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 said.
“It’s not about losing weight,” Adorable told me as he looked at me directly. “It’s about how you feel and about being healthy and fit.”
“It’s about losing weight,” I said. “Like about twenty pounds.”
I had already searched the internet and found that weight gain was a common side effect of working out for the first time. So I told myself I’d be okay with this for now and see how it went.
Those first mornings on my own on the treadmill seemed pointless. I wore baggy sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt. I brought a mug of coffee. And everything hurt. Adorable told me to go at any pace as long as I got in at least two miles. That was about 90 minutes of walking. It took me nearly 45 minutes to walk a single mile.
At first, I watched the news on the big screens in the second-floor training rooms, but as I upped my speed and my distance, I turned to the playlists on my iPhone for inspiration.
I went to R & J Sports in Bethesda, and they put me in Brooks running shoes that were, I’m not exaggerating, like walking on a cloud. They also sold me a pair of ultrathin Balega socks that absolutely do not slip, so I finally said goodbye to two blistering blisters. I picked up some Under Armour slightly fitted short sleeve T-shirts that didn’t stick to me, as odd as that sounds. For my legs, even now I am convinced my Lululemon yoga pants are the best things on the planet. I read about the controversy over those pants a few years ago, but there is simply nothing like them. Even now I rinse them out more frequently than I’d like, but remember I was working with Adorable, who stood very close to me for 60 minutes and stared at every move I made.
I suspect it’s an occupational hazard for trainers if they’ve got to work that closely with people who do not rinse out their yoga pants.
At one of our earliest sessions, Adorable asked me if I felt the burn after we did 20 reps focusing on my glutes.
“What would make you think I wouldn’t feel the burn?” I asked.
“Just checking.”
Adorable told me some clients prefer that he count every repetition aloud. We didn’t work that way. I’d usually ask him where we were when I thought I was out of oxygen. My favorite words: “Five more.” My least favorite: “Eleven more.”
When we were focusing on my core, wherever that was, I looked over at Adorable, and I’m sure he was thinking he was glad the Equinox Fitness Training Institute includes CPR certification. As good as he is, it would probably not be helpful to his career to kill one of his clients.
There was a session around that time where it was all I could do to keep from throwing up right there in the gym. I struggled on the drive home, and when I arrived at my house, I wasn’t sure if I should call 911.
But that night I went to sleep and felt fine when my alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. I walked into my gym clothes with that sense of euphoria that you read about. I am on the other side of this.
That was when we began to have regular discussions about the difference between pain and burn. There was no safe answer to his question, “Are you feeling pain or burn?” If I said pain (especially if it related to my lower back), we would simply stop immediately and move to that horrible machine that works your lower back until you feel the burn.
Day 2, March 31, 2014
“Yeah baby, it hurts a bunch
The girls got going and we had a munch
I promise on a dime, it’s the last time
I’ll never have a liquid lunch.”
—Caro Emerald, “Liquid Lunch”
I tried to cram in as much cardio as I could this morning. I would have done more if I didn’t need to shower and dress for work. I walked nearly four miles on the treadmill; for the first three miles I was walking briskly at 3.6 MPH, and for the last almost-mile, I walked at 3.7 MPH. After the treadmill, I did five minutes on the arm bike, which was all I had time for, but more importantly, it was as much as I could take.
Most of this morning’s music came from my Ladies Night mix, the one I’m compiling in anticipation of