On June 15th, I turn 1!! Well, my online gym turns 1. I am turning 38. As I look back on this last year, I am so thankful that you have been here with me on this journey. It hasn’t always been easy, and I still know I have so far to go, but it is all about the journey that you take. Not the end destination. 

After I teach or after a big event, I like to take a moment to sit back and think about what I did well and what I could do better. Thinking back to this last year, and everything I have done this last year (and not done!), I wanted to give you a little background on why I started this online community.

I have always shared my birthday with my grandmother, she is June 17th and I am the 15th. She has always been an important part of my life; so important, I named my daughter after her. Last year, she passed away and was buried on her birthday. I’ve always known my birthdays would be hard after she passed away. I was lucky enough to spend 36 birthdays with her. On my 37th and would be 97 for her, we said our final goodbyes. 

I have always dreamed of having an online gym, a place where I could reach people from across the world and share in their fitness journey. I had been researching online hosting sites for a while but never committed to starting it. June of last year, I was dreading the coming month. I knew my grandmother’s funeral was coming up. I would see her for the last time. But some feeling kept tugging at me. Something or someone was telling me to do something: to make a big change and to take that scary jump. 

I started making my site on June 7th, worked my butt off as much as I could with two kids on summer break to take of. And I set the goal to open the “doors” to my gym on my birthday, June 15th. When I opened the doors, of course there were glitches, things weren’t working correctly for my first class but I still pushed through. I kept thinking to myself the quote from Jurassic Park when the creator says that even when Disneyland opened, nothing worked. And Dr. Malcolm replies, “Yeah, but if Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” 

My first online class wasn’t perfect, but at least no one got eaten by dinosaurs.

I forced myself to make that jump. I knew it would be messy, but sometimes you just have to get messy to get something done. 

After my grandmother’s funeral on June 17th, I had to try to teach the rest of my classes from Orange County. I had forgotten my laptop…and my iPad. I tried to figured out a way to teach with the little equipment I had. As I was teaching Turbo Kick on Saturday, June 19th, I literally wanted to stop in the middle of class, and not continue because there were so many things not working: the sound and video for the online participants didn’t work, my playlist was skipping because it was a super old phone, my microphone had feedback and I was emotionally spent because of the emotional roller coaster I had had the last week.

Just then, a monarch butterfly flutters by, illuminated by the sun, and stays right behind the camera so only I can see it. In that moment, I feel her, I feel my grandmother’s presence. She’s telling me to push on. I know then that she was telling me the whole time to create my online gym, to create something I have always wanted to do but made excuses to not do it. She was telling me, create something new to celebrate with on our birthdays. She didn’t want me to be sad, she wanted me to keep going and to be able to find joy again on our birthdays.

I’m telling you this story because it is so easy to not do the things that scare us. It’s easy to fall into the routine of doing the same thing. It’s especially hard to make a change after a difficult event. Take that messy step. It might be a new job, or asking for a promotion, starting something completely new or beginning a new fitness journey. Take that step. There’s going to be ups and downs no matter what you do: whether you chose to do the same thing or chose to make a change. I’ll be here rooting for you.

I leave you with a lyric from one of my favorite Turbo Kick sections from Round 57:

Momma told me not to waste my life, she said, “Spread your wings, my little butterfly.”