Gathering Courage for My Sports Bra Summer

I have this dip, just below my hip, going down into my thigh. It’s incredibly sexy. I noticed it’s filling in. So, I guess it’s more appropriate to say I had a dip just below my hip and it was sexy. It has to be recent, this softening of my legs, but I’m afraid it’s been longer than I want to admit. But once that change started to happen, peeling back the layers of my midlife body and how I move within it became a near-daily sport. And, well, I’ll be honest: I’ve never been good at sports.

I was incredibly fit until I wasn’t. I was fit when I went to college, tall and lean and strong from bike riding and dancing my entire childhood. I was fit in college thanks to no car, walking everywhere, being too poor to eat and continued dancing. I was fit in my 20s from running up hills and across town and through campus until my knees told me to stop. I was mostly fit until pregnancy happened in my early 30s. Bed rest and prolonged postpartum depression and a tiny human baby with needs and a no-longer-any-version-of-herself-that-made-sense mama with complications, and suddenly I was drowning. And when I finally found breath, I was no longer fit.

Despite it all, despite every single bit of knees not working and finally having money for food and getting a car and a marriage and a baby and bed rest and postpartum depression, I never really struggled with body image. I’m uncertain how I made it out of the toxic diet culture of the 80s and 90s with a healthy approach to my own flesh, but even with the smaller chest and shot knees and midsection genes that erred on the side of “harsh and cold Scotland winter” rather than “sunbathing on the Mediterranean,” I was OK. I was fine with me. I wasn’t concerned. My fitness propelled me forward, making up for any perceived issues I might have had.

When I hit my 40s, nearly everything changed, and it felt like I was starting my descent into my later years forgetting what used to be. Forgetting that I was the one who never cared. Never blinked. Never dieted. But never struggling with body image before didn’t seem to matter as I descended into biological madness. And then COVID happened as the perimenopause that had already been happening accelerated at a rapid and frightening pace, and my life seemed to swirl and froth all together into the bottom of a cocktail shaker only to pour out 50 extra pounds of what on Earth happened to me?

My life seemed to swirl and froth all together into the bottom of a cocktail shaker only to pour out 50 extra pounds of what on Earth happened to me?

And that confusion is where I currently stand.

I find I avoid mirrors, opting instead for the reflection I have in my head. The way I looked before and the way I hope to look again, though I’m careful to knock wood or replace that thought quickly, lest I curse it. I can’t remember when I started, this avoiding, but probably mid-lockdown. Maybe earlier. Probably earlier. Just like most things that have to do with this new body, I greatly underestimate. I talk to my doctor about the weight and get batted away, every time, with a quick “that’s just what happens at your age” before moving on to other matters. But, is it? I see other women knocking on the door of 50 without the issues that have made me shop for clothes more often than I or my budget is comfortable with. Why are they exempt from this struggle? I find myself assuming that if I found the answer to that one question, it would solve everything. My weight would melt off like some carnival game prize from uncovering the impossible secret. I would finally win.

Last year, I started weight training and then, walking, abandoning the rowing habit I had developed over five years — five years and nothing to show except a million-meters-rowed pin and a deep sense of failure. Now as I’m pulling myself up for my second set of pull-ups, I focus on my arms. Strong from failed rowing, my vantage point shows them strong and defined. From certain angles, I can almost convince myself they are completely toned all the way around and should be a source of envy. But then I catch a glimpse of the underarm flab and the illusion is shattered.

If it were just the arms, I think I would be OK. If it were just the disappearing hip dip, I think I would be OK. If it was just a softening of my legs, my face, my body. If I could focus on my calves and their amazing shape, I think I would be OK. Or my thighs and how strong they are.

But I don’t.

I can’t.

Because between the underarm flab and the strong thighs house the main problem that I avoid looking at, avoid thinking about so much that it’s all I think about: the dreaded midlife midsection. The one that spills out and over my leggings, testing the very nature of my spandex. The one that sometimes bloats after sugar or sneezing or breathing wrong, or makes me look pregnant. Or “pleasingly plump.” The one that holds onto every morsel of food, every whiff of calories, every passing glance of a restaurant. The one that everyone would be staring at should I let it out of its tank-topped cage while at the gym.

I walk at my city’s rec center nearly every morning. Often, I’m the only one there. Sometimes there is a smattering of others, which probably doesn’t matter except, right now, I feel like it does because the rec center is old and the ventilation is poor and the track sits up on the second floor with a bank of east-facing windows that stream in every ounce of early morning sunlight, rendering any cooling air moot. And it is here, in the sun-drenched, older, poorly ventilated, second-floor rec center track where I made a goal for this summer. It is here with the boys playing basketball below, where the older man insists on talking to me through my thick padded headphones as we lap one another in our endless circles, where I’m working out these first-in-my-life body issues, that I am planning my sports bra debut. I’ve made a promise to myself that I will work out without an extra layer of security and comfort in order to ultimately be more comfortable.

It is here with the boys playing basketball below, where the older man insists on talking to me through my thick padded headphones as we lap one another in our endless circles, that I am planning my sports bra debut.

When I started walking last fall, a T-shirt was entirely appropriate. We moved on into the worst winter we’ve seen in many years and some mornings my sweatshirt never made it off my body. But now, with spring having sputtered along and summer in full bloom, I find I’m hot with my layered workout gear and the bank of earlier-sunrise-dappled windows. And I’m tired of being so hot when I walk. Leggings, while great, aren’t the most breathable. Add a sports bra and T-shirt and heaven help my early morning hot flashes. One recent morning, I almost worked up my courage to shed my outer layer by lap 20, when a group of high school girls came walking by and I immediately abandoned my chance. I spent a few minutes pausing my podcast and unpacking my reluctance but still couldn’t talk myself into exposing my flab to the world, even with a longer tank-style sports bra hiding underneath.

When I do muster up the courage to look into the mirror, I push on the pads of fat that spill from the sides of my sports bra. I turn and look at the back, making sure I’m not pressing out of the straps like some deranged Play-Doh (Not So) Fun Factory. I tug, endlessly, at the hem of my top, trying to make it lay flat against the high waistband of my leggings that never really stay put themselves. When did I get this way — both my current body composition and my mind’s obsession? I crave the decades I had when I didn’t seem to care. Didn’t notice. It seems I spend my days and weeks only caring, now. And for what? To prove … what? To impress whom, exactly?

Maybe it wasn’t the high school girls that stopped me from shedding my tank top. Maybe it was. Maybe it was the thought of anyone, save my husband, seeing a band of flesh that hasn’t seen the light of day since college. Maybe I did have body issues when I thought I didn’t. Maybe I buried them before they took deep root.

Or, maybe, I’m not ready to admit so openly to the world that I have issues now.

The only thing I do know is that it feels important to do this shedding of layers and inhibition that seems second nature to others. It feels important to recapture a part of me that has been buried. To feel sexy, again. To believe I’m sexy, again. To face a mirror again. To take up all the space I need until I don’t. To stare 50 in the face and simply say, “Screw it.”

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Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer based in northern Utah. Her work has appeared in Zibby Mag, Sky Island Journal, New Plains Review, Utah Public Radio and via her newsletter at tawnyagibson.substack.com.