Rock Your Body Right

Just once in my life, I would like to fall asleep like the people in a mattress commercial. I would like to lay my little head on the pillow, smile sweetly, and then drift peacefully into a restful 8 hours of dream-time. But I wont. I have a mind that is usually juggling about 19 different things and when I lay down at night my brain seems to want to go at top speeds until I pass out from exhaustion. To combat this, I have discovered pinterest. Things I have searched for on pinterest in the last week: roller derby, roller derby wedding, Aquarius, sports inspiration, skating warm up, shin stretches, octopus art, Prague, Ryan Gosling, Suzy Hotrod, life hack, quinoa, grilled cheese. You get the gist. My point here is that I cover a lot of ground on any given night, and I would like to talk about my continual disappointment in a particular area of pinterest searches. Workout Inspiration.

Despite my best efforts, I am not easily motivated to workout. I am regularly searching for the holy grail of workout motivation, the thing that will make me LOVE it. In my wide and varying, sometimes rambling, pinteresting journeys I have found there are a ton of really helpful and inspiring quotes and ideas that get me through the toughest of practices. So the natural next step was to look for "workout inspiration" in the darkness of night, right? WRONG. This yields a whole bunch of over-tan skinny women showing off bikini bodies while wedding dress shopping with tiny purse dogs. OK, that is a slight exaggeration. I am not against tans, wedding dresses, or adorable tiny dogs because first of all they're all pretty awesome and second, people have free will and all that. What annoyed me about this particular key-word search was the abundance of stuff about appearance and a lack of stuff about health or athletics to balance it out.

Every woman gets to make a decision for herself regarding why she works out; why she is in the gym when she could doing anything else in the world rather than sweating like a beast on the treadmill or grunting out another set of squats. For some women, the reason is a rocking bikini body, but not for all of us so why is that the main thing that comes up? It was just disappointing when I was looking at things like "I am not strong for a woman, I am just strong" and "I may not be there yet, but I am closer today than yesterday" and then transitioned all too quickly to "Shrink your waist" and "Imagine the outfits you'll wear". It was a shock to the system. I got a little mad at our culture for a moment about it.

I have been rolling this around in my head now for a while and I am still not sure how it makes me feel. On one hand, I think that whatever gets a person off the couch is GREAT inspiration. Do whatever works for you because your health is important. Even if your goal isn't to have better health, that is at least part of the result of working your ass off (literally). Your heart will be healthier, your blood pressure will decrease, and, most likely, your mood will improve as a result of endorphins (and looking HAWT). These are all good things, right? Yes... but... why does it still irk me? Why was my gut reaction to get pissy about it and think "There they go again, making it ALL ABOUT IMAGE. Ignorant jerks. As if a woman can't workout FOR HERSELF" and so on (and on and on). It's a good thing that Mr. Maguire wasn't awake because he would have gotten an earful about it. And doesn't every man just LOVE when his partner wakes him up in the dead of night to lecture them about feminist principles poorly thought out between waves of exhaustion?

I think those pins irritate me because I am a self centered jerk and think my reasons for doing things are superior to everyone else's. And, they are superior, but mostly for me. My reasons and my motivations work for ME. And though its TOTALLY BAFFLING that sometimes they don't work for other people, that is just how it is. So I guess I will have to tolerate that other people find inspiration in other ways. But I don't have to like it. Accepting that other people care a lot about having a bikini body might actually make me sleep better at night. Or maybe that is my next pinterest topic...

Derby Love,
Mollytov Maguire