The Body Image Series - Part 3: hockey

Quitting swimming was a huge deal for me. Not only was it an abandonment of an Olympic dream, but also a huge identity loss. I’d been ‘Lucy the swimmer’ for the last 8 years. Talk to any athlete about transitioning out of a sport they’d done their whole lives and they can relate. I’d always been working towards something when I trained. And training had always just been part of my day. I didn’t have to think about it. It was habit. It was routine. The summer that I quit swimming, I put on about 8kg and felt awful about myself. We also went on a sailing holiday, and, as incredible as it was, spending all day in a bikini for someone struggling with their body wasn’t the confidence boost I needed at that time. We have virtually no photos of me from that holiday - I was too uncomfortable to have them taken, or any that we do have, I'm wearing something to cover my body. I was still fit. I ran a 1hr 48min half marathon on two weeks of training in the September before going back for my final year of uni. But I didn’t feel like my body represented my level of fitness, and that was a huge frustration.

Pre-match photos with the 5s, 2018

I went back to uni for the final year of my undergraduate degree with the plan of just trying to keep fit, play some IMS (inter-hall) sport, and get on with my final year studies. Luckily, early in the semester I ended up going on a night out with one of my friends from home and her hockey pals, who convinced me to go to the hockey trials. It did take a bit of convincing. Loughborough hockey is notoriously good and I didn’t want to trial and not get in (fear of failure and all that). But I ended up going, and scraped into the 5s. God, I’m glad I did. Playing hockey honestly saved me in 3rd year. I met so many new people, and with so many on my course, we ended up spending a lot of time together. But on the pitch, I still felt self-conscious. We wore tiny hockey skirts which exposed my ‘big thighs’, and the hockey tops were tight around my biceps. It took a while for me to get used to the chafing that I would get during matches – “a sign of me being too big”, I’d tell myself. And yet, again I was one of the fittest on the team. Any day that I wasn’t training for hockey, I was in the gym starting to get to grips with the kind of weight training that wasn’t just so that you could pull yourself through the water faster.

Stepping out in the African Violet for Loughborough 5s, 2017

Commercial gyms are a funny place for someone who has never really trained for an aesthetic purpose. My goal was always performance and my body shape was whatever I needed to be to do that. Big lats and shoulders as a swimmer. A muscly kid with dreams of being an Olympic gymnast. My body was a side thought most of the time. At a commercial gym, however, that is very different. 90% of the people there are there with aesthetic goals. Namely to lose weight (mostly females) or to get bigger (mostly males). It’s only recently that the whole ‘build a booty’ generation of training has filtered into the fitness industry, and the notion of females lifting weights = manly is beginning to be disbarred. At the time, being #thiccc wasn’t really a thing. I enjoyed going to the gym and seeing my numbers increase, but I also found it a strange place because I didn’t really have a focus there.

There was, however, a few good things that came from training at this commercial gym. Firstly, before I started my part-time MSc, I qualified as a PT and got my first ever job there (I know…aged 21) and it’s a gym I continue to work at. But secondly, and prior to that, I started participating in one of the classes there called ‘RIG’ and met Barnie. He would eventually introduce me to CrossFit and I’m honestly so thankful he did. Once I started taking an interest, another PT, Brian, suggested I take a look at his box, CrossFit BFG. It took me a while but I plucked up the courage to go for a trial session one Saturday morning (my CrossFit story thus far is again enough for another blog post so I’ll leave it at that). This was a terrifying step for someone who hadn’t really started anything from scratch before. I’d always swam so transitioning into that from gymnastics was easy. Because of competitions, I knew a lot of the people I was going to be at Loughborough with so again, that wasn’t as scary as it would be for most freshers. But this was totally new.

On to part 4...