The Beginning

Welcome to The Fit Figure and to my first entry of my blog. My name is Breanna, the founder of The Fit Figure. I’ve given you a little glimpse into who I am in the About Us section of the website but you will get to know me a little better throughout my blog entries. I must admit, I have never written a blog before and I am not this fantastic writer so please bear with my grammatical errors and such.

The Fit Figure has been a vision of mine for close to 10 years so I am very excited to be finally here and writing to you and launching my website. They say timing is everything and I think it is finally the right time. Well that, and then I finally got off my butt and did something about this magical vision I had 10 years ago. So here we go. I hope you will join me on this journey and come out to the events I am producing, contribute to the website in the group activities and motivation pages and learn some things from my amazing contributing writers.

This all really started because I became a plus size athlete, in what felt like, overnight. I gained 65 pounds in less than 6 months. Who knew that was even possible? I was an elite athlete in the sport of long track speedskating. I trained twice a day; 6 days a week for about 10 months of the year and during those other 2 months I was doing one workout every other day during the off-season. I lifted weights, I ran, I skated, I biked, I hiked, I swam, and you name it. I was super strong in the weight room. My best leg press weight I lifted was 742 pounds and that was not a one-time lift that was my workout weight. With all of that, I was never thin or had a six-pack. I struggled with my weight my entire life. I had coaches tell me I was too fat, met with nutritionists about what I was eating. Most of the nutritionists usually said I was eating pretty well and could do a little less of the occasional cookie but all-in-all not bad. It’s extremely difficult to cut calories when anyone is training that hard. If I didn’t take enough calories, I wouldn’t have the energy in my workouts and wouldn’t recover properly. As you can guess, that is all bad news when working out is your job.

So back to how The Fit Figure all started. As I said, I gained a bunch of weight after I retired from skating. It wasn’t a very happy time in my life as you can imagine. I didn’t make it to the Olympics and win my gold medal. I was basically forced to retire from repeated injuries. I had three knee surgeries throughout my career and finally my body just couldn’t do it anymore. I had another knee surgery shortly after retiring. My thought was woo hoo I am retired so I can eat whatever I want now and I don’t have to work out every day! You see where this is going right? Surprise, you need to watch even more of what you are eating when you are not working out because now you are no longer burning tons of calories a day. Yep, I missed that memo.

Eventually I wanted to try get back into shape and looked at triathlon and started training for a sprint triathlon. What do you need when you want to work out? You need clothes to work out in. That was the problem. Apparently no one ever thought that a plus size women might want to work out and needed workout clothes. I scoured the Internet trying to find clothes and there was so little out there. So that is how I came up with idea of The Fit Figure. Long story short, I decided I had to try to do something about that. So here I am!

I look forward to this journey with who ever is out there to take it with me. I hope I can inspire some of you to try new sports and seek out new ways to be active. I also hope to be inspired by others too. After all, I am going through the same struggles as you.