My Life As a Fitness Model

The photographer described this final shot as "the perfect blend of femininity and strength." I have to agree.

I have a new respect for fitness models. You know, the girls in your fave ab-mags like Women's Health or Shape that manage to do a one-fingered plank or even something gynecologically humiliating and still manage to suck it in and smile? The ones whose captions say things like "Mara, 24, is a Pilates and aerial dance instructor and stays in shape by doing boot camp 8 days a week in a weighted vest. Her motto is: I strive for balance in my life."

Who hasn't always wanted to do Yoga in front of the sunset?? Where's Rodney Yee when I need him?

Well last week I got to be one of those girls when Turbo Jennie asked me and two others from her TurboKick class to pose for some promo materials (that I believe are actually going to be embedded in stone on our Y's legacy wall. I've achieved immortality at 30 - now what do I do for the rest of my life??). Yep, that's me up there on the left-hand side preparing to kick somebody's head off and trying not to crush the life out of wee Turbo Jennie when I fell over. Which I did after nearly every shot.

Holding a punch is much, much easier than holding a kick. J (on the left) and I were much relieved. Especially our poor booties.

Lesson Number 1: Holding poses is hard. It's hard enough doing a proper roundhouse kick. It's ridiculous when the photographer - a wonderfully talented and nice man everyone referred to as "Buddha" for reasons I never could figure out - yells out, "Great! Now can you just hold that?" My left butt cheek is now one size bigger than my right. I'm going to have do one-legged squats for a week to even out the difference. Not to mention that to get that nice "sweaty" sheen, the photog kept spritzing us down with glycerin water which while it had a pleasant rosy smell was apparently made out of mosquito pheremones.

I swear I eat enough fiber. Although how much do I love my bicep??

"Drop you arm. No, the other arm. Not your leg, just your arm. Look the other way. Chin down. Stop wobbling. Look fierce. No, not constipated. Fierce. Never mind, just look away. No giggling!" By this point I had contorted myself into something that didn't resemble any kick or punch and was possibly making the face that people do when they see Michael Jackson in person. Miss Tyra would not be proud.

Somebody teach me how to punch, please! And, also, how to stop giggling at inappropriate moments.

Lesson Number 2: Taking direction is hard. The photographer and Turbo Jennie had come up with a fabulous idea that would look both feminine and strong. The problem was in translating it to me. I daresay the other two models managed to look as fierce as if they wrestled tigers in their spare time without batting an eyelash. But me - I'm self conscious even when no one is sticking a camera in my face. Let's just say they took way more pictures of me and it isn't because I'm just so preeeeettty. But the photographer's brilliance prevailed and he managed to get a few shots that I'm actually rather proud of.

In my opinion, this shot of J is the best shot of the night. I want to see this in a magazine.

M's expression is so poignant in this one it kind of breaks my heart and I don't know why.

Lesson Number 3: Women are amazing. I got over my insecurity pretty quickly when I got to watch all the other girls posing. I was blown away by how beautiful and tough we can be. We were strong and tender. Agile and comforting. Trusting but not defenseless. All at the same time. Not that doing dancer pose against the sunset wasn't awesome - it was fantastically unreal - but the best part of the evening was sitting around talking with Turbo Jennie and the other girls after the shoot. Nothing fancy. Just girl talk. And it was amazing.

Running Scared: How I Got Into Fitness

We should institute a paper-bag mask and trench coat uniform for all would-be pervs. Make them so much easier to spot! Photo Credit.

It started with running away.

The Backstory
At nineteen I was sexually assaulted by a boy whom I was dating, hereafter referred to as Very Bad Boyfriend. The physical toll it took on me was rather minor (I had a worse recovery from my appendix surgery and don't even get me started about child birth). But after the dust settled, I realized that the mental toll was immense. I was depressed, withdrawn and suffered from frequent nightmares mixed with bouts of pull-that-crazy-woman-off-the-bridge PTSD. My remedy of choice was simple: pretend it never happened.

But it had. I was forced to admit this when I discovered through a newspaper article that, five years later, VBB had done it again. And again. I called the police department that same day and made a report. By the time I hung up the phone I was shaking so badly that I threw up. This will be so healing for you, everyone told me. You'll get to face him and show him what he really did to you. You can finally get really angry and justice will be served. In the end, after nine months of court battles, the only part of that that came true was the getting really angry part. He went to prison for three months and jail for nine but, strangely, it didn't feel just to me. I still felt hurt. If anything, I felt more hurt by him. Dredging up all the old memories and then listening to what he did to the other girls only made me wallow in my pain and the guilt I felt for not reporting him sooner.

In an ironic twist, the day after he was sentenced, my third baby was born. And the next day I started running. Never having been a runner before, at first it was just running away. I couldn't feel the emotional pain when I was in physical pain so as soon as I finished my 5 am nursing, I'd be out the door and into the dark. But my legs couldn't carry me fast enough or far enough to escape my thoughts, or the ten pounds of post-partum weight than I had decided to focus all my misguided anger on. Running was a good release but I was still scared.

The Beginning

I thought perhaps muscles would make me feel less vulnerable so I took up weight lifting. My first gym was one of those really sweaty, kinda dirty, 80's-metal-pumping gyms. It was fun to see muscles where literally none had existed before (How does one function without a tricep? To this day I don't know how I was able to drive or lift my children or brush my teeth without that telltale little cut across my arm), but I was still riddled with insecurity, scared of my own shadow and plagued with nightmares.

When my husband decided to go to night school I was worried. "Why don't you go to the Y," he suggested. "Maybe try kickboxing? They have a class the night I'm in school." "I don't have any gloves," I protested weakly. "You better start punching some bricks to toughen up then," he grinned.

The Power of A Good Teacher

It was the head strike that sold me. "Imagine you are actually grabbing someone's head and pulling it into your knee," the instructor yelled. That I could do. I had crash landed in Turbo Jennie's TurboKick class. A petite blond with biceps that could crack a walnut, she projected a no-nonsense, slightly dangerous air. When she punched I could see people going down. By the next class I was looking around the room for a real specimen to try it on, preferably someone I wasn’t related to but I wasn’t going to be picky.

One day after class I decided to ask her. "Have you ever, you know, punched someone? For real?"

"Like in a bar fight?" Her eyes lit up as she considered it and frat boys everywhere got a simultaneous, inexplicable shiver. Then she waved it off, "Nah. But I was a competitive boxer in college." That explained a lot. She wouldn't punch your lights out and send you home with your pride in a take-out box but, by golly, she could. No one would dare mess with Jennie.

And that's what I was lacking. All these years I had made it about him, about my attacker. When the truth was, the problem was with me. I felt weak. Scared. Ever-vulnerable. I was living in a world that felt unsafe to me and I didn't know how to deal.

I know I'm not alone. A 2007 University of Minnesota study reported that almost a quarter of female college students had been sexually assaulted. Take four of your best girl friends and then ask them. Their answers might surprise you. My point is the world is a beautiful, exciting and fun place but a safe place? Not so much.

During the court case VBB said that he had picked his victims because he knew we weren't the type to fight back. And here's my dirty little secret: I didn't fight back. I just cried. Sure he had the element of surprise, not to mention six inches and 60 pounds on me, and I've had enough therapy by now to be able to say that it wasn't all my fault - a typical reaction of victims trying to control the uncontrollable - but what I did, or didn't do rather, definitely affected the outcome. From the moment we went out together, VBB was in control. I let him set the boundaries, the mood, the location and almost every other aspect of the date. So by the time the battle came, I was exhausted, isolated and so far outside of normal that I lost the fight before it began.

I am not that girl anymore. Besides flat abs and arms that no longer wave like they're sending a sailor off to sea, Jennie helped me regain confidence in myself, whether I was doing a roundhouse (and picturing my attacker's head) or doing a body roll and realizing that it's okay to be sexy again. I don't have any delusions that the kind of cardio kickboxing I do will actually save me from a determined attack – I'm pretty sure no one has ever been TurboKicked to death – but I like to think it makes me less of an easy mark. I stand taller, walk faster and meet people's eyes when I pass them on the street. If it looks like I’m sizing you up, it’s because I am.

The Appendix

A few weeks ago I noticed a teenage girl watching me in the mirror during kick boxing. I could tell she was trying not to be obvious but she was watching me. And laughing. During a break I approached her. "Hey, are you enjoying the class?" I asked, trying not to feel like the last kid picked in gym class. Grinning, she answered, "It's great. I'm sorry to keep laughing but you just have this totally intense expression on your face. It's like you think you're really killing someone."