Tag: embarrassing photo of the week

Too Fat for Toes-to-Bar

My sister-in-law is a gifted songwriter, and about ten years ago, she wrote a hilarious collar-tugger of a song called “Too Fat for Breakfast”, in which she (a normal-sized person) outlined some of the ways our society made her feel like a lumbering, jiggly mess (“Last-season Jennifer Aniston/You look like a lollipop”). Here’s my CrossFit-themed homage to that song.

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About half the time, I’m tremendously proud of my CrossFit accomplishments. And then something happens. It’s usually that I see photos of myself working out. In fact, in one of my Fat CrossFitter posts, I addressed my resemblance to a certain Martin Short character. And there are just no other words to capture what happens inside my chest when I look at these pictures except abject horror.

Recently, I had to ask for a Facebook courtesy-delete of a photo of me holding a medicine ball, taken at three-quarters view so my hips are wiiiiiiiide as Mother Ginger’s. Seriously, it looks as if, were I to pull out the bottom of my spandex, nobody would be surprised if some children ran out. In addition, I’m looking down, so my double-chin is in spectacular spectacle.

These photos make me want to close myself in my house and communicate with the outer world only via USPS.

But sometimes it’s not a photo. Sometimes it’s an exercise that’s standard to CrossFit that I’m incapable of doing, and I feel like a failure pile because I’ve been at it for two and half years now.

I’m not even talking muscle-ups or anything. People way stronger than I am can’t do muscle-ups. I’ll probably never do a muscle-up.

But I still can’t do a pull-up. And I’m still too fat for toes-to-bar.

Here’s that story.

A recent CrossFit WOD required as many reps as possible in 7 minutes of:

  • three 95-lb clean & jerk
  • three toes-to-bar
  • six 95-lb clean & jerk
  • six toes-to-bar
  • nine, etc.

At this point, (it seems amazing but) a 95-lb clean & jerk is not difficult for me. My max is 129. So the first three clean & jerks were nothing. Then I stepped up to the pull-up rig, grabbed the bar, summoned every ounce of strength, and kipped as hard as I could. And my toes totally hit the bar.

I was like, OK, I’ll do another. I took a giant swinging swing of a swing, and my toes once again made contact. Then I had to rest. I missed the next one and had to rest. I think I got the one after that. Or maybe there was another missed rep in there.

Back on the barbell. Easy six reps.

Back on the rig. Missed the first rep. Efffffffffffffffff.

I managed to get through the six, interspersed with another three or four missed reps (which are the fucking worst because you’ve done all the work, just to get within an inch or two and have the rep not count).

And time was up. 18 reps. For comparison, the relatively fit people got 50ish reps, and the super-athletes got more than 90.

I wasn’t even winded because I had to spend all that time resting for my next toes-to-bar attempt so I did nine anger-clean-and-jerks after the buzzer.

I know, I know, I’ve made progress. When I started CrossFit, I would dangle tenuously from the bar and, with a great heave, pull my knees up to about navel level. Now, I can do nine singles. If you give me a few minutes.

But I still look like Jiminy Glick when I’m doing them.

Me & Jiminy 2

Aaaaaaand now I’ll be closing myself in my house and communicating with you people only via USPS. Send your addresses.

¡Pura Vida!

You may recall that, back in September, I vacated Durham for a week in Costa Rica with my super-friend Shiv (a.k.a. my sister-wife). You’re most likely saying to yourself, “Well, that must’ve been pretty dope,” and if so, YOU ARE A GENIUS AND TOTALLY CORRECT.

Evidence:

  • We stayed at the base of a volcano for a coupla/three nights.
¿See it over there? ¡That’s Arenal!
  • We went to a hot spring spa and sat in 100-degree waterfalls that came off that volcano.
  • There was a parrot named Estefanía who lived at/around our hotel, and
she would harass the workers until they gave her bananas
or “bañañas” as Shiv and I took to calling them for no good reason.
  • All breakfasts included fried plantains. All breakfasts everywhere should include fried plantains.
  • We ziplined over the jungle.
Seriously. Will you look at that.
Shiv=badass (She kept wanting to go upside-down and stuff, and the guides were like, “OK, crazy lady.”)
  • We went on a gorgeous hike.
What.

Also,

  • We met a baby sloth named Cheu, and
he did ET-phone-home finger with Shiv.
He also slothfully scratched his armpit for a long time. It was adorable.
  • We had two fantastic beach days.
Here I’m doing the Handstand Everywhere You Go requisite for people who do CrossFit. (I’m both proud of and embarrassed by this photo because, hey, that’s a pretty good handstand but, Jesús, you could land planes on my thighs.)

(I know. I need to cut that shit out.)

My favorite picture of the trip: Shiv en la bahía.

The only obstacles we had to overcome, other than the torrential rains for the first few days, were the incorrigible scavenger animals. To wit, the raccoons and coatis:

But also one morning, a band of capuchin monkeys terrorized/delighted (tomato/tomahto) the restaurant where we had our breakfast. I had wondered why the waitstaff didn’t put boxes of sugar packets on the tables — you had to ask for them — but it’s because the capuchins are junkie-monkeys. They will run through the restaurant, snatch the sugar packets right off your table (sometimes the whole box), and

scamper up the trees to get their fix.

The funniest part was that if they happened in their caper to grab any packets of artificial sweetener, they would throw them on the ground. (“Pump that garbage in another monkey’s face,” said the capuchins.)

[Side note: I told my 10-year-old niece this story, and she wrote the following poem.

Monkeys Don’t Like Splenda

I was sitting in the restaurant, (I was on vacation,)
I was taking lots of pictures I would send to my relations.
I got a big white envelope; it didn’t say the sender,
All it said upon its face was; MONKEYS DON’T LIKE SPLENDA.

I sat eating bananas, pondering those words,
I was in Costa Rica, but it did seem quite absurd.
Maybe they were picky eaters, or didn’t like the food,
Either way, this or that, I thought it was just rude.

I asked the waitress, bout the note, the manager’s the sender,
Each table gets one, and it’s true, that MONKEYS DON’T LIKE SPLENDA.

Then a monkey raced down and grabbed the sugar packets, 
Dumped the Splenda, dumped the box, and just made quite a racket.
I learned a quite good lesson; that healthy isn’t ALWAYS good,
Cause if monkeys don’t like Splenda, I don’t think that I should! 

I’m not biased or anything, but I’m pretty sure my niece is a genius?

End side note.]

Shiv and I sat on the beach late in the afternoon of our last day. Pieces of the navy blue mountains across the bay, which itself turned slowly from aqua to slate, chipped off and floated skyward. A lone trawler chugged its way toward the open Pacific. The branches of the guayaba tree stirred above us, and every time we stood up to leave, the yaw-kish of the waves hitting the beach lulled us back to our chairs,

while the sun became an ever-tinier pink sliver and disappeared.

The common Costa Rican expression pura vida means a lot of things, including hello and goodbye. If you say it about a person, it means s/he’s good people. But it also translates loosely as “Life is good”.

Which, in Costa Rica, it certainly was.

Pura vida.

Retrobruxist Friday 11/2/12

Three years ago, I responded to the negging incident. Awwwww, I was such an online-dating newbie, with my adorable disappointment in dudes’ profiles and emails. Now I’m all jaded and cranky and resigned to spinsterhood.

Progress.

My battle with acne started decades back. I wrote about it two years ago. I do eat way less sugar nowadays, but I also use

OXY face wash.

My sister looked at the bottle recently and was like, “That bottle…”

And I said, “Looks like it’ll punch your zits in the face?”

“Yes, that’s it,” she said.

It does punch my zits in the face, for the most part. The dermatologist prescribed Retin-A too, and so far, when I apply only a pea-sized amount, rather than the circus peanut-sized amount I used to apply as a teen, it doesn’t seem to make my face

do this

in the sun.

I was just thinking about the genesis a year ago of the great martial art abdo-shindo because I seem to have given myself some abdo this week. There’s something sexy about sore abs. Makes you feel like they’re all hard and tight and ripply.

Sore abs are liars.

Speaking of which, I already gave you the Embarrassing Photo of the Week, but I’m nothing if not generous, so here you go:

Look at that six-pack.

Happy Retrobruxist Friday, y’all.

One Tough Mudder, Part 1

[Before we begin, a note for my mother and any other worried parties: A friend of mine suggested I solve my ragey eye infection problem by wearing goggles during the Tough Mudder, so I dug through some stuff in my shed and found a pair of ten-year-old swim goggles. They more or less did the trick. ‘Course, they were real squeezy on my head and always opaque with condensation and I looked real cute, you guys. But between them and the drops, which have been actually landing on my eyeballs, thanks to Shiv’s steady hand, it looks like we might be able to save the eye. Onward!]

There were so many Worst Parts of the Tough Mudder Carolinas, I don’t really know where to begin.

We’ll get to them in a minute, but I should start with this: it was SO RIDICULOUSLY FUN. After the Shit Show known as Tough Mudder Mid-Atlantic, TM management was clearly back on their game for this one, and Team ‘Lisa

(from left, me, Kate M. “The Ginger Menace”, Shiv, and Hammer)

had SUCH a good time, y’all. People kept asking, “Are you all really named Lisa?” and we would explain that we were all Herculisas! Ha!

The fifth member of our team, Z, is not pictured, as he was behind the camera. Also, this counts as the Embarrassing Photo of the Week, considering that my “booming system”, as Dan NJ calls it, makes everyone else’s systems look like subwoofers.

Anyway, there was laughter and camaraderie. There was psyching each other up, cheering each other on, and hoisting each other over walls. There were inspiring athletes: one dude carried a pumpkin the entire course (you know, for Halloween!); a guy with a prosthetic leg ran our heat.

Some Mudders dressed in costumes: a caveman, a couple bumblebees, a bunch of superheroes, folks in interview suits, some jailbirds, and two guys who wore nothing but sneakers and pink lamé thongs. With their race numbers written in Sharpie on their ass cheeks.

It was hilarious and awesome and inspiring.

But the Mudder is supposed to be hard. When it’s hard, it’s good, and the good is bad, and the bad is good, because you’re doing it; you’re really doing this ridiculous thing. And so I present to you:

The Worst Parts of the Tough Mudder Carolinas, Ranked from Least Worst to Most Worstest of All the Things Ever

Least Worst: I’m actually kind of impressed that I didn’t have a panic attack in any of the tubes and tunnels we had to crawl through. My knees and elbows got scrapey and bruised, but apparently my theoretical claustrophobia is worse than my practical claustrophobia.

Worse: The upper body obstacles. Not the walls or the haystacks—those were fun because people let me climb on them and/or they shoved me over by my legs, feet, and ass—but the Hangin’ Tough and the Funky Monkey.

To be honest, I didn’t even really try on those because I knew I would be dropping into the water at some point, so I figured I’d just go ahead and put myself there. I KNOW, NOT THE MUDDER SPIRIT. Next time.

Also maybe for next time… Everest. (Z did it!)

Worser: Remember how I was worried about falling into the series of trenches full of water? Well, I didn’t fall in, but I did fuck up some other Mudders’ rhythm because, even though they say not to stop in between, I stopped. Sorry, people!

Kinda Bad: It wasn’t the carrying of logs that was bad. It was carrying the logs a long fucking way that was bad.

Definitely Bad: At one point, you had to fireman’s-carry a partner up a hill. I called dibs on Hammer, threw her over my shoulders, and started trudging. And even though she was the smallest person in our group, I still had to stop mid-way and take a break. She piggy-backed my ass from the switch-off point to the end. Beast!

Goddamn Terrible: The very first obstacle is called the Arctic Enema, a dumpster full of ice water with a board in the middle that you have to swim under. And when I say “ice water”, I don’t mean “really cold water”, I mean, water, but with a shit-ton of ice in it. As someone who grew up swimming summers in

Buzzards Bay,

I liked to consider myself a person who knew something about submersing oneself in cold water, but after experiencing the Arctic Enema, I imagine it’s more akin to winter-swimming in

Baffin Bay.

And even if I’d had the upper-body strength to hoist myself out, which I didn’t, being in that water for eight seconds made all my systems go beeeeeeeeeew brrrwwww booooo, and I was functionally dysfunctional. Fortunately, Z scooped me out by my arms.

Coming soon: One Tough Mudder, Part 2

Can You Even Dye My Eyes to Match My Gown?

I totally forgot on Retrobruxist Friday that I was going to implement a new feature to help me get over the idea that I might look repulsive on the internet: Embarrassing Photo of the Week.

Well, I’m here to remedy that situation right now. I was going to take another jacked-up pic of myself with Photo Booth, but! I jogged up to Boone this weekend to visit The Land of Oz with my dad and brother/fam, an annual debacle of a trip about which I will have to write one of these days, and I ended up in the family room, sifting through old photo albums and taking pictures of pictures.

Let me preface this photo by saying that my mom is an excellent seamstress. Growing up, whatever I asked for, she made, including the 7th grade prom dress you’re about to see. She would take me to the fabric store, and we would flop through giant McCall’s and Simplicity pattern books together. I’d point to The Dress, whereupon we would wind through the stacks of bolts until I zeroed in on the exact right fabric.

Some notes about this magnum opus:

  • Yes, that is a double bubble-skirt. Shut up. It was very much the fashion at the time.
  • If you click the photo and see it bigger, you might think that the white fabric has tiny black polka dots on it, but you’d be wrong — those are tiny hearts.
  • No, it’s not the lighting; my legs are indeed seven shades darker than my arms. That’s because I’m wearing dancers’ tights. I didn’t own panty hose, and these were in the days before one went bare-legged to such occasions.
  • Yes, that pony-tail holder is made of the same fabric as the giant bow on my ass. (I told you my mom would do whatever I asked of her.)
  • But most importantly, really, seriously,
look at my hand.

Hahahaha. I can’t believe I didn’t take up modeling.

On a sober note, I’ve always said/thought that I’ve been a fatty since forever. It’s clear from this picture that I was not fat in 7th grade. I really did start putting on weight in 8th grade and gained 50 pounds by the end of my year in Italy, but what’s interesting is, I truly thought of myself at the time as a fat girl.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it was the thing to do for middle school girls. Maybe it’s because I had been binge-eating for so long that I just assumed.

Anyway, back to important things:

(a) This dress is still in the closet upstairs in case anybody wants to borrow it.

(b) Next week: 8th grade prom dress.