I've never been able to sit still....and how it led to Fencing, Karate, and Crossfit

First things first - my nails have changed. My toes are "Jade is the New Black" by OPI, a lovely forest green color. My fingers are "Bare Necessity" by Avon (I know - but this is the first Avon polish I've had in probably 20 years, and I really like it - it goes on well and wears well).

I love to read. Seriously, I will sit still for hours and read a good book. Contradictory to the title, right? Reading is just about the only thing I will sit still for. It's always been that way. When I was very young, we lived in rural Illinois on 14 acres and my brother Mike and I would play outside all the time. Constantly. I was the scrawniest, smallest kid in my class at school. My mom even took me to ballet lessons, but they asked me not to come back after the first class. Apparently when you run one of the only ballet classes in the county, and said class is always full, you can tell the parents of smart-mouthed children not to bring them back. I don't recall this, but the story is she tried to teach us to do somersaults, and I told her I already knew how to do those, and she told my mom I didn't need to come back.

In elementary school we moved to Indy, and I gained a bit of weight. I had to play inside, and it didn't work out so well. Then my mom decided I could play sports. I played little league softball - right field and catcher (I was much better after I got glasses and could actually SEE the ball) and took gymnastics. None of these things really fit my personality.When I was in Junior High, I went to Shortridge, an IPS magnet school downtown. My father started fencing at the Athenaeum building. I went to watch, and fell in love. I fenced from seventh grade right up until I went to college. I got to go to the Junior Olympics and everything.

Not that I was an amazing fencer, but each division got to send so many fencers, and there just weren't a lot of kids competing at the time. It was comforting to know that the girl who beat me in epee went on to win the entire tournament. In High School, I started at Howe, and continued fencing, but also started to play soccer. I'd always liked it, but had never really played. I played my sophomore year for the boys team, and we didn't win a single game. I was a forward - that coach thought all girls should be fast, and didn't really let me play defense at all. When I transferred to Beech Grove, I played soccer again on the boys team, my senior year. The coach there let me play defense, specifically sweeper. Oh man, can I play defense. The referees always gave me the calls, because I was just a girl...

In college, I fenced again for a while after moving back to Indy, but stopped when I got pregnant with Trent and since his dad was a fencer, I never fenced again after the divorce. (there's only one club in town) I took a yoga class as an elective, and that worked out for a while. Except for one thing. I'm a tad competitive, and there just aren't yoga competitions! You can't be the best at meditating, or stretching, or holding a pose... So I started to look for something else. My friend Amy and I decided to find a kickboxing class. We tried a few, but went to Broad Ripple Martial Arts. I took kickboxing for a while, and then started karate.

Let's talk about kickboxing. It was something I had always wanted to do. I used to watch movies with my dad, and I loved anything with Bruce Lee or Jean Claude Van Damme. I can't even count how many times I've seen "Bloodsport." I was so excited to kickbox - learning to kick and punch, and I even got my own boxing gloves! The karate class started right after, and I kept staying to watch. I decided to try karate, and loved it too! The history and formality - all the punching and kicking other people - and there was clearly a right and wrong way to do things, and there were belts and ranks and promotions....much better than yoga!

I had started coaching Middle School Girls Soccer, and the coaches all played indoor soccer together. In March of 2007, I took a bad hit to the ankle and went down. After x-rays, trips to the doctor, and physical therapy, they decided to do surgery. I had a right ankle reconstruction in December of that year. It turns out that I had ripped all the ligaments and tendons except my Achilles, and that they had calcified back together. They had to drill it out and repair them. I was back at karate for about three months, tops, when I had some bad knee pain and swelling. After trips to the sports med doctor again, and an MRI, they had to do knee surgery to move my kneecap to the correct place and screw the tendons in. That was March 2009. I would just like to say that two orthopedic surgeries in less than eighteen months is really hard - especially on my husband Corey.

Two weeks after my thirtieth birthday, my knee doctor told me I could never play soccer again, I could never run,I could never go back to karate (one promotion away from my black belt),  I could never _______. There was permanent cartilage damage in both knees and arthritis. So, I was at a loss. My friend Darren introduced me to Frank, a crossfit trainer. I worked out with him for a while, but aggravated my knee - mostly because I hadn't been given a comprehensive list of the damage to my knee. So, I rehabbed my knee. I brooded. I missed karate and soccer. My friends were doing crossfit, and loving it. They were getting fitter, stronger and enjoying it. So Frank and I talked - while I had been out, he had some experience with a client who also had knee injuries - and he thought he could adapt workouts for me. That was the end of February, and since then I've gone from twice a week to three times a week in July and eating Paleo, taking a tad bit of time off to coach, and then to five days a week. I feel great - I'm getting stronger, working out hard, and losing weight and inches. I'm down a whole pants size! (It was the one I went up with all those surgeries.)

Crossfit is never the same. You lift weights, run (pose running, it doesn't bother my knee), do gymnastics, kettlebells, row, jump rope...Always something different. But you keep track of your stats, so you can look at your growth, and workout in a group so you can kind of compete against each other. Love it!

So there it is. The story of how crossfit came to me.