Healthworks Homecoming Yearbook

ELLEN

I started working out at Healthworks in December 2022. After a few years of consolation eating through the pandemic, I did not feel my best and wanted to build new habits to get moving more consistently. I had also just turned 39 and felt a pre-40 urge to do something big and challenging in the lead-up to a new decade.

When I was a teen and my mom was about the age I am now, she always talked about how cool it would be to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro. Somewhere she read a profile about it, and the idea took hold. It seemed impossibly ambitious at the time, as we rarely had the means to take vacations and had never traveled outside the country. I was also a surly teen who had yet to discover the joys of hiking, and I thought the idea sounded ridiculous.

In my mid 20s and early 30s, I surprised myself by falling in love with hiking. I love the endurance challenge, the peace of being immersed in nature, and I really love the perspective, mental and visual, from the summit. My mom and I have hiked together a lot over the past decade, local trails like Mt. Katahdin and more distant routes like the Milford Track in New Zealand. I even began to reevaluate my initial reaction to Mt. Kilimanjaro.

My mom has had more physical limitations in recent years after a series of treatments for breast cancer. She still hikes, but she has advanced osteoporosis now and no longer wants to attempt Kilimanjaro. So, rapidly approaching 40, I decided to take up the torch.

When I began training at Healthworks, I was getting winded during Zumba classes, and now I am at my peak cardio fitness. Just over four months ago, I summited Kilimanjaro. Because of my training, I didn’t have to worry about my muscle strength or my aerobic capacity. I wasn’t even worried about my mental focus or tenacity. I was carrying with me the feeling of commitment and solidarity that has come from working out in groups of determined women each week. I’m grateful to Healthworks for helping me to accomplish a dream that my mom seeded in me many years ago. And I’m so happy that I keep proving myself wrong! I thought I wasn’t a hiker, and I thought I wasn’t a “gym person.” Now, I’m glad to say that I’m both.