Fitness Goddess

Jackie Warner and my girlfriend share similar dimensions.

If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter feed and Facebook statuses, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been trying to go to the gym more, and have been whining about it pretty constantly. I’ve learned a little something about relationships in the process and want to share it with my lovely readers.

My girlfriend is fond of saying, “you’re skinny, not healthy” which is probably the most accurate assessment of what’s going on with me. Having a Buddhist’s mind for only eating out of necessity and petite Asian genes galore, I have always been skinny. But Nikki is right. Just because I look like I’m healthy doesn’t mean I actually am. I have my weekly trip to Wendy’s. Up until a few months ago I was smoking 3-4 cigarettes a day, which I know isn’t a massively unhealthy amount, but I can’t imagine smoking any amount is a good thing. All of this probably wouldn’t have even been noticeable if I wasn’t dating a fitness goddess. When you’re living with someone who runs 5 miles a day and lives at the gym, you tend to start wondering why she’s never out of breath and a couple flights of stairs kicks your ass.

Another source of epiphany on my lack of fitness is football. I’m in week three now of a coed-flag football league and I’m doing just terrible. It’s a no contact league and somehow I’m always sore after the games (mostly from falling down a lot). This is probably where my Asian genes work against me. Ever hear of an Asian football player? Me neither.

I share similar dimensions with Mulan...or maybe the dragon.

I’ll admit my privilege in this though. I don’t have to work at all to look like I do. I sleep 10 hours a day. I play a lot of video games. My quads (learned what they were called from Nikki, it's the top of your legs) are used almost entirely to support my laptop for writing. I subsist on a diet of Wendy’s, ramen, and breakfast cereal because I don’t really know how to cook. Yet, even with all that, I’ve hovered around 100 lbs since 8^th grade (don’t worry, I’m short enough for that to be well within normal - BMI 20.5). If you think that all sounds fantastic, let me ask you this:  could you put a baseball uniform on and easily infiltrate a Little League team? If your answer was anything along the lines of, “Of course not, I have boobs and hips” you’ve got me beat, because I’m positive I could pull of an Amanda Bynes type switcheroo for the LittleLeague World Series except I’m hopelessly unathletic. The point being, I’m not trying to build the body I have into the body I want. All the exercise I’m doing is only going to change the composition of the same shape I’ve always had; I’m literally exercising to lose my nerd’s lack of stamina. This is probably a strange concept for a lot of women, exercising for functionality rather than appearance, which is kind of a shame, isn’t it? More on that later.

So now I’m trying to go to the gym, which is kind of not what you think. We have a tiny fitness center in our apartment complex that nobody really uses, except for me now apparently. My girlfriend uses the massive athletic complex gym at UCF for real athletes and, while she’s offered to come with me to the free fitness center in our complex, I always tell her I’d rather she didn’t. It’s impossible to go to the gym the 1 hour a day I can tolerate (I get so freaking bored), when the person who is supposed to be your gym buddy could stay there for three hours quite happily. More than that, I’m fairly certain I use most exercise machines wrong the first time, realize there’s no way I’m supposed to bonk my head that many times, and then have to look at the vague silhouette diagrams on the sides to see what I should have been doing. I definitely still have this "please oh please oh please don’t embarrass yourself in front of Nikki" thing that has persisted since I met her. Despite the fact that she could probably really help me in this, being the multi-sport athlete and personal trainer she is, I still really want her to think I’m cool even though I’m really obviously not. This is when I realized my fitness idol and hero was actually my girlfriend. She exercises to be a better athlete and ends up with the amazing body she has because it is functional for what she does. When I realized I was doing very badly in my own sport, I figured out fitness wasn’t something that functioned only for looks, which I already have and exercise wouldn’t change, but should help me do the things I want to do physically. Ladies, look at your own fitness routine and ask yourself, is it helping you do what you want to do? Does it make you more functional or are you doing it in hopes of changing your appearance?

Oh! Yep, I was on it backward.

So the question becomes, how does a couch potato date a fitness goddess? Actually, strike that, I don’t like couch potato. Revised:  how does a bedroom bunny date a fitness goddess? All my exercise usually comes in the bedroom, so this is far more accurate anyway. To this point, she has tried to help me be a better person and I’ve convinced her an occasional trip to In-n-Out won’t kill her girl abs. This is one of those surprisingly complex relationship questions most people probably don’t even consider. A differential in fitness and health goals can really strain a relationship. I mean, she is up at 6 AM every day for jogging, and I’m rolling into bed most nights around 2 AM not to be awoken until noon, which means there are whole chunks of the day where one of us is awake while the other is asleep. My sister says this is completely normal, especially since she’s had her son, but I have the lesbian urge to merge here. I’d pretty much wrap myself around Nikki 24/7 if I could figure out how to manage that without it being socially awkward. I think the answer is incremental change and unconditional acceptance of benign traits. Let me explain that since it sounds all jargony.

In any long term relationship, you’re going to find there are things that don’t match up that can be changed and things that don’t match up that don’t matter. The skill set to develop here is to figure out the difference. When you’re with someone special, you’re going to have this urge to want to be a better person for them, and they’ll have this whole other set of interests and ideas than you, which can end up enriching you as a person if you’re open to trying. You’re not changing to suit them, you’re trying what they like and seeing if it might also be something you like but have never considered. Positive changes in your life can come from other people’s desires for your best interests. Take the smoking thing, if Nikki hadn’t pressured me, I’d probably still be doing it—incremental change. There are other traits though that are basic to happiness and aren’t really harming the other person, but just might not be what the other person would like for themselves. My sleeping in doesn’t hurt anyone. I’m a freelance writer. I can have the sleep schedule I want so long as I’m productive with my waking hours. It doesn’t really hurt me for Nikki to get up at 6 AM since I’m a dead to the world type sleeper, and it doesn’t really hurt her for me to wake up at 11:30 or noon. So we just accept those idiosyncrasies as part of the lovely tapestry that is the other person even though it doesn’t match our own personal preferences. If it doesn’t hurt you or make you unhappy, let it go.

I don’t expect the complaining about going to the gym will leave my Twitter feed anytime soon even as I’m getting into better shape, but hopefully I’ll stop falling down so much during games.

The LFL and Feminism

The Lingerie Football League:

A Feminist's Quagmire

I don't even know what this is called, but I know I can't do it.

I've actually been struggling for quite awhile with this question. I have several friend who play in the Lingerie Football League (ladies I met without knowing it was their sport). I won't mention who exactly, but you might be able to piece it together from my Facebook friend list. I'm also a feminist, so there's a pretty obvious conflict here for me. But I'm ALSO a lesbian into athletic women (see my girlfriend's abs for confirmation) so there are biological concerns as well. It's a whole mess and one I haven't really figured out an answer for yet.

For those of you who may not know what the LFL is, it's not entirely what it sounds like. When my friends did finally tell me where they were playing lingerie football, I was kind of horrified until I actually saw them play. And then I was horrified that they didn't have nearly enough padding for how hard everyone was hitting each other. There is a very small...loud...actually kind of large part of me that wishes they were given full uniforms so people would take the athleticism of it all more seriously. For a toughness factor, these girls have roller derby beat by a country mile, but when it comes to respectability, they're still lagging behind because it started out as a strange wet dream for really pathetic guys.

I can't be the only one who sees how the uniforms are fairly similar in size and composition.

Then something odd happened:  people started watching for the football. The models who couldn't run, throw, or hit vanished and women with far sturdier bodies (translate--thicker) and real athletic ability took their place. This isn't to say there weren't real athletes in the early days, they were just so ridiculously good by comparison that they obliterated the lingerie models every play. The uniforms still disgust me though.

You don't get abs like that without being an athlete; trust me, I've tried.

As a feminist, there are elements here to be proud of, but also a lot of gross stuff. It's televised women's athletics, which is good! But it's televised on MTV2, which is bad. It's women playing a professional contact sport for real money that was once only allowed to men, which is great! But they're basically only wearing underwear while they're doing it, which is bad. Right now, the women who are playing are real athletes who take real hits and receive real injuries and bruises from it all in front of a cheering crowd, which is good! But the stadiums also tend to be really empty most of the time, which is bad considering men's high school football sells out more often than the LFL does. The women of the LFL have realistic bodies (5'7" 148 lbs and heavier kind of normal), which is good! But they also sell game-worn "uniforms" on the LFL website, which makes my skin crawl it's so disgusting. I love my friends who play and I love that they're playing football, real professional football in front of crowds of people who paid to be there to see them play, and I'm so fucking proud when I see #1 make a really vicious tackle that would make most men cry. The supportive fan and lover of women's athletics really wants to like the LFL, but the feminist in me is screaming the entire time, "They shouldn't have to wear lingerie to be watched!"

How did anyone even tell them apart without uniforms?

One of the angles I've taken on this, and it's helped rationalize it a lot, came from the ancient Greeks. The original Olympics, which were men only, were participated in while entirely naked and often lubed with olive oil. I'm not going to get into the whole homoerotic side of this and the affinity the ancient Greeks had for all things man-love, but I am aware it exists. The point was, the greatest athletes of their era refused clothing for athletic competition at one point in human history, and it couldn't have been about turning women into sexual objects or pieces of meat, because those naked athletes were all men. When I look at the LFL uniforms and think of them more as gladiator armor designed to show off the marvel of the athletic form, which was the goal of the lack of uniforms in the games in ancient Greece and Rome (again, all men), it becomes slightly more tolerable as long as I ignore the real intent.

This didn't match my preconceived notions either.

Taking the feminism angle out entirely, there are some other, more pedantic, problems for me. When my LFL friends ask me why I don't go out for a team (there is one in LA when I lived in SoCal and there are a few in Florida so it's not like access is an issue), I always came up with a laundry list of excuses:  I'm small, I'm slow, I'm a baby about pain, I smoked up until very recently (so I can't really use that one anymore), etc. And most of those excuses were valid reasons, but my real conflict was...I don't want to wear the lingerie in front of people. I hate myself for having to admit this, but one of my major conflicts was the completely anti-feminist hangup of thinking people would think I didn't have a good enough body to be wearing something that skimpy. As enlightened and advanced as I try to be, I still have those hangups about how I look, and as brave as I like to think I am, these women who are clearly participating in a male-dominated fantasy, are braver than me when it comes to a positive body image. That kind of sucks to have to admit; I mean, I couldn't imagine how much worse my nose would be if it got broken playing tackle football or how my top would be largely ceremonial since I don't really have boobs enough to fill out most bikini tops. It's strange to find out exactly how far we really are from enlightened when something like this brings up all the ways we're just like everyone else in our shallow fears.

Maybe I'm just weird, but this looks like a lot of fun.

My wish would be that the more traditional tackle football leagues for women would gain more support and get the television contracts they deserve. Or, if the LFL does have to be the face of women's football, that it'd take more of a roller derby angle to it where the women get to modify their own uniforms as they see fit and have a more active hand in how the league is run. In the meantime, I'll just have to be conflicted about it all.