“I wish I could be a runner,” she said.
“You can,” I quickly responded.
“Look at you,” she said. “You’re so fit.”
We talked for a few minutes about the importance of making time for ourselves, of starting out slowly and committing to walking a few blocks every day.
“Seriously, if I can do this, you can,” I said. I showed her my before-and-after photo, and she nodded.
“You got this,” I said.
And you can, too
What follows are posts from my original blog, SKINNYCAROLEE, which was hosted on BlogSpot from February 2014 until August 2015. I started my journey with a goal of transforming my physical appearance, but when I made the transition from focusing on losing weight to learning how to carve out time to meet my own fitness needs and to push myself physically and mentally, I moved the blog over to my personal website hosted by Squarespace and renamed it BE THE DOG.
Awesome people you’ll meet throughout this book:
Adin – My insanely artistic son, a dancer and athlete, who’s always there to encourage me to dig in.
Adorable – Reuel Tizabi, my original trainer at Equinox Bethesda who’s on his way to receiving his doctor of physical therapy degree.
Buff – Shoubry Sos, my trainer at Equinox Bethesda after Reuel left to return to school full time.
Lord Baltimore – Bob Walker, my husband, who was born and raised royally in Baltimore.
Mia – My wildly talented daughter, who heads up my squad and who sensibly reminds me when I get anxious before a race, “Mom, you volunteered for this.”
MCRRC – Montgomery County Road Runners Club.
Patrick Gatti – An American businessman on assignment in Kingston who ran with me in Emancipation Park in the evenings after work and talked endlessly with me about my upcoming first half marathon, D.C. Rock ’n’ Roll.
Perfectly Nice – Daniel Le, my trainer at Equinox Bethesda when Reuel attended the World Cup in Brazil.
Really Smart – Dr. Katie Taraban Mahoney, my physical therapist at Elite Physical Therapy and Wellness Center in Washington, D.C., who relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015.
Ripped – Neile Miller, my Vassar classmate who also trained with Reuel.
Triathlete – My good friend and work colleague, who’s apparently naturally athletic.
Wonderful – Francis Bass, my massage therapist, who has sadly relocated out of Washington, D.C.
Chapter 1 – OMG—Endorphins Are for Real
Day 1, March 30, 2014
“We’re running around like we’re brainless.”
—Rizzle Kicks, “Down with the Trumpets”
I was never a gym person. The whole gym culture had run right past me. My family has always belonged to a local health club, and Bob, my husband, Lord Baltimore, and Mia and Adin, my adult children, work out at the gym as often as they can. My father, Len Belkin, walks daily and swims twice a week. They’ve all got a gym routine that I somehow never felt I needed. I had lots of excuses. I wanted to be home with Mia and Adin in the evenings when they were in middle and high school. Later, when they were barely home themselves, I needed to rush through the front door to feed the dog. And I had cooking to do.
I had begun to practice yoga around 2011, and in late 2013, I joined Equinox in Bethesda for the early morning yoga classes. I developed a particular fondness for the club’s yoga studio, which is outfitted with individually operated ceiling fans, so if you arranged things optimally you could set yourself directly underneath one and ask the teacher to turn it on.
When I returned from a theater trip to London in February 2014 and felt limited by my lack of energy, I agreed to meet with one of the Equinox trainers who had been emailing me incessantly offering a free fitness assessment and a free personal training session.
I had ignored these emails and put off the training team for an incredibly long time.
A few days after returning from London, I met Reuel Tizabi, an adorable trainer, at Equinox Bethesda after work. I—ahem—had forgotten to bring my sneakers, so we would be limited in what we could do during the assessment.
I stepped on the scale, and I weighed 121 pounds. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, but I’m 4’10” and my ideal weight is closer to 95 pounds, so that’s a lot of extra weight on my small frame.
Wow, when did that happen? He went through everything else: pulse rate, body fat index, blah blah blah, I wasn’t paying attention—121 pounds?
I agreed to the free personal training session with Adorable. He told me to arrive 10 minutes early so I could warm up on the treadmill, and he would meet me there. In the meantime, before the first training session, I came across the latest issue of More magazine, which featured the fifty-nine-year-old author of the book Labor Day, who began a weight loss and fitness regimen at the San Francisco Equinox. I read the article and handed Adorable the magazine. By the time we met for the second time, Adorable was referring to the flabby personalities under my arms as “Aunt Betty.”
The initial training sessions were astoundingly difficult and embarrassing. No matter what we did, I was completely out of breath and lightheaded. Did I say I was embarrassed? Adorable could tell when I needed to take a lap around the training area—he’d walk with me, and I would feel even more on display as an overweight miniature dinosaur. It’s amazing that I never ran into anyone I knew at Equinox. I live in Bethesda. Kind of a miracle. Kind of amazing I never ran into anyone, literally.
I told Adorable I had a dress I wanted to wear to the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company Gala in two weeks. It was the one I had planned to wear to the Tony Awards the previous year as Mia’s guest when Pippin was nominated for a bunch of Tonys—but I had worn Option B, which was black and forgiving. Adorable was straightforward. He told me I would not see results by then, but he reminded me I was in this for the long haul. We would work Aunt Betty hard.
“You’ll see results in sixteen weeks,” he said.
After a week of training with Adorable I had difficulty buttoning my suit jacket around my chest, and I had gained three pounds. I told Adorable about those results.
This was good information, he noted, because that gave him important insight into how he wanted to move forward. At my request, we stopped using weights and began increasing the number of repetitions using resistance bands. He told me to come in as much as possible to walk on the treadmill, and we were working to strengthen the area around my left knee since I had never done what my then-physical therapist told me to do after my knee surgery in September 2012. “There’s only so much progress you can make if you can’t get your knee to stabilize,” Adorable
