You probably already know Adrienne. She is one in a million and her energy and presence can be felt even before she enters a room! Here’s the very special Thank You Adrienne sent to Justin Thacker very recently on her 40th Birthday. Adrienne has gained such a great perspective on living life, going for goals and gratitude that we couldn’t just let this gem sit in Justin’s inbox!Dear Justin, By the time I found my way to you and the Lab Gym last February/March, I thought I had already done the lion’s share of my journey from where I was, to where I hoped to go with my health and fitness. To be sure, 2012 was a year of tremendous change and progress for me – and I am very proud of myself for all I did that year, losing 70 pounds and regaining my health and fitness.When I found your Bootcamp and Heavy Metal CrossFit, I thought I found what I was looking for – another secure anchor in what I thought would be a life long battle to never lose my way, lose my health, lose my fitness again.What I didn’t realize at the time, was that it wasn’t just an anchor to keep me where I was. Very quickly I started to see and realize it wasn’t the place I would just finish my pull-up goal with 1 pull-up. It was the place where I would do 1, and then 5, and then kipping 10, and then 2 weighted – and someday without a doubt 21-15-9 with thrusters between sets. It wasn’t a place where I would just get over an ill-conceived fear to deadlift a barbell, but rather to learn to appreciate the deadlift and the way sometimes it makes my brain feel like someone launched me from a rocket. Before many more months passed I’d methodically learn to fling that barbell over my head and stand up, and then my fascination with learning and perfecting the olympic lifts had begun.
I thought my journey was almost over when I met you and the lab gym. But today, today of all days, my 40th birthday — a day that might have crushed me 2 years ago with sad certainty that I was old and done — I am so grateful to you. Today would be different if I was still 70lbs overweight. But it would also be different if I had never learned I like CrossFit, I like handstands, I like box jumps, I like Turkish getup, I like kipping, I like double unders (sometimes), I like Olympic weightlifting, I like racing myself and the clock and other people…. Today would still have been hard if I thought I had already reached my peak and all I was doing was just trying not to slip back into being deconditioned again… when I had never even tried to see if there was an athlete somewhere inside me.
Thank you for never looking at me like a middle aged woman with a lethargic past – and I am so grateful that my fitness dreams don’t sound silly to you. Because the number one reason that I feel fine about 40 is because you showed me that I am not at the end of a fitness journey – I’m just at the beginning of a new one.
So excited, so happy, and so interested to see what happens… Thank you for that – I can’t imagine a better birthday gift than the gift of feeling like I have potential and there’s a plan to harness it and a forum to take it out for a spin. It’s going to be a fun year.
