Funny Friday

Overheard at 15 to Fit today...we got on the subject of Botox somehow.  Somehow?!  Whaddya mean somehow?  I was training duet partners and everyone in the private room was a woman over 40, of course we were talking about Botox.  It's a subject that comes up more frequently than I care to admit.  I was bursting with laughter and had to tell them about my friend....hmmm...let's call her Linda.

Two years after I moved from Indianapolis one of my very close friends from there texted me in desperation.  "Patrea, please help me. I went to the dentist today."  (It's actually her dentist that gives her Botox).  "Now I can't lie down." (For those that don't know, providers of Botox suggest that you don't lie down for a few hours after it's injected so it doesn't move around to places it's not supposed to go). "My husband, (even though she's been getting Botox for 10 years, he still has no idea) is coming home early before the kids get home from school and he's going to want to have sex.  What do I do?!!!"   Desperation, sad face emoji.

My response? I text while shaking my head:

"Linda, Linda, Linda...1.  This is the very definition of a first world problem.  2.  This is such an easy solution: HAVE SEX STANDING UP!"

I shared this with my awesome, smart-alec client today and she states completely deadpanned,  "There goes our Patrea, First World Problem Solver."  I like my new title.  

Comedic Great Joan Rivers Was a Bada$$

She sat on the bed, the gun in her lap.  Everything seemed hopeless.  "What's the point?" she thought.  She couldn't think of one.

Only a few months earlier, Joan Rivers had everything she ever wanted:  fame and fortune, the job of her dreams, a loyal husband, a loving child, a lavish estate-and a future that beckoned with enticing possibilities.  After years of struggle, she had not only succeeded as a comedienne but had made history as television's first and only female late-night talk show host.

And now she'd lost it all.  The First Lady of comedy was fired from her job and publicity humiliated.  Her husband-unable to bear his own failure as her manager and producer- killed himself.  Their daughter blamed her mother for his death. 

Reeling with grief and rage, Rivers then discovered she was broke.  She had earned millions of dollars and lived a life of baroque luxury, but here husband had squandered her wealth on bad investments.  She was $37 million in debt, and her opportunities for making more money had vanished. "

These are the words of the great author Leslie Bennetts in her biography about Joan Rivers entitled, "Last Girl Before Freeway".  I had the great fortune of attending an event hosted by 'Her Wealth' of Bridewater Wealth and Financial Management at Congressional Country Club in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago.  My friend and fellow 15 to Fit Pilates instructor Karen Palacios-Jansen is on the board of Her Wealth.  The mission of Her Wealth is empowering women with the financial confidence and resources they need to take control of their money and their wealth. 

Eye-opening, alarming, inspiring and motivating are just a few words to describe the night.

Some eye opening facts:

In matters of divorce a typical woman endures a 73% reduction in her standard of living.  Her typical ex-husband enjoys a 42% increased standard of living.

90% of women will be solely responsible for their financial matters due to divorce or death of a spouse.

Alarming facts:

One in four women over the age of 65 are in poverty or "near poor".  Near poor is defined as 150% of the poverty threshold or $15,400 annually.

Women are 80% more likely than men to be impoverished in old age. 

Inspiration.

The story of the rise and fall and rise again of Joan Rivers is beyond imagination.  At the age of 55, after working incredibly hard and rising up in the 1960s through the grueling ranks of an industry completely dominated by men, Joan Rivers found herself with a dead husband and 37 million dollars in debt. 

Joan Rivers didn't kill herself.  She lived. She lived to keep her little dog Spike alive whom she credited with saving her life in that moment because he jumped on the gun.  She was worried about who would take care of him.  She lived to triumph in 17 different industries and in the process built a billion dollar empire in her 60s and 70s.  Pause and really think about that statement.  She built a billion dollar empire as a senior citizen, in Hollywood of all places.

As Leslie Bennettts states, "I don't think people quite realize that. They know she designed and sold jewelry and clothing on QVC, but building a billion-dollar company when you used to think you couldn't be trusted to read a contract is remarkable.  The other thing she did in her later years was she essentially invented the red carpet phenomenon as a television entertainment genre. That has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. She invented the formula: the commentary, the jokes, who are you wearing?"

Motivating:

Leslie said that throughout her career Joan's mantra which she often wrote down was "Never quit.  Never give up.  NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER!"  NEVER- written in large block letters eighteen times. 

Joan Rivers died on September 4, 2014.  Her estate was estimated at $150 million.  She lived a very extravagant, opulent life and enjoyed spending the money she so deservingly earned. 

Leslie told a story about an article she herself had written just before the contentious Presidential election of 2016. It was a controversial article.  She sent it to six major news outlets.  All of them rejected it.  Leslie got up, closed her computer and started walking away.  She then had a haunting thought,  "Joan Rivers would be very disappointed in you right now.  Never quit. Never give up.  NEVER. NEVER. NEVER."  She then sent it out to a contact that had a woman-owned media company.  Leslie got her answer later that night.  The woman responded, "This piece is brilliant.  I'm running it tonight."  Leslie thought, "Hmmm... Joan Rivers' mantra is something I need to adopt for my life too."

Listening to Ms. Bennetts speak I had a burning question about Joan Rivers.   At the end of the evening, Ms. Bennetts had a book signing.  When she signed my book I asked her,  "What drove Joan Rivers to be that motivated at 55 to come back from such personal and financial devastation?"  Leslie's honest-to-God answer said with all conviction  "Anger.  I think she was angry.  I think she thought FUCK THIS!  I can beat this stupid system."  I have to readily admit that I am a fan of the F-word.  Hearing this world-renowned author that's in her 70s exclaim it so definitively motivated me to my core. 

Don't all of us have some kind of system we are trying to beat?  Overcome some obstacle, competition, race within our selves,  a behavior change, a hatred of something we know we need to adopt, (exercise anyone?)

Remember Joan Rivers' remarkable life and example.  Never quit. Never give up.  NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER.

Drink Too Much and Still Lose Weight!

Uh... there’s not so much truth in this statement.  It's very difficult to lose body fat while drinking beyond moderation.  This is not only due to the calories consumed but also the food choices one makes when they're drinking.  Let's face it, they put restaurants like, La Bamba- Burritos as Big as Your Head, Insomina Cookies and Papa John's Pizza next to bars for a reason.  That’s because when you're drunk, you ain't eating salad.  Salads as Big as Your Head restaurants next to bars just isn't a thing. 

Compounding the excess calories of drinking and the subsequent drunk-eating is the problem with the next day.  Being hungover doesn't exactly make you feel like getting up and seizing the day.  Waking up late, or worse, having to get up early due to kids' schedules, lethargically schlepping through the day and being unable to complete anything close to exercising leads to your clothes becoming too small fairly quickly.

Alcohol has been shown to decrease fat metabolism immediately and dramatically.

In one study, eight men were given two drinks of vodka and lemonade separated by 30 minutes. Each drink contained just under 90 calories. Fat metabolism was measured before and after consumption of the drink.  For several hours after drinking the vodka, whole body lipid oxidation (a measure of how much fat your body is burning) dropped by 73%.  That's immediately.  It's also been shown to decrease strength for up to 48 hours after blood alcohol content is at .08% or higher. 

As registered wellness consultant and nutritional counselor Haylie Pomroy states, "In short, alcohol is an enormous pain in the metabolism.  It's a huge tax on your liver- the organ that's supposed to be burning fat for you.  Your liver also has a second job:  ridding your body of chemicals (like alcohol).  Every time you swallow a drink, your liver has to take time off from its fat-burning job while it evicts the chemical intruder."

I did a consult one day and a potential client said to me, "I don't drink at all...". During this long pause I excitedly picked up my pen and began writing her statement down on our 15 to Fit Consultation Form.  My eyes wide with enthusiasm and shock, I knew I'd be able to help her quickly with her goal of toning up and losing weight if she didn't drink at all.  Then she added, "...Monday through Thursday.  After Thursday, I don't have any rules and drink as much as I want."  Uh...things just got more complicated for her weight loss goals. Another way of saying what she said, "I drink as much as I want and don't limit it at all almost half the days of my life."  People are very adept at lying to themselves.  She was not ready to change.  I joke about it, but it's really not funny.  My earlier post chronicles the rise of excess alcohol consumption and its deadly effects, particularly for white women.  The Lake Norman area is smack dab in the middle of this demographic.

If you're trying to boost your metabolism, lose weight and improve your health consider the possibility of giving up alcohol for a short time. Start with two weeks and see if it makes a difference in how it impacts your life.  Don't jump on the scale after two weeks and say "I haven't lost any weight this isn't working."  Focus on how you feel and if you have more energy and your health is going the right direction. 

Look, I'm a person too.  I live at Lake Norman where many people's normal life is to live on vacation.  My husband often quotes the line from the movie 'Animal House' when Dean Warmer says to Dorfman "Overweight, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life."  Well, thin, sober and smart may just not be as much fun all of the time. Ha!  There's a lot of social drinking that goes on here but it's not too difficult to be social and still be healthy.  If all or most of your friends drink and you'll be a social pariah if you don't imbibe, you can still drink less and not have anyone really notice, especially if they start getting drunk.  They're not watching your alcohol consumption all night, just in the beginning.

Some examples of how to appear like you're drinking as much as your friends:

Consume drinks with less alcohol in them.  Go for very light beers like Michelob Ultra or Miller Draft 64. 

Drink soda water with a lime (they don't know if you're drinking, they just think you are.)

Give up or reduce wine.  It's a bottomless glass.  I personally did this about a year and a half ago.  In situations where I would normally have had a glass of wine, I switched to Michelob Ultra.  There's a bottom to a bottle of beer.  Wine, not so much.  Yes, it appears that wine is more sophisticated and "healthy".  It's not.  That is a delusion or the CDC would be suggesting people start this habit.  They don't.  If you haven't developed a drinking habit, don't start is their stance.  Nobody says this about exercise.  Drinking wine is not that good for you. 

What about the argument that Europeans do it and it's good for you?  I recently began working with a client from Belgium.  She stated that when she moved to the Lake Norman area three years ago she gained weight.  She was amazed at the amount of drinking that happens here.  She said in Europe she drank wine but the glass was 2 1/2 ounces and was sipped over dinner.  Here the glasses are three to four times that size and it's guzzled.  That's not the healthy Mediterranean diet moderate drinking prescription.  We like excess here in the U.S.  We're Americans after all!

If these suggestions seem preposterous to you and there's no way you're giving up alcohol it doesn't mean you can't lose weight, just know it makes it harder.  You can always download the app "Get Drunk Not Fat" for additional tips. Calories in, calories out is what ultimately works for weight loss.  Caveat:  This app is not based upon improving your health. Its only intent is to help you cut calories when you do drink.  

So What is "Moderation"?

"All things in moderation... even moderation." -Oscar Wilde and Erika Jagger. 

Erika Jagger is my college friend, twenties party buddy, international traveler and former personal trainer cohort.   She's the first person I remembering hearing say that and I thought it was hilarious. It's funny and cute, just like her.  I take it to mean that sometimes you just have to throw your hands up and say what Tom Cruise said in Risky Business. 

"Sometime you just have to say what the F-heck."  Eat that brownie. Skip your early morning exercise class to lie in bed with your husband.  Drink an extra glass of wine with an exceptionally delicious meal.  Except sometimes not drinking moderately is neither funny nor cute.  We can't say "Sometimes you just have to say 'What the F-heck?!' " all the time.

So what is moderation?  Is there a specific definition or is it different for everyone?

The CDC defines moderate drinking as having up to one drink per day for women and up to 2 drinks per day for men.  This definition is referring to the amount consumed on any single day and is not intended as an average over several days.  However, (tellingly, I add) the Dietary Guidelines DO NOT recommend that individuals who do not drink alcohol should start drinking for any reason.

Take home message, if you don't drink, don't start.

Well, what's a drink?

A standard drink is equal to 14.0 grams (0.6 ounces of pure alcohol.  Generally, this amount of pure alcohol is found in:

*  12-ounces of beer (5% alcohol content).

*  8- ounces of malt liquor (7% alcohol content).

*  5-ounces of wine (12% alcohol content).

*  1.5 ounces or a "shot" of 80-proof (40% alcohol content distilled spirits or liquor (gin, rum, vodka, whiskey).

The following information comes from the website www.moderatedrinking.com. 

So if you drink more than 9 drinks per week for a woman or 12-14 drinks for a man, that means you are not a moderate drinker, but does that make you an alcoholic?  No. Some heavy drinkers who've experienced problems from their drinking can learn how to moderate their drinking.  They can maintain moderate drinking for years at a time.  Others cannot.  So who's more likely to be successful at moderation?  Drinkers with a shorter history of problems and less severe problems tend to be more successful with cutting back and maintaining it. 

They also have another resource called the Drinker's Check-up that can help you take a good look at your drinking and get objective feedback. Then you can decide whether or not to change.  

For Women Heavy Drinking Has Been Normalized. That's Dangerous.

After I was mistakenly punched in the face by a football player at Ball State I was forced to spend some time reflecting on my choices.  Of course, I was 20 years old but I remember being very offended when my dad suggested that I increased the likelihood of bad things happening by the company I was keeping.  I offered up, "You don't understand.  It was mistake.  He wasn't trying to hit me." 

I think my dad's point was that I had put myself in an unsafe position by surrounding myself with a bunch of large, drunk people at that party and many others in the preceding years.  Eventually these risks caught up to me.  He wasn't blaming the victim per se, just wanting me to realize that if I had chosen not to attend that wild, drunk-fest, things would've been different.  Rarely would he ever discuss his drinking and how it impacted his life but this was an eventful discussion and he admitted that he had made bad decisions due to drinking.  This probably would have had more of an effect on me if I had been drinking.  I wasn't drinking at all that night, so I couldn't understand the concept of being around people that were drinking solely for the point of getting drunk increased the likelihood that bad things could happen to me even if I wasn't drunk myself.  Being 20 years old also didn't help me see my responsibility in the matter.

I'm certain being raised by an alcoholic greatly influenced me in the positive as it relates to my own drinking as an adult.  This is especially true after I had children.  I drink very occasionally.  I'll often have one Michelob Ultra with dinner about one or two times per week.  I rarely drink more than three beers on a week. 

My limited drinking also has to do with owning a fitness business.  I feel it is hypocritical of me to be imbibing consistently.  That's not to say I've never had one too many since my kids were born.  When you drink as little as I do, it doesn't take much.  If I have four drinks on one night, that's definitely binge drinking for me.  Two is my limit.

Whether you have pondered how your drinking habits have impacted your life or not, there's no denying that women are drinking in greater numbers than ever before. This is no accident.  I've summarized an article written by Kimberly Kindy and Dan Keating and published in The Washington Post.  It is titled "For women, heavy drinking has been normalized. That's dangerous."

 

The ads started popping up about a decade ago on social media.  Instead of selling alcohol with sex and romance, these ads had an edgier theme: Harried mothers chugging wine to cope with everyday stress.  Women embracing quart-sized bottles of whiskey, and bellying up to bars to knock back vodka shots with men.  For women, heavy drinking has been normalized.  That's dangerous. Instead of being embarrassing, women being drunk is portrayed as funny in marketing, movies and television.

In this new strain of advertising, women's liberation equaled heavy drinking, and alcohol researchers say it both heralded and promoted a profound cultural shift:  women in America are drinking far more, and far more frequently, than their mothers or grandmother did, and alcohol consumption is killing them in record numbers. 

The percentage of women who binge drink increased 40% among white women from 1997 to 2013, 10% for Hispanic women and -10% for black women.   Since 1999, this increase has caused a 130% change in alcohol-related deaths for white women and 27% for Hispanic women.  On a positive note, alcohol related deaths for black women have decreased 12%.  

The alcohol industry and some government agencies continue to promote the idea that moderate drinking provides some health benefits.  But new research is beginning to call even that long-standing claim into question. 

Drinking an excess of alcohol among other things is linked with…cancer. 

What?!  I guess I just thought the risks of drinking to excess "occasionally" were getting hurt falling down or being embarrassed.  I thought liver disease was for people that "were really bad alcoholics."  I never considered that binge drinking increases ones risk for cancer.

There is "strong evidence" that alcohol causes seven cancers, and other evidence indicated that it "probably" causes more, according to a literature review published online in Addiction.

Epidemiological evidence supports a causal association of alcohol consumption and cancers of the oropharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, colon, rectum, and female breast. 

As a silly, college student, my drinking had consequences then.  As a grown woman in the fitness and wellness field, I do my best to limit drinking to excess.  Sometimes I have to admit that I fail.  Not wanting to be hypocritical, my only wish is that my clients, friends and family ponder the impact that drinking is having on their health, life and happiness.

Radishes and Cookies

You're NOT LAZY, You’re EXHAUSTED!

Your brain isn’t of one mind. It is made up of two parts: the emotional & the rational. The emotional part of the mind is instinctive, the side that feels. The rational part of the mind is reflective, the side that thinks.

One analogy, among many, which portrays these two varying parts of the mind is Jonathan Haidt’s “the Rider & the Elephant”. The “Elephant” is representative of the emotional side of the mind and the “Rider”, the rational side of the mind.  In short, this analogy works to portray how the two sides of the mind interact with one another, with the Elephant consistently moving in the direction it so pleases, while the Rider works to keep the Elephant on track.

The Elephant (the emotional side) more often than not can be described as the side of the mind that wants quick pay-off with only short-term sacrifice. It wants instant gratification, and  in a lot of cases it can be mistakenly characterized as lazy (Heath 7 & 8).

Consider the following study as an example of this mistake in characterization.

A group of college students some time ago were asked to participate in a study. It was a “food perception” study, unbenounced to them. One request was made of them: Fast for AT LEAST 3 hours to ensure you come to the lab with an appetite. Upon arrival, the students were then split into two groups. One group was asked to eat a plate of cookies, and the other group a bowl of radishes. The groups were not allowed to eat the latter. The group who was asked to eat ONLY the radishes, despite their temptation, triumphed the challenging task. All of the participators, in fact,  displayed perfect self-control and followed the directions given to them, eating only what they were told they could indulge in. Next, the students were presented with various puzzles to solve. Little did they know, the puzzles were impossible to solve. The researchers wanted to see how long the two groups of students would persist in a difficult task before they finally gave up. Here’s what they found. Interestingly enough, the group of college students who ate the radishes were less persistent. They gave up on the puzzles in half the time as the group who ate the cookies (Heath, 9).

Why? Were the radish-eaters lazier than the cookie-eaters? No, they were just more tired out!

The radish-eaters ran out of self-control more quickly than the cookie-eaters because their task in resisting the cookies, minutes earlier, proved much more challenging than resisting the radishes! (Super surprising right, because radishes are irresistible? Yeah right!)

“Self-control is an EXHAUSTIBLE resource. The radish-eaters had drained their self-control by resisting the cookies, so when their Elephants (their emotions), inevitably started complaining about the puzzle task, their Riders (their minds) didn’t have enough strength to yank the reins to continue on in the puzzle. The cookie-eaters, on the other hand, had a fresh, untaxed Rider, who fought off the Elephant for double the time (Heath, 10).”

Often times, the perception of failure in change is often attributed to laziness. However, the purpose of the case study above is to show, more often than not, your shortcoming isn’t due to laziness. In reality, your Elephant is actually EXHAUSTED.

Exercising self-control requires working mental muscles. The bigger the change, the more one tires out. Believe it or not, self-control in all aspects of the word, takes a toll on a person. Practicing self-control creates fatigue and eventually people run out of gas. Self-control is bigger than just the “willpower to fight off vices”. Self-control is any part of the day in which you must “supervise” yourself, even if it’s as simple as eating radishes instead of cookies. Supervising yourself could be when you have to watch what you say, or complete a task that you don’t understand (Heath, 10). Regardless of what it’s pertaining to, every type of self-control is draining. Luckily for us, a lot of our daily life is “unsupervised activity”. We live a majority of our days on automatic (Heath, 11).

We create habits throughout the course of life and those habits become the norm and eventually, when we decide to make a change, it is incredibly challenging, because we no longer can put on cruise when we get up in the morning. No, instead we have to start supervising ourselves.

“So the next time you hear someone say change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, remind them that actually change is hard because people wear themselves out. In many cases, laziness is actually exhaustion (Heath, 12).”

Watermelon Bust

I don’t know if Ball State still has this, but back when I was a college student, we had something called, “Watermelon Bust Weekend.” Every college has their big party weekend and Watermelon Bust was ours. The origin of the tradition is lost in the haze of a decades-long ritual of inebriated frenzy, so I never knew what it meant other than a lot of drinking. Essentially, you gather a bunch of 18 to 21 year olds, get them drunk, then give them watermelons, and see what happens. They would lay out these giant pallets of watermelons and you were meant to do relay races with them.  One of those races you carried the watermelon between your knees. Then there was the watermelon toss, so the watermelons would fall to the ground and bust open all over you. You would wrestle watermelons out of people’s hands and end up wrestling in the ground, which was muddy more often than not. Finally, there was a tug of war. It was such a big deal that kids from Indiana University and Purdue came up to Muncie to partake in Watermelon Bust. One year, I went with my friend Phil and his friend Jason, who came up from Indiana University. We pre-gamed and got completely filthy during the day’s events.  My teammates and I entered the tug-of-war, thinking we were so strong that we could beat the field.  Boy, did we learn the hard way right into a pile of mud.  Yes, pound for pound we were strong but just having weight matters in an event like Tug-of-war and my 110 pound or less teammates didn't qualify.  We were very overconfident, uh...until we weren't. 

I lived in the honors dorms because I was attending Ball State on both an athletic and an academic scholarship.  The academic scholarship was actually greater than my athletic scholarship and paid for all of my out-of-state tuition. That year, my roommate was one of those people that was never around. She was a nice enough girl, but she was gone every weekend to visit her boyfriend back home, who she was dead set on marrying. She was from John Cougar Mellencamp’s home town of Seymour, Indiana. I think her sister even dated John Mellencamp. Most weekends, my dorm was empty. I lived in the Nerd dorm.  It was quiet and a good place to study but definitely not party central.  It had been a chilly and drizzly fall day, so Phil, Jason, and I were covered in mud and watermelon. We went to my dorm with the intended purpose to shower and get cleaned up. We went to the women’s communal bathroom and got into the showers. It wasn’t salacious at all, we kept our dirty clothes on, but it seemed perfectly logical in our inebriated state to shower fully clothed in order to get clean. The moment the water spurted out of the shower head, the mud and watermelon bits flung all over the bathroom. We were giggling and trying to wash off when one of the girls on my floor walked in wearing her fluffy blue terrycloth bathrobe, carrying her shower bucket with a smile on her face and then she saw us.  Her smile vanished, she gave us a dirty look, rolled her eyes and harrumphed away as if she were Princess Diana.  She immediately walked out of there and reported us. Sure enough, my RA came in and yelled, "What do you think you are doing?"   That was a fair question.  There was mud everywhere! She was super mad but of course we thought it was hysterical.  She yelled at me to get rid of Phil and Jason then clean up the bathroom. The guys left me there as I was trying to wipe up the mess soaking wet. One of my friends from the honors dorm was there and decided she would try to help me out. She got some mops and we mopped up the whole mess up as best we could.

Phil had this gigantic station wagon, like Clark Griswold-style, and it even had wood grain on the side. He used to say that he could fit 16 people and six kegs in it. It was so outdated it must have been from the 70’s.  I used to ride on the hood of the car.  I would do this completely sober, just something to do to get some fun going. I would grab onto the hood of some car and hold on. My sister and I used to do it all the time in Iowa because what else are you going to do there? We started out on the little compact cars that we had. We went to parking lots and tried to hold on while the other would try and spin you off. So I did that on Phil’s big station wagon, the Family Truckster, as he called it. If we were cruising around and there was nothing else to do, my friends would shout out, “Hey Patty! Go on and get on the front!” It didn’t take much to get me to do it. So we would drive down the main drag at Ball State, coming back from the library, and I’d climb on the hood of the Family Truckster just for the hell of it.

           The gymnastics team mainly partied with the football players when we weren’t hopping fences to get into bars. Each sports team had their own house at Ball State, and we often went to the football house to party. They were fun, but they were always out of control. Without fail, a fight would break out at each party. On the last night of the school year my junior year, there was a particularly raucous party going on at the football house. A lot of people were already gone, but the rest of us were whooping it up. My friend Robin and I were planning on driving to Kentucky the following morning to see the Kentucky Derby and stay at her parent's house outside of Louisville for the night. I was so excited to get out town and go to the Derby that I didn’t even drink that night. It wasn’t like I spent the entire four years of college drunk. Since high school, I knew when I could go out and party and when I needed sleep and study. In theory, Ball State was supposed to be a dry campus, but no one stuck to that. My teammates and I would mostly party in the fall before gymnastics season started and once winter rolled around, we would straighten up. There was a pact between us that we would not drink from January through March. We went to the same number of partiers, but we just wouldn’t drink. However, we would make up for it the rest of the year.

            So, it was the last night of school that year and I was standing on the porch of the football house and I wanted to go into the house and use the bathroom.  The guys on the inside of the house had locked the door and Paul, the 6’ 4,” 250 pound football player was standing directly behind it. I started pounding on the door to get Paul to let me in. There was a small, decorative window that I stuck my face up to see who was inside.  I saw Paul tapping on the glass, taunting me. Then, his fist came through the glass into my face, and with it, a million shards of glass. I felt the pieces near my eye and shut it in case glass had gotten in. In the middle of the night before the Kentucky Derby, my teammate and best friend Robin drove me down to Ball Memorial Hospital to get my eye checked out. Robin loved listening to music from the 1960s. Her speakers were blaring and I was splayed in the passenger seat with my hand over my eye trying to keep it closed, begging her to change the station, at least this once for my sake.  If I was going to be blind in one at least she'd let me listen to the dance music I loved on the way to the hospital.  I didn’t have glass in my eye, but I did have a black eye for a few weeks. We didn’t end up going to the Kentucky Derby.

            After that, we curtailed it with those guys. They were just wild. They were drunk and many of them had problems with it. I remember I was taunting one of the players for his hair being long, messing around with them like I would my brother, and he warned me that if I kept at it, he was going to slam me against a wall. So of course, I kept making fun of him and sure enough, the next moment, I was against the wall with a finger in my face. I think he was getting ready to punch me when my friend John peeled him off of me. It probably wasn't the best move on my part taunting a drunken, giant football player.  His move was still inexcusable.

A few months later, I saw John, the guy that rescued me, holding my tiny 5'2" 100 pound friend Wendy up against a fence and another guy had to pull him off of her the same way. Some of those guys were just violent and bad news. I had a few friends on the team, like our friends Zork and Mike, but it wasn’t worth the risk of hanging out with the rest of the team.  We decided we needed a safer environment.  

A College Bar Called "The Chug"... What Could Go Wrong?

College was great, and I think it was greater for me for one specific reason.  I'd really never been anywhere else.  I grew up pretty sheltered and other than a trip to Florida once, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana once to visit Ball State’s campus, that was it.  I often say, if you grow up in Iowa, anywhere you go after that is fun.  So, for me, Ball State was the most exciting and diverse place I had ever been. There were people from all over the country there. I was friends with people from New Jersey and Wisconsin and California. It’s hard to make a college experience unique because, for the most part, it’s teenagers doing dumb stuff while drunk. And while I talk about partying a lot, I remember getting very offended when people acted surprised to see me in the library. I was in the library all the time, but I hid out on the top floor because they’d make a party even in the library. It was just as social of a place as the dining hall. There used to be these solid wood cubicles that were meant to divide the desks for a greater sense of privacy. We'd take some breaks from studying, and we'd get up and do flips while holding onto the sides. I could do a pretty good gainer layout step out holding onto these cubicles.  My best friend Robin and our football playing giant friend Steve used to do the moves from Dirty Dancing. Robin would run into his arms and jump while he held onto her hips and it was a vision straight from the movie poster. And this was when we were supposed to be studying in the library.

            Needless to say, we were pretty crazy. I was probably not unlike every other college student, except that I was an athlete, and more specifically, a gymnast, which came in handy when I was trying to get into bars before I turned 21. Butterfields was one of the bars in town and on Thursday nights in the spring, everyone flocked to Butterfields and danced all night long. There were other bars closer to campus, like the Chug, but Butterfields was somewhat nicer and drew in the juniors and seniors. The Chug was basically a glorified dungeon. The floor was just concrete and the toilets were always flooding. There was always a layer of fluid on the floor that was either wet or in the stages of drying, so it was sticky. We just assumed it was a whole lot of spilled beer. Years later, when my friend Zork, the football player, got married, we were all together again reminiscing and I found out that that layer of fluid I thought was beer was actually pee.  The football players used to bet each other who could pee under the bar next without getting caught.  The entire time, I mean for four years, we thought we were sloshing around in spilled beer and liquor, but we were wading in spilled beer, liquor and the football players’ urine.

Rather than get trapped in the Chug, we went to Butterfields. We couldn’t get in the legitimate way, however, for our first few years of school, but we wanted to go dancing. Butterfields had a patio in the back that was open during the spring time and it had a large wooden fence around the perimeter. Since I didn’t have a fake ID and I seldom borrowed one from an older friend or a friend’s older sister, we scaled the fences. Butterfields was further from campus, so we’d drive there together, all dolled up with our 80’s hair and miniskirts, and walk to the back of the bar. Since I was much taller than all of my gymnastics teammates, I didn’t have much trouble grabbing on to the top of the fence and hoisting myself up. That was perhaps one of the immediate and useful real world applications for gymnastics. Getting over in my miniskirt was more challenging, but because I could hold up my own body weight, I could keep my knees together as I brought one leg onto the fence at a time. I sat there, perched like a supermodel, until someone came over and readied themselves to catch me on my descent. I never got in trouble.

            The fun would commence with the scaling of the fence. From there, it was on!  We would dance, dance and dance.  Yes, we partied a lot and drank to excess often but that's not what made the fun. Partying to us was if there was a lot of dancing happening and people getting crazy.  We didn't always drink to make this happen.  Sometimes we would justify that we had to drink because our bodies were in so much pain from gymnastics we'd only be able to dance all night if we were a little numb from drinking.  However, during season we stayed completely sober. People just thought we were drunk because we were so uninhibited.  In general, gymnasts can really dance.  It's a huge component of the sport.  When we could go out and get an amazing cardio workout all the while, having a raucous time, we were in!    It wasn’t like Butterfields was the greatest club in the world, not by a long shot. But at the time, we didn't really know any better.  All we needed to have a good time was a DJ that would play the music we loved, a few fun people in the crowd and each other. 

In those days, at least at Ball State it wasn't like getting caught underage drinking resulted in severe discipline. That’s the main reason I never tried pot.  We didn’t get tested in gymnastics, but I never felt that pot would be worth losing my scholarships over if I ever got caught. So I just drank. 

I recently attended a presentation on alcohol at the National Strength and Conditioning Association's Strength Coaches conference.  Interestingly, all the data points to the fact that college athletes drink more than non-athletes.  It is just considered part of the culture.  Add to the fact that those that binge drink in college are more likely to have problems with alcohol later in life as well, drinking to excess isn't a great idea no matter your age.  More on that next week...

Texas, Waffle House and a Navy Seal

(This post picks up after our October 21 blog post.)

During my sophomore year at Ball State, I became friends with a Navy Seal when he was an assistant volunteer coach. I was 19 and he was 32. We had been good friends throughout the year and I fell in love with him that spring. He was graduating and had an internship in Dallas, Texas. I wanted to travel with him and try to make this relationship work out. Fortuitously, I had a friend from high school who was living in Fort Worth, Texas and he invited me to stay with him for a few weeks. I left Indiana with $30.00 in cash and a $42.00 check from the Waffle House where I worked. I quit my job there, but I was too embarrassed to go back, so I had the Navy Seal return my uniform for me.  Many years later, I relayed this story to one of my Pilates instructors.  I'll never forget her dead panned face as she sarcastically said, "So you were scared and it took the Navy Seals for you to return your Waffle House uniform?"  She then fell to her knees on the floor with laughter. 

Ahh, the Waffle House.

I rocked that uniform.

None of the patrons at my Waffle House looked like this...

At the time though, I ultimately wanted to keep tabs on my Navy Seal, who had just broken up with his girlfriend.  I didn’t want them to get back together. However, this was the logic I used at the time to rationalize the trip to myself:  I was 19, and in Indiana, you had to be 21 to serve alcohol, so I couldn’t work in any of the upscale restaurants like Chi-Chi’s.  Yes, upscale restaurants like Chi-Chi's.  Since I didn’t want to go back to Clinton, I figured that I could work in Texas, where I could legally serve alcohol and therefore make more money as a waitress at a good restaurant. That was the excuse I used while I followed the Navy Seal to Texas. Within two days of arriving, I got a job at Red Lobster.  But in addition to all that, I had never lived anywhere else and I was just excited to get out and go somewhere. There was no planning, clearly, as I only had $72.00 in my pocket when I left. I never told my parents that I went, though. I knew that if I told them, they would have flipped out and forbidden me to go. I decided it was better to ask for forgiveness after the fact than it was to ask for permission. I was down in Texas for about six of the ten week total.  My high school friend that rented the apartment went back to Clinton for the Fourth of July, and I believe he told a few people I was staying with him. It’s a small town, so I’m sure my mother heard of the rumor.  Shortly after he came back from Iowa, my mom and I had an interesting conversation.  I could tell by what she was saying she knew I wasn't in Muncie anymore.  I finally confessed, because I was obviously caught.  She didn't completely flip out but they no longer gave me any spending money the rest of my college career. 

            The friend I was staying with didn’t really have a place for me to sleep. There was the bedroom that he and his girlfriend shared and then there was a bunk bed that was just the bed frame and springs. So I slept on the floor or on the couch for the entire time I was there. The Navy Seal and his friend Herman had made fun of me for leaving Indiana with only 72 bucks, but the apartment they were meant to be staying in turned out to be a real dump. There were feral cats everywhere as well as roaches. It was in such disrepair that he had to leave and for a time, he had no place to stay. I felt bad for them but a little vindicated for myself.  Navy Seal and Herman hassled and teased me relentlessly the entire trip from Indiana to Texas that I'd be sleeping in a slum and be homeless.  Although I slept between a couch and a floor, I was staying in an otherwise very nice apartment with a pool and a beach volleyball court. They told me then that I was staying in the Taj Mahal compared to what they had.  Eventually, my Navy Seal moved back in with his girlfriend without saying anything. He came over once to my place by himself and the second time he visited me, he brought his ex-girlfriend and Herman and a bunch of his other friends with him. That’s when he told me things were over between us and that he was going back to his ex.  What was worse, he came to the apartment with her in tow and she didn’t know that we had been together.

            I was upset of course, but I don’t remember sitting around and moping over him. I’m sure he cared for me, but I suspect his plan was to spend time with me and if things worked out with his ex in Dallas, then he could just go back to her. If things had not worked out, he still had me. I was there for 10 weeks and it was over by the third. You have to laugh about it or otherwise you’d cry.

Having grown up in Clinton, Iowa and gone to college in Muncie, Indiana, being in Fort Worth was a big city for me. I’m sure I was devastated at the time, but I sprang back with a 19 year- old's desire to have fun. The people that worked at that Red Lobster with me were from all over the place. There was a Mormon from Utah, a guy from Kansas and a Muslim from Egypt. It sounds like a bad joke, but we all hung out and had a great time. So I might have lost the Navy Seal, but I wasn’t too heartbroken about it. I got to live in Texas for ten weeks.   Living successfully in Texas, in other words, getting a job within two days, making friends and having a good time was a wonderful confidence booster.  It was a very risky proposition and it all worked out for me.  It reduced my fear of the unknown and helped me to realize that I was capable of pulling off things many people, especially my parents, would deem dangerous and crazy.  Plus I got to stay in a Taj Mahal apartment.  Ha!