Strong Women

I have been working out a lot and only lifting and not running. While I know I will go back to running in the future, this has been a great change and so fun. Jeff has been helping me and I feel like I have never been so strong in my entire life. I was close my sophomore year in college when I was playing volleyball at Dixie, I could bench more, but my abs were not so strong. It has been so fun and a great thing for Jeff and I to do together. When I was running, I felt in great shape cardiovascular wise but I did always feel a little skinny and wimpy. It is so fun to always flex my arm and feel muscle there. I always tell Cheyenne to feel my muscle so now she will do it to me and it is the cutest thing EVER!! We will be eating dinner and she will stick out her elbow toward me and say, "Mommy, feel my muscles!"

When I taught health and learned about eating disorders, I learned it was really important to emphasize to your athletes (as a coach) or daughters (as a parent) the importance of being strong and not skinny or thin. Your strength is something much easier to control in a healthy way than your thinness, because that has so much more to do with your genetics. And really people look better when they have some muscle!

Growing up I was always smaller and skinnier than most on my sports teams and my dad would praise the girls who were bigger and stronger. That was so great because that is what I aspired to be was bigger and stronger. When I got older and hit puberty, he would tell me I needed to lose 10 pounds so I could jump higher or run faster, which honestly made me feel bad, but I knew he was just trying to make me a better athlete. I think those comments could have been dangerous if I didn't have a good relationship with him and a good self-image and hadn't already decided when I was young that the perfect body was strong and sturdy.

My parents both loved sports and that is something Jeff and I both love. My Dad was a great athlete and competitor at University of Oregon as a hurdler. He even got invited to the Olympic Trials. He later ran marathons with my mom after they were married. My mom especially set a great example to me of lifetime fitness and I want to do the same thing for my girls. She was a pioneer of sorts for women's sports. When she was younger it was not popular or common for women to be athletes. She grew up on a farm and was a rebel of sorts, never working in the kitchen or inside but always doing the manual labor outside with her dad and brothers... milking cows, moving pipe, etc. She played what little sports were available at her high school. I think I remember her saying she ran track, but girls weren't allowed to run over half a mile, because they didn't think it was good for them or something. In college she played field hockey for Ricks and BYU and some other sports too but I can't remember. Growing up my mom would run or ride her bike to work so my sister or I could drive to school. She was always on a million different adult sports teams (softball, soccer, racquetball, volleyball, etc.). Now she is 61 and still plays on a softball and volleyball team and plays racquetball all the time and rides her bike to work. If there were boys playing sports, my parents would encourage me to play with them, "If they can play, you can play!" they would say. They never made me feel like I couldn't be as good as any boy. Especially for my mom, if she wanted to play at all, much of the time it would have to be with boys.I mean, when guys are really good athletes, I can't beat them, but I could beat a lot of boys I dated in sports, so just because people are boys doesn't mean they are automatically better at sports.

This blog is like a journal for me, since I don't have time to do both and I have been an extreme journal writer my whole life (I have about 20 or so journals from my youth). These are just thoughts I have been having about raising my girls to be strong women with self-confidence and a great body image! I hope we can succeed in doing that:)