, I implore you to find a local gym, and just show up.
If you show up, you will be welcomed into the group. People will be happy to have you there. The trainers will remember your name, and you will be instructed on how to properly complete an exercise that you may not have previously known how to do. Many other things will happen to you upon showing up, but the most important thing to know is that regardless of how you look, or what kind of shape you are in, you will be welcomed, and you will complete the workout.
Showing up is the hardest part. If I can do it, so can you.
I've been incredibly lucky to have come so far, thanks to the CrossFit community. Had it not been for Melissa Kiel, Nathaniel Schrader, Tiffany & Brian Wilkerson and the friends I've made along the way, who all opened up their gyms and provided me with endless belief and support, I would not be where I am today. All I had to do was show up, and they gave me places to show up to, and support when I did. Like I said earlier, this is my story and they are my opinions and they may be different from yours and I respect that, but I felt that it was important to perhaps give the person who has toyed with the idea of joining CrossFit the last little push they needed to get in the door. The first workout is always free, and you can find a local box at the CrossFit Website.
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