#particularly in hs when I was chubby and depressed and they made us to a 10 minute mile

[vitos-ordination-song]

Was anyone else abused thru forced exercise? Like I can remember my brother being punished by sadistic exercise routines and stuff but most of the time it wasn’t even punishment. It was just my parents being psycho. Something that’s been depressing me is that when my mom visited a couple months ago, I felt bad because I didn’t realize how much her body had deteriorated. She’s still healthy enough but she can’t hike like she used to. We only did 3-4 miles but she started to be in pain towards the end and I was sympathetic and helped her out when we got home. Then I thought about it… I showed her way more care than she did towards her own children when we were growing up (story of my life but anyway).

Almost every vacation we took was full of hiking. I was tiny and the only girl for a while and my dad literally wrote a song to make fun of me for being “delicate.” Neither my sister and I could keep up with the rest of the family and my parents would just leave us behind on trails! This was out in national parks. I was hiking in Arizona as early as age 3, and I remember doing a 14 mile hike at age 7. Typically the hikes were 3-10 miles, often strenuous. Sometimes we did more than one a day, and we usually didn’t get any days off. It was absolutely fucking exhausting. I’d get horrible cramps in my stomach, I’d be hungry, thirsty, and bored. And they just didn’t give a shit. No complaining, we should just be grateful for the opportunity. Pretty sure my ankles and feet were damaged because of overexercise at a young age.

When I was around 6, my family visited Yosemite and we started doing the upper falls hike. Around halfway up I begged to stop and, for the only time I can remember, my mom granted mercy and took me back down the mountain (possibly because she was also having a hard time). But my actual sadist of a father forced my brothers to finish it. Years later when we visited the park again, trying to prove I was tough, I did climb myself. And I had horrible leg pain for MONTHS afterwards. The hike is so steep that going back down is just as bad as going up, and honestly it’s pretty dangerous. The fact that my dad made my six year old and eight year old brothers do it is just shameful. They were resentful of me for years after I got out of it that first time.

My mom always signed me up for sports, whether I wanted to do them or not. There was a lot of embarrassment involved there, but I could usually just get over it. Around age 12 though, she forced me to join a professional swim league. I am a strong but not fast swimmer. I was okay with summer league but this was something different: two hour practices in Olympic length pools. We got yelled at if we stopped to breathe. I felt like I was drowning. It’s incredibly stupid but it turned into a huge power struggle with my mom, ‘cause I started refusing to go and she wouldn’t tolerate any threat to her authority. She of course had given me other body issues (she used to joke about giving all her kids eating disorders) so I would go to practice hungry and tell myself at least I was losing weight. I was literally still a kid, I wasn’t even done growing…

In my teen years, my mom got into CrossFit. She was super annoying about it and made me go too. I hated it of course, and I was usually the only kid there unless my siblings came along. The type of exercise they do is dangerous; to this day I think being forced to do “box jumps” damaged my legs, and CrossFit definitely contributed to my mom’s stress injuries.

This is part of a larger topic I guess: my parents are totally dead to the flesh, don’t even know they have bodies, and tried to rob me of mine too. It’s taken so long to rebuild a healthy relationship to my body and to exercise; it’s been a struggle to balance between avoiding it out of depression or overdoing it out of anxiety.