How I Got Trapped in a Bathroom at the YMCA

The sequel to: How I Got Trapped in my Bra at the YMCA

I swim laps for exercise. It’s a good workout, I love the water, and while I’m doing it nothing hurts – which at age 44 with an osteoarthritic hip (sexy, I know) it’s getting harder to find an activity where that’s the case.

I was a swim team member as a kid and I can recall swim-a-thons where we hit fifty, sixty, and seventy laps in a night, but it had been years since I had that kind of endurance so when I rejoined the Y a year ago I was only swimming thirty, ten of which I was using a kick board.

Since then I’d been creeping up on laps. I hit forty, even fifty, but never the elusive sixty that signals a mile. Swimming a mile and walking a mile are very different things as far as one’s body is concerned.

So Wednesday when my sister asked me if I wanted to go for a late swim with her, I said sure and headed over early. She’s a lot faster than me so if I was going to hit sixty laps in the same time she could I’d need about a twenty or thirty minute head start. When she arrived I was almost thirty laps in and feeling good.

An hour into my swim I did it – I hit sixty laps! Technically the end tally was either sixty-two or sixty-four, I stopped a few times mid lane to adjust my goggles so the lap counter on my smart watch malfunctioned a couple of times.

I was elated! Also, I desperately had to pee.

I quickly exited the lap pool and went into the poolside bathroom. It’s a single, spacious unisex just a few steps away from the hot tub.

Blessed relief.

Now, if you are female and wearing a one-piece swimsuit there are two ways you can approach a bathroom break. You can yank the leg of your suit to one side, thus stretching out the material and running the risk of flashing a butt-cheek later on, or you can pull the entire sodden contraption off and basically be naked. I had opted for the latter, as butt-cheek flashing wasn’t high on my YMCA to-do list.

My suit is a racer-back, with cross straps and is also, I must add, a size too small for me. I order suits a size smaller than my pants size because I want them to fit snug and firm with nothing flopping around.

As I stood I realized, to my abject horror, that in the minute I’d been sitting there my arms had gone limp as noodles, all strength completely drained away. Simultaneously, the soaked fabric of my swimsuit had turned into an impenetrable rolled knot of fabric, strangling my upper thighs.

I pulled, I tugged, I wrestled, using arms that felt about as strong as those of a wee newborn babe.

Eventually the terrible reality dawned on me and I stood there for a moment, dripping and horrified.

I was trapped. Naked. And unlike the last time I’d gotten into a predicament like this there would be no kindly, long-suffering stranger to rescue me.

Outside the door was the lap pool, with it’s fifteen-some-odd of my fellow male and female YMCA members (including my sister) blithely carrying on their workouts with no idea of my plight. There was also a good fifty feet of freezing hallway standing between me and the sanctuary of an appropriately naked locker room space.

They would not, I thought, appreciate a portly, pale flasher running by. Notwithstanding the fact that I could only toddle, not run, with the fabric of my suit knotted about my legs.

In desperation I took the suit off and rung it out, thinking perhaps if it were dryer and not rolled over itself this would be easier. Alas, that meant I now had to start the process all over from the beginning.

I shimmied, I yanked, I jumped and pulled in at the same time, using gravity and momentum to inch my sodden swimsuit up over my panicked body bit by excruciatingly tiny bit. All the while I was wondering if my sister was concerned about why I’d now been in here so long and exactly how long I would need to be missing before somebody came looking and thus revealed the mortifying truth.

Quietly, my workout tracker pointed out that my pulse had gone a bit high. Yes, no kidding, I silently responded to it – I AM TRAPPED NAKED IN A PUBLIC UNISEX BATHROOM, WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU EXPECT?

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the suit was at least up over all the necessary bits. Crooked, twisted, cutting off circulation to my left breast and right buttock, but blessedly, mercifully up.

I limped over to the end of my sister’s lane and waved to get her attention, telling her I was headed to the showers. I then disappeared into the relative solitude of the ladies locker room before she could do more than give me a puzzled look over why I’d been gone so long. Or looked so pink. And disheveled.

And that’s how I got temporarily trapped naked in a bathroom at the YMCA.

 

Bring the Pain

So I’ve been doing pretty good getting to 10,000 steps every day, which isn’t easy when you sit at a desk for work. Fitbit has new software that reminds me once per hour to get up and move around, which is both helpful and annoying. I think I’ve been spotted a few times at the office muttering curses in the general direction of my wrist when Little Brother nags me to go walk around during the day.

My primary problem right now is pain. When I get to 10,000 steps whether by treadmill or walking outside or going to Zumba, I’m in pain when I lie down in bed at night. My hip hurts (I was born with dysplasia so there’s no getting around that since it’s an abnormally developed joint) and my legs ache pretty badly from simple DOMS. The leg aches make me restless because they’re relieved a little by shifting them around in bed.

Also, Zumba is causing me anxiety because I get really red in the face, which is both embarrassing and unsettling to look at. My heart rate is at peak almost the whole time during a Zumba class, which may be partially caused by how hot it is in my gym’s workout room. It’s a small, poorly air conditioned space so the temp inside soars in the summer, and ‘hot Zumba’ is not advisable the way ‘hot Yoga’ is. I’ve noticed I don’t have this problem when I go to special Zumba events at my local YMCA, whose workout room is essentially a meat locker. It’s too cold when you first walk in but once you get going, it’s awesome. I’m not sure what to do, I like to push myself during Zumba but I really don’t want to die in the middle of a Cumbia.

I can take Tylenol PM or Advil in the evenings which helps a little, but I don’t really want to take an analgesic every single night and leave it sitting in my stomach (and potentially burning a hole in the lining) as I sleep.

Is this going to get better? Or is working out while fat and post-40 just always going to hurt and possibly be dangerous? It's a bit depressing right now.

Nerd Group Fitness

“One does not simply walk into Mordor…”

This is the basis of the extremely nerdy, Lord of the Rings-based walking challenge a friend of mine proposed at the start of this new year. That we, as a group, collectively try to cover the 1,779 mile distance between Hobbiton and Mount Doom.

He got the idea here.

If we’re doing it in a year it comes out to just under five miles per day (10,000 steps), which is the recommended amount of movement for an adult human anyway. Figuring out where we'd be in Middle Earth as we cover distance is just a fun way of keeping everyone interested and motivated to move. All you need to participate is a movement tracker of some sort and a bit of commitment.

At first we had some confusion over how to keep track of everyone. A Fitbit group would work, but not everyone uses a Fitbit, so we eventually settled on a Google spreadsheet where folks can log in each day and report their daily mileage and steps. It averages us all together so we know where we are as a group as well as individually.

I’m thinking of giving myself a reward at journey’s end for reaching Mount Doom. Technically, it should be a ride on a giant eagle’s back to Minis Tirith but since those are hard to come by I’ll try to think of something indulgent and frivolous that I normally wouldn’t get for myself (that isn’t food).

“Home is behind, the world ahead,

and there are many paths to tread

through shadows to the edge of night,

until the stars are all alight.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Thanks Under Armor

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Under Armor nor do I receive any sort of reward for promoting them. These are just my opinions based on companies I like to promote because they make me happy.

So I work out a lot. Or, at least more than the average American. I’ve learned over the past few years of upping my workout game that proper gear is extremely important, particularly with my physique. Compression leggings and sports bras with proper support make the difference between feeling good while jumping up and down and feeling as though parts of my body are moving in totally different directions in a distinctly uncomfortable fashion. “Sweat wicking” fabric is a MUST. I used to do cardio in ordinary cotton shirts. As I sweat, these shirts would become wetter, bigger, and heavier, until I was working out in a shirt that felt as though I’d jumped into a pool wearing it. Not comfy. I don’t know what the technology is that keeps certain fabrics dry despite copious amounts of sweating, but I’m grateful to whoever invented it.

Under Armor makes really great (and great looking) stuff both for staying warm in the cold and staying comfortable during a workout. I have a long sleeved thermal shirt from them and it’s made from a snuggly, remarkably thin material considering its purpose and how well it keeps me warm.

Their stuff doesn’t come cheap, but it does go on sale. I got the entire outfit pictured below for about $38.00 – which is not bad at all for quality workout gear.

Best of all? Size XS through size 2XL cost the exact same price. They have no fat fees!

So cheers to Under Armor, both for making quality workout and cold weather gear that fits a wide range of sizes and for treating me exactly the same as my slimmer athletic counterparts – you give me what I want, so I give you my thanks!

Post-workout RHAR!

Autumn Equinox Yoga Practice

So today is the Autumn Equinox – meaning there will be equal hours of light and darkness today. Last night I had my weekly Yoga class. My teacher told us that it’s traditional to observe the equinox by performing 108 sun salutations, and asked us as a class if we would like to do so.

When she looked to me for my opinion what I said was, “I can’t say I’ll succeed but I’ll always try.” I didn’t mean to sound quite that Zen, it’s just what came out, but it’s the truth. After nearly half a year of yoga I’m still quite poor at it, the only thing I have going for me is my stubborn will not to give up.

Sun salutations aren’t easy for me because from downward dog position you’re supposed to step or jump your feet to where your hands are on the floor, and the interaction of my erm… abundant thighs vs. abundant stomach prevents this. So in order to get back to standing position I sort of awkwardly kneel and then scramble upright again rather than making a smooth transition. Additionally, when I go to plank position then lower myself in a controlled manner to the floor, I’m reverse bench pressing over 200 lbs. No easy thing to do over a hundred times.

Still, I was game to try. My teacher often suggests that we dedicate our practice to someone who needs our “energy” more than we do that night. I figure that’s the same idea as dedicating a fast or prayers to someone, so last night I focused on a friend of mine who is going through a tough time medically and decided to do my best for her.

We did the sun salutations in sets, and I can honestly say that during the first set of twelve, I actually did twelve. After that, things diverged from the plan. During the second set I did about ten, during the third set probably seven, and so on. In total I would estimate I did around 50 sun salutations, and for a beginner like me I’m proud of that.

I would have done more but somewhere around the sixth or seventh set I felt like I was stepping on something, which is weird because I was barefoot on my yoga mat – there was nothing to step on. Finally checking things out I realized that the skin on the underside of the big toe of my right foot had quite simply slid off and was hanging by a strip (yes, it was as gross as it sounds). Since nobody else had this problem I’m guessing it’s another issue related to being so heavy on completely flat feet. My flat feet were an amusing novelty as a child but now at middle age my total lack of an arch is a more serious problem.

I hustled out to the front desk for a band aid, put it on, and continued, but things got a bit trickier after that. The studio floor is not the cleanest and most of what I was thinking after it happened was that I really needed to get my foot clean. Thankfully, the actual pain didn’t set in until this morning.

Overall I’m glad I gave it a try, and I hope to do much better next time. I can tell that I’m much stronger than I was when I began (downward dog doesn’t quite feel like a resting position yet, but nor is it as difficult as it was at first). My goal now is to develop a habit of practicing at least a little bit of yoga every day.

Zumbaversary!

So it’s official: I’ve been going to Zumba class about three times per week for a whole year!

I have two teachers with very different styles: one class is like dancing in the basement with all your friends in a party of youthful enthusiasm and the other is a bit more like participating in a Pitbull music video. Both of them use completely awesome music, and both of them probably get tired of me asking, “Oooo – what song was that?” so that I can go home and download it. The positivity, patience, and enthusiasm of the people who teach Zumba is infectious and something I’m eternally grateful for.

I’ve also made friends in class and met other Zumba instructors for outside events such as the two Master Classes I’ve attended, and soon I’ll be going to a special “Glow Zumba” event which takes place in the dark with black lights. I may crash into somebody, but it’s going to be awesome.

My gym is very judgment free and I’m so grateful for that as well. I’ve never felt out of place or looked down upon for being the biggest/slowest/clumsiest/weakest person around (which I frequently was during this first year and often still am).

That being said, here are some health improvements I’ve enjoyed over this past Zumba year:

Greatly Improved Stamina – I have always loved to dance, and for a non-dancer person I’ve got pretty good rhythm. When I was in my twenties I used to go clubbing a lot, not every weekend but a few times per month, and I would spend hours on the dance floor. At some point in my thirties (I don’t recall exactly when) I found myself sedentary, weighing around 300 pounds and in a situation to dance again. I found to my horror that I couldn’t dance any longer; one song in I was exhausted, sweaty, in pain, and done, and it was a heartbreak. I started Zumba after losing seventy pounds, but it was still an uphill battle to get my stamina back. When I first started I did none of the high impact movements (things that take both of your feet off the ground simultaneously). Now? I do all of them. All the jumping, all the hopping, all the lunges (and I used to really hate lunges). Also, I went to a wedding a few months ago and danced for three hours. Nonstop.

Resting Heart Rate – My resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute. I know this because I wear a Fitbit and it reports to me each day what my resting heart rate was over the past 24 hour period. 60 beats per minute for a 41 year old is fantastic, when I began Zumba I believe it was around 75 beats per minute.

Coordination and Balance – I’m naturally clumsy with poor balance due to a combination of fluid in my inner ear from persistent allergies and completely flat feet. Although I’m still clumsier than an average person (there’s no cure for flat feet) I’ve improved noticeably over the past year. Within the first few months of starting Zumba I fell in class twice, one time spraining an ankle badly enough to keep me home for the next week. That hasn’t happened in about six months now.

Confidence – Zumba forces you to get over a lot of your inhibitions. When I first started there was no booty shaking for me, just a sort of embarrassed little wiggling shimmy. Now? Yeah, I shake what God gave me like nobody’s watching. I don’t care who’s watching or what they think because I’m enjoying myself. That physical confidence actually carries out of the classroom and into everyday life as well.

What hasn’t happened this past year? Well, I’m still not thin. This is no fault of Zumba and entirely the fault of continued binge eating episodes in my life. I’ve said it a hundred times and I will again now: you cannot outrun your fork. But if I didn’t have Zumba in my life? Who knows, I may have skyrocketed back up to 300 pounds by now and beyond. My body is prepped from a lifetime of destructive eating patterns to gain weight almost effortlessly, and Zumba has been a big part of keeping my weight stable for the past year. That’s something to be extremely grateful for.

The best piece of advice I have ever received about health and fitness came courtesy of James Fell who writes the fabulous Body for Wife blog and it is this:

“Find something physical to do that you love, and then eat to perform better at it.” Truly words to live by.

Ammunition to Fight Concern Trolling

Below is my current weekly workout schedule:

Monday: One mile walk on my lunch break, followed by one hour of Zumba (high-low impact cardio) in the evening.

Tuesday: One mile walk on my lunch break, followed by one hour of Zumba (high-low impact cardio) in the evening.

Wednesday: One mile walk on my lunch break, followed by a two mile walk in the evening.

Thursday: One mile walk on my lunch break, followed by one hour of Zumba (high-low impact cardio) and then another hour of Yoga in the evening.

Friday: 20-30 minutes on a cardio machine (elliptical cross trainer or treadmill) followed by 45 minutes lifting free weights. When possible, I attend fun special events at my gym on Friday evenings such as Zumba Step or Glow Yoga or take a two mile walk.

Saturday: One hour of Yoga in the morning, two to three mile walk in the afternoon.

Sunday: Two to three mile walk.

This is my training schedule under ideal circumstances. I do not always do all of it every week (for example, if it’s cold, raining, or snowing, that impacts my taking a walk outside). However I do most of it on most weeks, so about 80% of what you see up there gets done on an average week. Also, you don’t see me taking a “rest day” because at my current fitness level walks don’t really count as “workouts” per say, they’re just my body performing its normal form of locomotion. So Wednesday and Sunday where all I do is walk – those are technically rest days.

So why am I sharing this?

For one thing, I’m sharing it because I’m proud of the level of physical activity I have worked up to. Judging by every statistic I’ve ever read I get far more exercise than the average American, and that is something to be proud of. I didn’t suddenly start doing all of this on a whim, I used to just walk five or six days a week and that was it. I’ve been working up to this level for the past eight months so as to include a good variety of cardiovascular training, endurance work, balance, and strength improvement. Even so, every single day, some part of my body is always sore. I don’t consider that a bad thing.

I am not doing this to make you feel bad if you don’t do this much. I have several things going for me that allow this schedule: such as not having to care for small children, not being impeded by a physical injury or disability, not working several jobs simultaneously, or simply not wanting to. It’s a human’s perfectly natural state to want to conserve calories – before our environment became so obesogenic that trait actually kept us alive. If you don’t want to get up and do cardio every day that actually makes you perfectly normal.

And even though I have the luxury of time to do all this, things suffer as a result. My family doesn’t usually get dinner cooked for them on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays – which means I eat a lot of quick sandwiches before running to the gym and my family winds up grabbing fast food burgers way too often. Left to their own devices the two skinny dudes I live with will tend to do that.

So I work out a lot more than the average American and have been doing so for the past eight months, and this is what I currently look like:

I am not thin. I may get thinner, I’m certainly trying to, but I don’t actually know what I weigh right now because I haven’t checked in over a month. My clothes fit, so I suppose I weigh whatever I did a month ago – which I think was 230 lbs. Believe it or not, 230 lbs. when you have the eating disorder that I do is not too bad. After all, I used to weigh 295 lbs. However for the moment I don’t seem to be losing weight to any large degree, and it is what it is.

So as you go about your life, you may encounter someone who snorts derisively at a person my size and says something to the effect of, “if they’d just workout now and then they wouldn’t be fat like that”, or “if they would just get their fat butt off the sofa and take a walk every day they’d lose all that extra weight”, or “they probably have diabetes, look at the size of them!”

If you encounter someone like that (often referred to as a “concern troll” because they exhaust a great deal of mental energy being overly concerned for the health of other people based on the use of physical appearances they think are ugly as a diagnostic tool), feel free to send them to this page so I can say, “hello”.

I realize they might shrug me off as a liar – but why would I do that? I’m not claiming that I defy physics by eating barely 1,000 calories per day and working out this much and still not being thin. True my metabolism is slower than average, but I still weigh this much because I still eat enough calories to support my 230 lb. body weight. I eat very healthfully overall but I struggle against binge episodes on a daily basis and I enjoy dessert now and again. That being said the concern-troll battle cry of, “put the fast food down, fatty!” does not apply to me either. I eat a fast food meal about once every three months or so – or about three times a year, which is not enough for it to account for my weight.

In fact, according to quantifiable physical metrics such as blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, etc. I am “healthy” – but I’d still like to take 60 more pounds off because I want my joints to last and those numbers may not stay so good as I continue to age. It’s not about appearance. An appearance that is physically attractive in the socially acceptable way would be nice, but it’s not happening. Sixty pounds down from here I’m going to look even more like a sag-bag than I do right now, and that is what it is, I’ve got to accept it. I can be healthy though, I can be strong, and I can have amazing endurance – those are attainable goals. Heck, I’ve already attained them I just want even more of them. I also have binge eating disorder and it’s not going away, so it could be a whole lot worse than it is right now and I’m genuinely proud of how far I’ve come.

Concern-trolls simply may be enlightened to know that sometimes the work a person puts in at the gym doesn’t show like they expect it to on the outside for a myriad number of complex reasons they surely cannot understand at a glance. And as always, it is impossible to judge a person’s health or even activity level by looking at them.

How I got Trapped in my Bra at the YMCA

My sister has a membership at our local YMCA, so she can go swimming. We both love to swim. As kids, we were both on swim team for years, and she eventually became one of those teen lifeguards who hang out at the pool all summer long.

I would love a YMCA membership, but since it costs $60 / month and my Retro Fitness membership is only $20 / month with plenty of Zumba and Yoga included – the cheap Scotswoman in me wins out there.

Still, my sister gets occasional guest passes to the Y, so this week I went with her to swim laps and check out all the improvements they’ve been making over the last year.

Some things are new, like a lazy river, a little water slide, and lots of water-dumping buckets and fountains to fling H2O all over the place. Some things are just the same, like when you walk out of the pool area into the hallway that leads to the locker room. It may have seemed like a perfectly reasonable temperature when you went through there dry a half hour ago but has morphed with the presence of pool water into sub-arctic temperatures. Always refreshing.

Behold the new pool!

The other thing that hasn’t changed is how much faster than me my sister is. In about 30 minutes I did nine laps while she did… I don’t know – about fifteen? It’s hard to count when somebody is winging by you underwater like a swim cap-clad bullet. This is why she became swim team captain and a lifeguard and I became that kid who goes to art camp and learns how to decoupage.

Not that I’m competitive or anything.

When we got out I saw that I only had a half hour to get back home for an appointment, so while my sister headed into the showers I returned to the lockers to throw on my clothes so I could leave.

I had brought one of my simple sports bras – one that Champion calls, “The Great Divide” because it supposedly doesn’t cause uni-boob (please note this claim on their part is FALSE, at least for a user as gifted as I am). It looks like so:

On this particular day when I went to pull it on over my head as is its sole mode of entry, I neglected to take into account that though my skin had been briefly swiped with a towel to remove excess water droplets I was still wholly and entirely damp both from pool water and a light layer of post-lap swimming perspiration. This dampness caused the fabric of my sports bra to drag heavily against the skin, which as I yanked it over my head caused the back of it to roll several times over until it had turned into more of a spandex-y rope across my back than the Y shaped racerback configuration it’s supposed to have. Since I had also simultaneously shoved my arms through the armholes, my arms were suspended over my head in a rather useless fashion and the front was stretched so tight that it was sitting above my chest instead of properly covering it – meaning my boobs were out. Way out.

Before swimming we had used the weight machines, then did a solid half hour of crawling and backstroking and breaststroking. My arms were tired like limp noodles, and my bra had become a skin tight rope of rolled colorful fabric jammed just beneath my armpits.

I was trapped. Completely and totally trapped. With my boobs out.

Granted, the YMCA locker room is a naked place, no big deal, but I’m one of those shy people who tries to minimize the nakedness, even in naked-appropriate situations. This was not good.

I glanced to my left, where the showers were, pondering having to hustle across the locker room to obtain my sister’s help in my current state, with my arms trapped over my head and my chest just kind of swinging free. Eventually, once she’d stopped laughing, I was pretty sure she would help me.

As I pondered this, and continued to uselessly wiggle, while simultaneously starting to panic, I heard a very quiet, accented voice from behind me that said, “excuse me.” And then with a sharp, efficient yank, I was free! A total stranger had come up behind me and yanked flat the back of my sports bra, allowing me to pull the front into its proper place as well.

I turned around to thank the small, middle-aged Asian woman who had come to my rescue, and she merely gave me an efficient nod before going about her own business. Mentally I could picture her a minute before pondering my struggle from behind with a quiet, resigned sigh.

People helping other people out of nowhere, even in small, crazy, totally embarrassing ways – it reminds you that sometimes the world is an okay place to be.

Also, the new pool at North Penn YMCA is really spiffy.