Alyssa Ages, author of Secrets of Giants, shares her empowering story of trials, triumphs and lifting heavy things

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome back to another edition of the Red Leaf Fitness podcast, A show dedicated to bringing you stories, interviews and conversations about living a healthy, resilient and productive life. I'm your host, Sean Blinch, and I want to thank you for making time to listen to this episode today and, if you like what we're putting down, we would love it if you would follow, rate and share this podcast. All right, now let's get down to business. Welcome back to the Red Leaf Fitness podcast. I am sitting here with Alyssa Ages. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 0:41

I am doing wonderful. How are you doing today?

Speaker 1: 0:43

I'm doing okay. I'm doing, I'm doing well. I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, secrets of Giants that just hit the shelves.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Yes, right.

Speaker 1: 0:58

So I have a couple of questions that I wanted to get into, but first of all I just wanted to first talk a little bit about where people can get this book and how it's been going, and just hear straight from you about it.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Yeah Well, the good news is you can get it anywhere books are sold. So if your local bookstore doesn't have a copy on the shelves, they can order it for you. If you want to buy local and you want to buy a signed copy which I assume they still have on the shelves my friends at Typebooks in the Junction have a couple of signed copies, and then my friends over at Queen Books on the East side also have a whole bunch of signed copies, and then anywhere else you can get it and you can call me up and be like hey, I'm local, Can you come sign my copy?

Speaker 1: 1:47

And I will do it.

Speaker 2: 1:48

Yeah, it's been going well. It's its own, not to be too punny about it, but it is its own version of heavy lifting, oh good pun Writing and releasing a book into the world. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:06

It's. You know, there's a lot that I was not expecting and it's a labor of love. I'm so proud of it. I'm so excited that it's out there in the world and I'm excited that it's resonating with people. That's the best part for me is the responses that I've been getting, including and this is excellent timing because my, I think, new favorite response I got yesterday last night from somebody through just my forum email on my website. I will actually read it to you because it's that good, yes, please do.

Speaker 2: 2:35

So this lovely gentleman said hi, I'm writing to say that I really enjoyed your book. I learned a lot and was even inspired to keep trying to get the lid off a jar of sauerkraut when I thought I couldn't get it. I stuck with it and enjoyed delicious savoriness this evening. Thank you, that's great. I was like yup, that's it. It just made me so happy because it is.

Speaker 2: 2:57

You know it's funny, but it is the essence of it, right, which is like stick to it. You can do hard things, even if that hard thing is opening up a jar of briny goodness.

Speaker 1: 3:07

I absolutely love that and I just wanted to double back just for a second and just make sure that everybody has what you have there, which is a my own signed copy. So if you'd like to borrow this, the answer will be no. Your pause, get your hands off and get your hands on your own copy. That's so cool.

Speaker 1: 3:31

I actually wouldn't mind piggybacking on that response that you got and I was sharing with Alyssa just before we started this podcast. It took me no time at all to get pretty gripped and I wouldn't mind reading really quick One of the first things that you're going to see, and I'll just sort of preface this a little bit. So it's always as a strength coach it's always been a. Really it's not easy getting people excited to come in and lift heavy stuff and do hard things right, and I know this very well, which is exactly the spirit of this book, and I just I don't think I've ever seen or heard a summary as concise as this.

Speaker 1: 4:21

So Alyssa says lifting heavy stuff is innate and primal and not in a buzzword kind of way. It taps into and amplifies all wonderful things that make being human awesome, like making us more courageous and less fearful, increasing confidence, giving us a sense of mastery, connecting us more deeply to our bodies and providing the pure exhilaration of doing something that once seemed impossible. Boom, like that's it. What does that mean to you? I mean, other than you know, that is exactly what it means to you, but could you expand on that?

Speaker 2: 5:02

Yeah, I mean, I think people have for a long time thought of strength training as one of two things Either it feels scary and foreign to them and the domain of you know I lift things up and put them down, kind of bros or they might think of it as a means to, like this aesthetic end I'm going to get bigger biceps and six pack abs, and one of the things I say in the book is, like that's not what it's about, and this book does not end with me getting them either, which is 100% true, although I did recently see a video of my back and it looks pretty great.

Speaker 2: 5:34

Yes, all right. So the whole thing with strength training is that it just allows you to feel your body in a way that I think our bodies are meant to move and meant to work out and meant to feel right. I want to walk around in a body that feels capable of doing things, and I think one of the incredible side effects of lifting is that there's almost nothing that I look at in the world and think I don't think I could move that.

Speaker 2: 6:04

And sometimes that's completely delusional, like I do now, look at buses and go I wonder if I could pull a bus now that I pulled a truck and like maybe not, maybe I can't, but I love that. I walk through life thinking that there's a chance and I think that's one of the most incredible things that strength training gives you is just this belief in yourself and your ability to do hard things.

Speaker 1: 6:24

I love that. I love that. That's so cool. And do you think that? Another thing that kind of hit me when I was going through was I think this is very timely topic. I think your book is arriving at a really important time with a really important message. Would you do you think so, like, do you do you think I could keep talking about the message and why it needs to get out there?

Speaker 2: 6:56

Yeah, I think you know and I'm going to kind of gear this towards women a little bit- as a woman.

Speaker 2: 7:04

Strength is important for everybody, but we are in a moment right now where there's a lot of authors who are putting out books talking about the way that women in sports have been treated and have been perceived. So a friend of mine wrote a book talking about how, you know, even the science in fitness has always focused on men, and that we've just sort of gone like well, I'm sure the same thing applies to women, right? And it doesn't. And I think for me personally, you know, got two little girls. I want them to grow up in a world that sees strength as being desirable, not in a, you know, aesthetic sort of a way, but just being something that people want, that they want to be strong, that girls want to grow up thinking that being strong is cool. And my daughters feel that way, which is amazing.

Speaker 2: 7:59

I hope they always think that, and I think we're in a time right now where we've got that opportunity to put that out there for women to say hey, you know, it's not bulkiness, isn't this thing to be scared of, right? Whether or not you are going to put on mass or get bulky is largely genetic when you lift, but either way, whether you do or you don't. It's a side effect of it. It's not the point. The whole point of it is how your confidence increases, how you believe in yourself in a different way, and I think that's really important.

Speaker 1: 8:35

Absolutely. And you know and just to build on a really good point, by the way I think that young people are coming up and they have so much information being thrown at them and they have an insatiable amount of access to it, so, like their phones, are these information highways of all this confusing stuff. And I think when you have mentors and beacons and you have strong role models and role modelship who are out there, that is, quite In my opinion, simply the antidote to a really vexing issue. That I is a rising issue, which I don't know if there's a clear answer, but if there, and if there was, you know it's gonna, it's like this, it's about this stuff and it's like banging the drum, about being excited, about getting strong. So I really applaud this message and, as you know, I have a young daughter who's two and I think about this all the time. How's she going to grow up? You know these are these are really relevant issues for me, so I think that's fantastic, alyssa.

Speaker 2: 9:58

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:59

Well, and I think to your daughter, having you and Val who make working out and make lifting, just this very it's normal, right, it just it's a part of life and that's going to be huge for her growing up, in particular, seeing her mom doing that kind of stuff, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Yeah, we, we, we try to get it and exercise in front of them as much as possible and we see it already. Williams, this is like you know he's, he's super excited. We bought him one of those little toy barbells and like, yeah, it's a blast and we have a little playa box and you know, and he does, he does little crossfit workouts and stuff with us.

Speaker 2: 10:38

But but yeah, like the best thing ever.

Speaker 1: 10:40

It's so good, yeah, but we do that.

Speaker 2: 10:43

I mean I do that with Cassidy, my older daughter. We I've been teaching her. We have a little chart, a little sticker chart in our gym and our garage and it's Cassidy's barbell, one on one chart. Amazing, I I've been teaching her all the major lifts with a broomstick and it's holds her if you fill out the whole sticker chart. So if you figure out how to do all of them with perfect form with this broomstick, I will get you. Rogue has a little like five pound barbell for kids. Yeah, so it's like you can. You can earn your barbell.

Speaker 1: 11:13

I love that. I also. Yeah, I, by the way, sticker charts are super effective on me as well and, yeah, I think that's awesome. So, secrets of giants Could you talk a little bit about the inspiration and sort of how it came to be?

Speaker 2: 11:35

Yeah, so I had been. It was an endurance athlete for a number of years, and then I had started my strength training journey with CrossFit and then moved my way into strongman and was doing strongman training for just over two years. I was training for a competition here in Toronto in my in. I was with my coach and we were doing an Atlas stone load. So if anybody doesn't know that, it's like the large round stone that you're picking up and you're either putting it to your shoulder or you're putting it over a bar. And I remember just having this sensation of complete exhaustion Not like this is a tough workout exhaustion, but just something else. And when I went home that day, I took a pregnancy test and I found out that I was pregnant.

Speaker 2: 12:22

And then three weeks later I found out that I was miscarrying and I went very quickly from feeling the strongest that I ever had in my life to feeling the weakest and just really broken and vulnerable. And I know that you know all about this. And one of the things I did during that time to just I don't know help my mental state, I guess, was I kept going back to the gym and working with my coach, and you know, whatever way we found was safe. And when I would leave those sessions I found that I was walking a little bit taller, was had my shoulders pulled back. He felt more confident in my body, my body's ability to do things, and I started thinking well, maybe I've had this lifting thing all wrong, right, maybe it's not about how much you can lift, but how you manage all the struggles that you go through outside of the gym with the things that you've learned inside of the gym. And so, fast forward a couple of years, I've had my two daughters.

Speaker 2: 13:22

I'm at this at the time that I was writing this book, approaching 40, I just turned 40. And I realized that for the last five years my body's primary function had been to get pregnant, stay pregnant, feed a small human with my body or somehow bounce back from all those things. And I thought, you know, I had this question when I, when I saw the impact of strength training on me following the miscarriage and going through all the fertility struggles, and I wanted to explore that more. I wanted to really understand okay, how did that help me? How did just picking up, you know, a long metal bar and some iron plates have that much of an impact on my mental and emotional state. That's so cool.

Speaker 1: 14:05

It's a great story and when you pick up a list of book, you'll hear that's essentially the story that she takes you on right from the beginning, and you hear you'll hear it with full color it's, it's. Even as a as a husband going through a similar journey with my wife, it resonated with me. So it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's a wonderful story. So you know, in the sense that you got a lot out of it, right, it was like it's not to say it wasn't a hard journey, it was, but yeah, it's a noble one and honorable. So could we go back to the very, very beginning? I would love to hear the origin story from day one. So could you start from where you were born and kind of how it led to today?

Speaker 2: 15:07

Yeah, so I was not an athletic kid. I was, you know, I should say as a little little kid. I was kind of as athletic as anybody else. Right, I was doing gymnastics, ballet, what have you?

Speaker 2: 15:21

When we moved from, I was living in Brooklyn we moved from Brooklyn to Long Island and all the girls were playing softball and I decided, for some reason, I was going to play baseball. This was what I wanted to do. I had no basis for this, I did not know if I was good at it or not, but I just was like I have to do something different than everybody else. And I went into it and it was terrible. I never hit the ball and I did get the MVP game ball one time for getting hit with the ball and getting an automatic walk to first base, and I basically that was when I was 10.

Speaker 2: 15:55

And for the next 10 years I kind of told myself this story, that I was just like not an athletic kid. That was it. I'm just. You know, I'm not good at this, I am not meant for this, and I avoided it as much as I possibly could. When I moved to New York and I was working one of my first office jobs and I had to play a game of softball. And when I tell you like I avoided things, I mean I literally would cut gym class when they had softball.

Speaker 1: 16:19

I was just.

Speaker 2: 16:19

I think it was. I was just traumatized by this. I was like I'm not doing it. And I had to. It was for work and I got. You know, I got up to bat and I hit the ball and when I was able to, I went off to the side and I called my mom. I was like, mom, I finally hit the ball, like I had to play softball, and I did it. I hit the ball and aren't you proud of me? Like, after all those swings and misses, I finally hit the ball. And there's this long pause. And she was like, yeah, no, that's great, but just, it wasn't that you never hit the ball in Little League, it was that you never swung the bat.

Speaker 2: 16:54

And I thought in that moment oh, my God, I have told myself this story that I have made up about my ability for the last decade plus of my life. Maybe I'm not bad at sports, maybe I've just been scared of failing at them and that sort of set me off on this course of trying to swing at everything, basically. So I signed up for a marathon. Having never run more than a couple blocks, I did end up doing a bunch of marathons. I signed up for the triathlon and, to be clear, a half Ironman triathlon without the ability to swim. I could breaststroke, whatever, I could doggie paddle, but I was like not a good swimmer and went through a ton of triathlons, didn't?

Speaker 2: 17:45

Ironman decided, ok, now what? And found my way into CrossFit and really started to just fall in love with the strength aspect of it. I liked cardio, I will always like cardio, I will always be a runner. But just going in there every day and doing something different and a little bit harder every single time was so different from what I'd been doing. Because when you're doing training for a cardio event, it's like it's another mile every time, right, but it doesn't feel as tangible as adding another plate onto a barbell, right. You can't feel that progress in the same way. And a friend of mine in my morning CrossFit class said I think you should try Strongman with me. There's this group class, go give it a shot. And I went into the Strongman gym that first day and I will never forget this. I come up in the elevator in this office building and the elevator door opens and I just heard death metal coming from behind this, like big, non-descript metal door.

Speaker 2: 18:54

It's like, oh no, maybe I should turn around and go back home. But I went in and that day I lifted a log, we pulled a ship anchor chain and at the very end we got to pick up Atlas stones and I was assigned to this 90 pound one. The first time I picked it up I didn't get it very far and I thought, oh my God, everyone's going to laugh at me, I'm not actually good at this, this is terrible. I should go home. But everyone encouraged me to try it again and I did and I got it up to my shoulder. And there's this moment that I remember and I have actually a picture of me holding it and you can see the smile on my face, because I remember in that moment thinking I could lift anything in this gym if I really wanted to. That is how invincible I felt Just picking up a rock and I was like this is what I want, this is it. I want to do this forever and I have stuck with that longer than I have stuck with anything else.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Oh, that's so cool.

Speaker 2: 19:51

It's a really fun sport.

Speaker 1: 19:53

That's so good and I can really hear the swing, the bat stuff that you were talking about earlier. Right there you just like you took it from like sport to sport to sport and and just continued it and just happened to find, like it's like that Goldilocks effect, like this is like, this is your sport.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Yeah, this is the one.

Speaker 1: 20:17

That's so good. You know it's interesting about power athletes and stuff. They're all softies Like I don't know. There's probably an outlier out there, you know, in the rough or whatever. But a lot of the power lifters that I know are, just like you know, the best, so warm and great.

Speaker 2: 20:36

Oh my God. And like in this world, it's. I think there is an element to it, and you see it in CrossFit too. Right, with just the fact that everyone stays at the end of a class to cheer on the last person, like you don't finish your workout and leave, you stay in your chair for everybody.

Speaker 2: 20:49

There is something about doing hard things together as a group. That is, there is a real not to use again that buzzword primal, but there is a real primal quality to that and I think some of that comes from the fact that we have, you know, forever had to work together and do hard things in order to survive. And so, yes, it's not survival in a CrossFit class or a strongman competition, but there does feel like an element of having, you know, the ability to thrive by standing there and supporting each other. In strongman in particular, a lot of the I mean the world's strongest man athletes will tell you that they, if they are competing against the guy who is most likely to beat them and that guy forgot his weight belt, that day, his peer will give it, will give him his, because no one wants to beat anybody else on a technicality. The whole point of the sport is to see what are we capable of doing, and if I can't do it, I want you to do it, because I just want to see someone do it.

Speaker 1: 21:52

Yeah, you see that across many sports. You see some of the most human things shine through in those moments, like that shared weight belt. It's absolutely wonderful. Another aspect of the community when you're lifting a 1RM, let's call it a deadlift. If you're in a gym by yourself and you're hitting that 1RM, it's not the same as if they're sitting there and it could be one other person. Amplify that if there's 10 people there and you're all doing it at the same time, there is an electric energy that you're now plugging into and it's a blast.

Speaker 2: 22:34

Yeah, and you're more likely to, I think, keep pushing too, right? Yeah, I think if you're by yourself, it's easier to just kind of give it up. I was doing 14-point. I wish I could remember. I want to say one maybe. In my CrossFit gym it was collectively something like 84 burpees and 84 thrusters. The weight for the thruster was something I had done once, literally once. I was like I'm not scaling this, I'm doing this whole thing. People were finishing in 12 minutes. It was the average time I'm up there on this platform in this room full of people. For 45 minutes I kept shaking my head at my judge and he's like okay, you're going to quit. You want to put this down? I was like nope, nope, there's too many people here, I'm going to do it. I just think there's no way I would have done that at home. I'm stubborn. There's no way I would have stuck with it for that long at home. I would have scaled it, I would have something, but I didn't and I got through it.

Speaker 1: 23:40

Absolutely. Can you actually speaking of competitive strongman? Can you talk about your competitive strongman career?

Speaker 2: 23:52

Yeah, I think it was an interesting word for it, because one of the things that I can only laugh and I kind of love it is I have come in last in almost every single strongman competition that I have done and past Alyssa teenage Alyssa, early 20s Alyssa would have quit, would have been like forget this, I'm terrible, I know what I keep doing. This Adult Alyssa is like what an opportunity to learn and to get better. One of the coolest things about it is you're really just yes, you're quite literally up against other people, but ultimately the whole point is to see can I do something more than I was able to do in training? Can I do something more than I was able to do in my last competition? I've probably done somewhere in the range of eight or 10 competitions. I have gone to Provincials here and I have gone to USS Nationals. But, to be clear, uss Nationals was because I was the only novice to show up for a competition and so I got an automatic Bids and Nationals. But I think there would have been a time where I would have looked at that and gone. I'm not going to do this. I didn't earn this With my coach we were kind of like but why not?

Speaker 2: 25:02

Why not get up on that stage, knowing that probably everybody up there is stronger but maybe they're not, maybe I can do better? And that day was this real mix of. There were plenty of events that I zeroed, but I came in second in my first ever Nationals in the farmer hold. I had to stand there and hold 120 pounds in each hand for just as long as I could, and I knew that I'm so stubborn that there was absolutely no way I would let go of those things until I had broken the National Record, until my hands fell off and the woman ahead of me broke it first. She beat me by 10 seconds, so we both broke the National Record, but she holds it now with 10 seconds more than me. But I came in second in an event in my first ever Nationals and I'm like, yeah, that's why you go to these things, because that felt amazing. I crushed my goal on it.

Speaker 1: 26:04

That's so good, that's fantastic and I applaud you for that. And really, like you know, talking back to how you were mentioning the, when you're in these things, do you zero? People are probably thinking about what place right?

Speaker 2: 26:19

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:20

You know so and so, or Alyssa came in or the other athlete came in. What they're probably remembering is I had a wonderful conversation with Alyssa. She was so good she. You know, like we build up these myths in our mind and we think it's all about these numbers and metrics and really it's not. Everybody's just trying to, you know, do best and do their best and try to get a little bit better than yesterday.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Yeah, A hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 26:45

You know. It's also making me think about how a lot of this stuff is likely rooted in the process Right For you, like you probably have really fallen in love with the training and that kind of that final day or that meets or whatever is. You know it's you're talking about. I don't know. Four hours out of a hundred hours you put into leading into it, you know. Can you talk a little bit about your process and your training?

Speaker 2: 27:22

Yeah, and I'll say too, those competitions, while they last for five hours, that is literally five minutes of exercise. I'm going to follow those hours of training because each event is 60 seconds. You're basically, yeah, you train for, like you know, months and months and months to compete for five minutes. Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes that anyone gave me in the entirety of this book, and there are a lot of really, really wonderful things people said.

Speaker 2: 27:47

But I had the opportunity to interview someone named Colin Brace, who have people don't know him, colin Brace, he did once compete in World's Strongest man. He is an Olympic bobsledder, he is the program director for World's Strongest man and runs this massive arena series in the UK called Giants Live. And I don't have the exact quote in front of me, so I'm going to do my best not to butcher it. But he said the World's Strongest man is invariably someone with a hole in his heart because he thinks if he wins, he'll wake up the next day when he's crowned king of the world. He thinks that he'll wake up the next day and be a different person, but then he finds out he's the same person, and that's a terrifying thought.

Speaker 2: 28:26

And I was like I knew when he said it it was really impactful. But at the time I thought that doesn't really impact my life. I don't see how that relates to me. That's about the guy who's actually at the top of the podium. And then I went to nationals and I didn't perform in the way that I wanted to.

Speaker 2: 28:47

And when I went back to my hotel room afterwards I remember sitting in this kind of moment of what am I supposed to do now? This was the thing I worked towards. I don't have to sit here and think about the macros that I'm eating for the rest of the day. I don't think about what I'm training. I've hit this pinnacle and I'm like, well, what's next? Where am I going next?

Speaker 2: 29:06

And you realize, if you don't fall in love with the process of getting there, if that's not the part that feels the most amazing to you, then the wins and the losses, they're never going to feel the way that they should. The wins are never going to be as good if you don't care about everything that it took to get there, and the losses are going to be that much worse if you didn't love the process of getting to that point. So for me, I'm just, I don't even not even training for a competition right now, but I still kind of go about my business four days a week of just getting up and doing my workout, and I love it. I love every second of it. There are some things I don't love my coach programmed front squats and I don't love front squats. But, like other than that, for the most part I want to do those workouts every single day that I have programmed to do them. It's those little wins every time. It's seeing those little incremental gains every time that you go in.

Speaker 2: 30:06

And even when you fall backwards, even when you don't have those gains, when you have those losses, it's about knowing, okay, how can I, how can I shift this a little bit? One of the most, I think, rewarding things has been I take videos of all of my lifts and I don't really post them. They're mostly just for my coach and myself, but what I do is in between sets I go when I look at the video so I can go oh okay, you meant to move your foot this way, but you didn't realize it actually moved this way, and it's really become fun to kind of tinker with that and try to figure out oh, what little fix can I make? And then you do that in the gym. It's such a clear parallel to the rest of your life. So you go into a work meeting and something doesn't go well. Your presentation doesn't go well, okay well, are you going to just go well? That's it. I suck, I'm never doing another one of these again.

Speaker 2: 30:57

Or do you look at it and go well, okay, this was, I probably should have done this and said this, and whatever. Well, I've got another chance. So now I know that I can take that back, I know that that failure doesn't make me a failure and I can fix it for next time.

Speaker 1: 31:12

Yeah, I love that and that's one of the easiest things to follow in the process, one of the. I didn't come up with this, but it's just something that I really, really love and I can't get out of my mind and it's a concept of unimpeachable credentials and so, and what this means is that Alyssa works so hard eight months or whatever the lead up of the training is, and she shows up and she hits second place in that hold. That is something that is a trophy that goes on the shelf inside Alyssa's heart and nobody could ever take that from you. And why I think this is so important is in today's sort of warp speed life, where everything happens so fast and there are so many messages to get back to and then there are so many things to do and it's all about efficiency and there's not a lot of opportunity to put these trophies into that shelf.

Speaker 1: 32:25

And we need people's hearts filled with unimpeachable trophies where they really believe in themselves and they have that quiet confidence, and that's the kind of stuff that makes the fabric of humanity better, the stuff where we're all really content and we're solid with ourselves and self-esteem is at the forefront of everything. And so you know, I love hearing stories about how like you went in there, and it's not about the metric or the place, because we're missing the point. You know, you just have this really, really great story and you have this wonderful romance with strongman in the competition and you're competitive with it all. It's lovely.

Speaker 2: 33:16

Thank you. Yeah, one of my favorite bits of feedback I got from one of the early readers of the book and it's on the back of the book, she included it in her blurb was just that it's a. The book is a love letter to the world of strength and I was like, yeah, that's you see it, that's it, you know. I wanted that. I wanted to make it clear that this is I love, that I'm in love with everything about this world and the people in it and the athletes I interviewed and the experts I interviewed, the stories people shared with me. I'm honored to have been able to tell them the things that people trusted me with. It was pretty incredible.

Speaker 1: 34:01

Can you talk a little bit about the support in your life and who is around you and some of the? You know your mentors and you know not to be too punny myself, but the shoulders that you stood on while you were writing the book.

Speaker 2: 34:22

I mean, I think this is, you know, it takes a village. So you know my husband was pretty incredible about this whole thing. He was so just funny side note my best friend from high school. His wife is a phenomenal author and when she was writing her book she would have her husband do a lot of the kind of early reads through it. And when she was releasing her book and I was in the midst of writing my book and my husband and my friend were sort of chatting and they're like, so do we get editor credit? Because you know they're really like reading it constantly.

Speaker 2: 34:59

So that was huge for me it was just always having somebody to walk in with my computer and be like I need 35 minutes of your time because I'm going to read you a whole chapter out loud and I need to know what you think. You know we have a nanny who is phenomenal and I literally wouldn't have been able to do any of this if we didn't have her. With our girls my kids are also just you know, they have no idea what I'm doing, honestly, but having them in the gym with me doing my workouts and, just you know, being able to kind of bring them into the story that way. I was so inspired by them. One of their I mean one of the things that they said to me was a huge inspiration for this book.

Speaker 2: 35:40

I talked about it at the beginning, but I was reading them this book about this early 1900s strongman named Zisha Breitbart, and in the book it talks about how Zisha was strong enough to have an elephant walk across his chest and he could you know, he could bend metal bars with his hands. And every time I would read this stuff to the girls they would say, oh, how, how does he do that? How does he do that? And then at the end, after he pulls this wagon load of 10 men down a stretch of Fifth Avenue with just a leather strap in his teeth attached to a rope, the very end of that, my older daughter was like, well, why? And that is a huge reason that I went on this journey?

Speaker 2: 36:19

Because I thought I don't, I don't know. I mean I know, like I know that it's fun and I know that I love it, but like, literally, why, why do we all do this? I need a better answer for that. And then and you've seen this in the book I mean the second main character in the book is my coach, who's just been with me since day one of this process and has never not believed in me and has always pushed me in a healthy way. Was with me through both of my pregnancies and postpartum and always made me feel really safe and has never like has never made me feel bad about a loss or like it reflects on him in any way. Has always just been really proud of me and then taken my lead to say you know for me to go. Okay, I want to work on that weakness now and then we work on that weakness.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Um, so big shout out to your coach. Can we talk about, uh, how to look him up, and uh, can we talk about him? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 37:18

Yeah, my coach is Dan Wallace. He? Um is one of the world's strongest men. Um, he? Uh was Canada's lightweight strongest man. I think two or three times Um. He trains out of a Fordis fitness on the East side, um, but you can find him on Instagram, I think he's just at Dan Wallace. And then he also has a business called move well daily with his partner and another friend of theirs, um, and it's like fully kind of comprehensive, so they'll do nutrition stuff. Um, they're both certified in animal flow. Um, so, yeah, pretty awesome.

Speaker 1: 37:58

Um, and I'm just I'm pulling up some stuff, so this is, um, this is a pretty exceptional, uh credential list here. So, uh, if you are feeling inspired, um, please do look him up. It's uh, dane, which is D I, a, I N and Wallace's W A L L I S. Yes and um, sorry, dane, if you're not accepting clients right now, but, uh, at least go go and look him up. Uh, cause he's he's quite impressive Uh yeah, not just for strong man stuff.

Speaker 1: 38:35

Yeah, um, so you know, I I always think it's really interesting to uh hear about uh who's around, uh someone while they're going through an event, and so I think it paints a really great picture, uh about um, um, how you, how you got uh through all these events and then, how you know, you made a book out of it. Um, could we talk a little bit about some of the things that you didn't see coming when it comes to writing a book, like what's something that you, like you, wouldn't have thought of if you're?

Speaker 2: 39:10

you know, um, on the other side of authorship, yeah, I, uh, I'll say I actually think the book writing process was not terribly far off from what I thought, with the exception of the fact that what I put into my proposal for the book and my chapter outline changed so much. And, oddly enough, the hardest thing for me was my story, was writing my own story and figuring out kind of the narrative arc of it. I would have this like wall of post-it notes that I would just kind of like move around and try to figure out where things were going. Um, and a lot of times I kind of would shy away from telling more of my story or being more vulnerable. And it was my husband, john, who kept saying to me he's like no, this has to be more like people care about you. You need to put you in here more and you need to be more vulnerable and you need to be more open. And you know, in the end I'm really proud of that.

Speaker 2: 40:05

The hardest chapter to write I didn't think would be this one, but the hardest chapter to write was actually the chapter about body image, because I had to be really, really honest. I wanted so badly. So when I, when I started training for nationals, I wanted to put on muscle mass. Um, I didn't want to be the smallest person in my weight class, and so we. I worked with Dane a lot on how to how to eat properly for that, but for me that meant eating a lot more than I was used to and that's more than I was used to for my whole life, right? Because I'm of the generation that grew up with Kate Moss very publicly saying nothing tastes as good as skinny feels that when you hear that that really stuck with me, um, and all of the magazines I grew up with.

Speaker 2: 40:51

I grew up in the era of the Waif, so it was. I thought it would be so much easier to just go. I don't care, I'm putting on muscle. This is what matters to me, and I very much wanted to be able to start that chapter thinking okay, this, you know, this isn't like, this is going to be hard for me and I wanted to end it being like everything's amazing and I just like love being bigger and whatever. And the truth was it was a back and forth the whole time. It's still a back and forth. I still, you know, I came out the other side being more proud of my body for what it can do than how it looks, but there's always going to be that back and forth. Where I go, oh, I can lift heavier, but my jeans fit differently and I'm I'm actually, you know, I kind of like that because it's human and it allows me to never I never get to come back and say, oh, I'm going to be a better person, but it allows me to never.

Speaker 2: 41:48

I never get too kind of comfortable in you know, in one way of feeling about my body and it reminds me on a regular basis, like to challenge the way that I think to go. Okay. Well, yeah, maybe this feels differently in your body, but did you also just hit a deadlift? Pr and having to always go? What do you care more about? What matters more? So it surprised me how, how hard that chapter was to write. Almost everybody that that's the chapter they liked the most because it was the most honest.

Speaker 1: 42:20

Yeah, you know, it's just hearing you talk about that. What's coming up for me is just I'm thinking about, like why are people so drawn to the vulnerability? What? Why is it so magnetic? Like I have a couple of ideas, but why do you think that connects with people so well?

Speaker 2: 42:38

I think in this particular world of strength from the outside, people expect lifters from any you know part of the lifting world to kind of have this sort of hardened vibe, like the muscles are acting as almost a literal armor. And when you see that that's not what it's like, that's not how people are, look, there's always going to be assholes. For the most part, you know there people have that. There's that soft gooey inside. Everyone I spoke to, every athlete I spoke to for this book had a story like that where they were just so honest about the fact that there was something in their life that made them feel weak and strength was the thing that made them feel powerful and made them feel like they could withstand some of those things. One of the most powerful moments for me was when I was doing that interview with Colin Brice.

Speaker 2: 43:31

Nick Best, who is an 11 time I think World's Strongest man competitor, happened to walk up at that moment and Colin brought him into our conversation and to kind of paint a picture of Nick.

Speaker 2: 43:45

He is six foot I don't even know like there's like a lot taller than me and Bald's head goatee built the size of like two linebackers side by side. I mean he's ain't a pro. And Colin just said to him how did you get into strength training? And both of us watched him as his eyes just welled up and he was like, oh, that's that's. You know, that's a hard story and then kind of went into talking about going through abuse as a kid and never wanting anyone to be able to make him feel weak or weak or to be able to have power over him, and that was why he got into the world of strength. And so you really see that these guys who from the outside just look like you know, I don't know, meathead or whatever, unfeeling, that kind of vibe that we give to people in this world, there's just so much more to their story.

Speaker 1: 44:43

Yeah, and it's reminding me of one of the questions that you're actually answering with this question or with this book, and like just pulling it straight out of the out of the jacket of your book. It says well, the full sense is what if strength isn't about how much we can lift? What if it's about how we manage life's struggles? So, like this strength and this healthy tension is acting in the right direction and I think that's a good thing and it's a feedback and saying like, okay, this allowed me to dismantle this problem In my mind, I actually have a solution now. Okay, that's good. And then I also am now feeling really empowered and jacked right now.

Speaker 1: 45:25

So whatever I face in the rest of my day wasn't as hard as that front squat that I hated. So like I'm not going to be able to do anything about it, I'm not going to be able to do anything about it, I'm not going to be able to do anything about it. We just went through the squat that I hated, so like now, this is gonna. You know I can do this stuff. So it's, these things are a force multiplier on each other and I think it's it's really special and you know, your story is vulnerable and, if I can just add in, I think I think it's so helpful to hear the real stuff and why people love it so much is because, like, we have this bizarre dichotomy right now where it's like, like, yeah, here's my entirely polished, edited life, and we all know that's the polished, edited life, but we all kind of still wanna like adhere to something where, no, I want my, we have this idealism or whatever my life should be, but it ain't that, you know, it ain't, and so it feels really good to be like holy shit so, and so I went through it.

Speaker 1: 46:35

Like you know, it makes us really really human to share that stuff, but it's the scariest for and that's, you know, I commend you. I understand why it was so hard to write that chapter.

Speaker 2: 46:48

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 46:51

Yeah, so okay. So with that, I wanna respect your time, but this has been a real treat. I'm loving this book so far. So if you're looking to pick this up Alyssa spoke in the beginning about how you can get it and if you're really really nice, you might be able to get a signed one not mine, because I'm gonna keep it. But thank you so much for joining. This has been a real treat.

Speaker 2: 47:21

Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful.