Episode 26: Lucy’s Story

Hannah:
Welcome back, Burn Pod listeners. Now today’s episode, we’re going to be chatting to a couple of our new ambassadors. These amazing women that are part of our community, and everyone has their own story, so we just like to mix up all the educational podcasts with some real world women’s stories. So I’d love to introduce Lucy to you all. Welcome, Lucy.

Lucy:
Hi, Hannah. Thanks very much.

Hannah:
Thanks so much for joining us. Now, just so our listeners can get to know you a little bit, give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and a bit of a background.

Lucy:
I’m a 39 year old working woman. So I’m a mum of two. I work in the city. I work part time. I spend a lot of time taking care of kids. I love them, so that’s okay.

Hannah:
That helps.

Lucy:
Yeah, life is pretty much being a mum and that’s really it.

Hannah:
Yeah. And how long have you been with BurnTheory for?

Lucy:
So I actually looked it up the other week and it’s a year and a month.

Hannah:
Oh, happy anniversary.

Lucy:
Thank you.

Hannah:
Now, what I’d love to do is just, I guess, set the scene for our listeners and maybe take Lucy back to her teenage or younger adult years, if you can remember back, and getting into, I guess, your relationship with fitness and health and yourself, any sports that you did, any difficulties that you came up against or anything that you just found really worked for you.

Lucy:
Well, I had to think about it before. I was actually thinking, I remember we were about eight. I know I was in primary school and we were doing sport and one of the options was to do aerobics.

Hannah:
Oh, wow.

Lucy:
Yeah. And it was the only thing that I found really attractive and really appealing, which is, I think, probably strange.

Hannah:
Unusual, yeah.

Lucy:
But we grew up poor, so I didn’t really have many opportunities to do extracurricular activities. And to be honest, I was actually quite a heavy smoker for a few years and I was a heavy drinker, so there wasn’t a lot of fitness in my life at all for probably about seven years. And it was actually when I moved to Tassie that I really started finding my feet with it. And that was that I revisited a childhood love of cycling.

Hannah:
Oh yeah.

Lucy:
And so I started commuting a lot on my bike and obviously, Tassie is very hilly, so I had no other means to transport. I couldn’t drive until I was 30, so everything for me was about cycling and getting out into nature and hiking and yeah, I just made that my ammo and just really enjoying my body to that extent. But it was actually, I have really terrible allergies and I needed to find a gym that I could go to that would challenge me physically and be a really positive space and actually when I found BurnTheory, so, yeah.

Hannah:
So was it not having the car and then having to bike around and… I’ll just wait for my dog to finish having the loudest drink. Can you hear that?

Lucy:
No.

Hannah:
So noisy when they drink. I don’t think they’re very efficient at drinking water.

Lucy:
Have you seen the slow motion of dogs drinking? It was water flying everywhere off the tongue.

Hannah:
Yeah and then they walk away from their bowl and half of it falls on the floor anyway.

Lucy:
Yeah.

Hannah:
Okay, he’s finished up. So I’ll just cut that bit out and cut that bit. So when you arrived into Tassie and didn’t have a car so had to bike everywhere, was that the crux for you to say, “All right, well, smoking and drinking, doesn’t help with that. It makes things a lot harder.” And is that when you started to sort of shift more to that exercise and fitness focus?

Lucy:
Yeah. Look, I was a student as well, so I didn’t have a lot of money for smoking and drinking.

Hannah:
It’s expensive.

Lucy:
Sorry. I’ve got a baby wanting Googie milk. I’ll make you Googie milk. Go on, baby. So it was a slow thing. I don’t think it was… It wasn’t something that just happened overnight. But so for example, I lived in north Hobart when I first moved to Hobart and I had a job that started at 8:00 AM in the morning. So I’d be off and I’d cycle into Sandy Bay and then I’d do my thing all day at the uni and then I’d cycle home. And everywhere I moved around, I just kept cycling and walking and then I’d have solo holidays on Maria Island and I’d take my bike.

Hannah:
That’s amazing. And you would just camp over there?

Lucy:
Yeah. I used to camp over there. I’d cycle down to the South Islands and camp there. And it was my favourite space, my favourite place. And I actually took my husband there, he wasn’t my husband yet, and that was actually where we found out that we were pregnant with our first child.

Hannah:
Oh.

Lucy:
So yeah, it was a bit magical.

Hannah:
Yeah.

Lucy:
It was a bit magical, and also disgusting because I was so sick. That’s how we knew. I’m like, “Wow, I need to vomit at the smell of oats.”

Hannah:
That’s unusual, yeah.

Lucy:
Also my husband is really fit and he just loves activity of all sorts and he’s a caver and does cave rescue when people need rescuing.

Hannah:
Wow, that’s cool.

Lucy:
He’s really into hiking and cycling and all sorts, so he’s been really good for that because he is just such a positive influence. And I think really up until I’d met him, I’d only known quite an Australian larrikin culture of going to the pub and playing and listening to live music and drinking and partying. And then yeah, I met him and it was like everything that I enjoyed on my own, which was cycling and hiking, I had someone else to do it with, so that was really nice.

Hannah:
That’s special. So with the two kids and the job and everything else that comes in with life, how do you manage your time for yourselves and juggle all those things?

Lucy:
So I made just a genuine commitment to taking care of myself because yeah, if you don’t exercise, if you don’t feel good in your own body, you’re no good to anybody else around you because you just feel oppressed and you feel unloved because you’re not loving yourself.

Hannah:
Yeah.

Lucy:
So yeah, well one, I joined BurnTheory. And actually, I don’t know if you remember it, but I’d actually seen an advertisement on Facebook and I was like, “That looks like a great gym. I think I’d like to join.” And then it was like, “Book a time to come into BurnTheory.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m not very good at making commitments like that.” And so I just went, “Oh, I won’t do that. I won’t do that.” And then you called and you said, “I see that you almost made it. Do you want to book a time with me?” And it was like, that is so helpful. I just needed somebody to get me over that next step of actually organising a time.

Hannah:
Yeah.

Lucy:
And it just honestly changed my life because it just… And it was that little bit of care that really matters. And so pretty much, I just made a commitment to go to the gym three to four times during the week. So I make sure I have an hour lunch. That’s really important. I’ve just got to turn off the washing machine.

Hannah:
Hashtag mom life.

Lucy:
Yes, total mom life. I’ve already done two loads. So I just make a commitment to go during the week. I can’t get too sweaty because I work in an office, so I just make sure to go to barre classes. But I think also, obviously, cardio is pretty important, so I try to go to boxing on the weekends at least once a fortnight and preferably once a week. And obviously my husband’s really supportive of that.

Hannah:
It makes you feel better for yourself and with yourself as well when you move your body. And I know it’s hard because I get caught up in life. I own a gym and I sometimes go months where I’ve exercised literally twice in two months. I caught myself doing that when I was opening Moonah studio. And it’s so easy just to have that rhetorical, that, I don’t know, that story running around in your head saying I’m too busy. I don’t have time or other things are more important and it’s hard to get back on the bandwagon than it is to just stay on it, even if you dip and ebb and flow, and I just found when I move, I’m a lot more efficient.

Lucy:
Absolutely and you’re just happier. So sometimes I’ve been really grim and been going into the studio. So I remember one time Alice was there, “So, how you doing?” I’m like, “I am not in a good mood. I’m not happy.” And she’s like, “All right, well maybe you’ll feel up after this.” I really did. I walked out singing, but yeah.

Hannah:
Yeah. And you just got to get your butt there, don’t you? We do the rest. But just getting yourself dressed or walking in the door, even if you tell yourself, look… Say you’re at a 24 hour gym and you don’t feel like it and you walk in and say, “I’m going to give myself 10 minutes.” And I guarantee if you push through the first 10, 15 minutes, you’re usually there for the rest of the workout and you feel so much better for it.

Lucy:
Absolutely. And that’s it. And I think this is it as well. I always thought I have to be positive and happy and up it’s about this attitude that’s unbreakable. But actually going, you know what? No, it’s okay that you’re in a bad mood and you can go to the gym and admit you’re in a bad mood and that’s okay.

Hannah:
Yeah, exactly.

Lucy:
As long as you’re here.

Hannah:
Exactly. You can’t always be up. That’s not being a human. We all know we notoriously have our moments, especially, particularly women. We feel all the feels.

Lucy:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And look, and this is it. I think for me it was about setting realistic expectations. I don’t think I’ve lost any weight, but I am so muscly and I’m so strong and I feel really good. My daughter’s going on 15 kilos, I think more maybe, and she’s easy to pick up. I can carry her around. Occasionally, we’re like, “Do you want to catch her? You want to catch her? Let’s throw. We’ll throw,” which is very responsible, but she loves it. And I can even piggyback my son and he’s nine and he is solid muscle. So it’s just, I love the fact that I’m so strong and that’s been the goal. It’s not, oh, you need to lose weight. You need to be perfect. You need to be happy. You need to be gorgeous. You need to be skinny. You need to be all the things. It’s like, no, you’ve got to like yourself-

Hannah:
Yeah.

Lucy:
however you are. And particularly, I turn 40 next year and one of my knees… Finding out I had no ACL was like, “Oh, that explains so many things.” But also just being like, “Holy shit.” That’s actually quite… It’s not a disability, but it’s an inhibitor and realising that, but being like, “You know what? That doesn’t mean I have to stop. It just means I have to manage it.”

Hannah:
Yeah. Working around it and find other ways, yeah.

Lucy:
Exactly. And realising I’m getting older and I’m slowly falling apart and that’s fine. I mean, after having two babies, I had one naturally and I had one by a C-section. I’ve only recently just got back feeling in my lower stomach.

Hannah:
Oh, my god.

Lucy:
So, it’s about just kindness and not putting really cruel expectations. That’s what I’ve found for me that I just don’t… I’m not mean to myself anymore.

Hannah:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s working with what you have. I think we expect our bodies to, and I think it was in one of our previous podcasts, speaking to one of guest specialist, she was saying that I think we always expect our bodies to be able to do what they did when they were 20 and that’s sort of what we aspire to. And if it can’t do what it could do at 20, then we feel like we’re useless or we’re not good enough. Your body will change. We get older. We get more ailments and stiff and sore joints. You have babies. Jeez, bodies go through so much, particularly more so for women.

Lucy:
Absolutely.

Hannah:
So knowing where they’re sitting at the moment and loving them and doing the right movements and expecting of your body what it can actually do, I think, is really important. And it takes the pressure off yourself.

Lucy:
Absolutely. And I think, people say things like, “Oh, I wish I was young again and I knew then what I know now,” and yeah, that’s great. We can wishful thinking, but when you really implement that, which is you need to be kind to yourself, you need to accept yourself for who you are and you need to have realistic expectations, I think that’s something that you don’t have when you’re young, because you are full of vim and idealism. But as you get older, you just realise, you know what? It’s okay to be old. I’m not as beautiful as I was. I was gorgeous and now I’m a mom and that’s fine. I still feel beautiful. I still feel good. But I know that it’s about how I feel, not how I look. Yeah. It’s a completely different view of how it is to be as a person in the world.

Hannah:
Yeah, exactly. And just before we wrap up, do you have any tips for listeners to help motivate or manage their time better?

Lucy:
It definitely is about priorities. At one stage, I was attempting to make sure I ironed all of my bedsheets.

Hannah:
Wow. That’s next level.

Lucy:
Yeah. It was really stupid. And I realised that imposed this like, you must be this very tidy mother kind of idea. And it was like, you know what? That’s just ridiculous. You don’t actually get to enjoy anything if you do this. And so it’s about prioritising what actually matters and what makes you feel good. And that’s, I think, always about checking in and just being kind. It’s always being kind and keeping an eye on yourself and treating yourself like you’re your own best friend, really.

Hannah:
Yeah, exactly. And talking to yourself like you talk to your best friend.

Lucy:
Yeah.

Hannah:
What would you tell them?

Lucy:
Do you really need to iron [crosstalk 00:15:59] Do you need to iron the dish cloths? Do you really need to do that?

Hannah:
Probably not.

Lucy:
And then you say that to someone, “I felt like I needed to iron this.” They’re like, “Oh my auntie used to iron her underpants.”

Hannah:
Wow. Yeah because a lot of people say undies.

Lucy:
Yeah, so many people say undies.

Hannah:
Well, thank you so much for being on board and spending your time with us. It was a really cool chat. I guess, any final words before we wrap this up?

Lucy:
No, just a big thank you to you and Dani and Alice and just the team is so wonderful and I just absolutely love coming to the gym. I’ve liked going to the gym before, but I’ve never just loved it and really felt comfortable.

Hannah:
Oh, well, thank you so much. It does take pretty cool people like you to make the space too, so we appreciate all of our wonderful, wonderful ladies. All right. Well, thank you so much again and for our Burn Pod listeners, until next time, I’ll catch you later.