Sharing the love OR Have you accepted Richard Simmons as your personal savior?

I always imagined myself with someone active. Someone who could come with me on my long workouts, or at least carpool with me to the gym. I found a girl who I love, who's a wonderful person, who's caring and supportive, and who's a couch potato and a smoker. The expression "couch potato" doesn't exist in Spanish, so when I found her still in bed and wrapped up in a blanket at 4 in the afternoon one day and said, "you look like a potato!", it had some novelty. And the name stuck. As in every couple we have our nicknames that make other people gag. For me and Silvia it's Potato ("patata") and Co-Potato ("compatata"). A verb has even been born of it: "patatar", "to potato" and it's my other half's favorite thing to do. In fact, it's pretty much all she does. In fact, sometimes she gets depressed and it's hard to get her to STOP being a potato, even to just get up and go to the couch. And she's ALWAYS yo-yoing. When I first met her she was only eating 800 calories a day, all in meat (some of it raw - also, who the hell would have thought you'd find me with a carnivore!). Then, one night we got drunk and she ate an ENTIRE baguette's worth of bacon sandwich. When she had finished she went to a gas station and bought another sandwich of the revolting variety that you can find next to the Red Bull in any gas station or 7-11 in the US. She weighs herself every morning and will say "I lost 3 kilos yesterday" or "I got 2 kilos fatter". I tell her it's impossible to gain or lose that much fat mass in a day and that it's probably water, but she pays me no never mind.

She loves to tell me about what a good athlete she is. "I did Camino de Santiago," she says (a many day hike starting as far away as Switzerland and ending up in the north-west tip of Spain). "That was 10 years ago," I say, "it doesn't count anymore". "I used to climb up Tibidabo on my mountain bike and bike 40k to Sitges," she says. "But you couldn't do it now," I say. One day I was talking about a run I'd done and she said, "That's not that far." "You couldn't even run a kilometer," I said. Potato: "Sure I could." Me: "Wanna bet?" So we made plans to go to a track on Sunday. The terms: she must run one full kilometer without walking. Loser buys the other one dinner. We went to the track and had to ask around to find out exactly how much we had to run to hit a kilometer, 2 laps around the outter-most ring of the track. She started out fast and by the end we were nearly crawling, but not walking. She was breathing so hard that I seriously wondered if continuing to push her like this was a good idea and if I would need to do CPR. But low and behold, 6 minutes and 10 seconds later she finished. You should have seen how high she held her head that day. She was sick to her stomach and coughing all day long from the effort, but she was proud of herself. I'd never seen her proud of herself before.

I see in her exactly what I was like before I discovered triathlon. She hates her body and punishes herself with food. Either she totally deprives herself, or she binges, and to punish the binging she binges even more. She's depressed and doesn't really have any reason not to be. Why bother to find a reason to get out of bed every morning if bed is so comfy? But I KNOW a more active lifestyle would do her good. I KNOW she'd feel better in her own skin and wouldn't say "yeah right" when I tell her she's beautiful. I KNOW she would have more energy and WANT to eat better rather than depriving herself and then eating a whole pizza (or two) by herself. In the beginning I tried. I said, "You know, you would feel a lot better if you got a little exercise". "I don't have time". "Sure you do, you sit alone for 3 hours every evening staring at the wall and drinking coctails waiting for me to get home". "Ay, Claire," she said, "I'm tired when I get home from work,". I tried starting small, "Why don't we just go for a 20 minute walk 3 times a week?" "Ay, Claire!" she said, like I'd asked her to walk 6 hours in the freezing rain. "You could burn more calories in a day and eat more," I tried. "I don't like exercise, I'd rather starve myself," she said. "But then your metabolism...". "Ay, Claire, I don't want to!" Now she just says, "Ay, Claire" every time I even start.

I have a lot of respect for Richard Simmons. Given, the man's a walking joke, but you gotta give him credit where credit is due. He gets the lost causes, the people who can't even get out of bed or roll over because they would crush their lungs, and he gets them moving. Forget a sprint distance triathlon, many of these people literally risk a heart attack walking to the mailbox. He gets the biggest, fattest people who have lost ALL hope, and he manages to get them up, moving, slimming down, and feeling good about themselves. In my last job I gave introductory workouts to new gym members and encountered a lot of these women. I tried like hell to make exercise un-threatening so they would keep going. It's NOT easy to do and I lost most of them. Richard Simmons is a good man in my book.

So it all gets me thinking, this must be what door-to-door bible thumpers must feel like. "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?" Slam! It's the same as, "Why don't we go for a wa..." "Ay, Claire!" Religion is something that either you have it or you don't. Same goes for a fit lifestyle, and all the fitness missionaries are convinced that they can save others' quality of life like they've saved their own. People "find fitness" like they "find Jesus". There's nothing more irritating than a pair of clean-cut boys in ties and starched collars trying to save your soul. Alright, they love Jesus, I get it. I'm very happy for their souls and that they've found a reason to enjoy life, we all know how difficult that is and anything that gets you through the day is great. Really. Just keep your personal savior away from my soul. I'm a lesbian, for heaven's sake! I must sound eerily like those guys when I get started. "Have you accepted Richard Simmons as your personal savior?" And Silvia's probably not the only one who wants to scream at me, "Alright, you love your heartrate monitor, I get it. I'm very glad that you've found a way to deal with your own demons, but keep them far from my beer and Chinese take-out! I'm a smoker for heaven's sake!" How could someone get so angry when you're just trying to save their soul?