By Jenny Neyman
By Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Kim Jordan hits the gym twice a day for three hours, doing cardio and weightlifting.
Redoubt Reporter
Kim Jordan walked — or, maybe “hobbled” is more apt — away from the Humpy’s Marathon in Anchorage having reinforced some important life lessons. Spending the equivalent of over half a workday covering 26.2 miles tends to give one plenty of time for reflection.
While her worsening state of physical misery could be ignored to a certain extent during the run — and had to be in order to accommodate her sheer determination to finish — it was harder to avoid revelations about how she had gotten herself into her current state.
Lesson one: It’s good to have a challenge for which to train.
The way Jordan throws herself at life, finding new experiences to dive into and measuring sticks to stack herself up against is not difficult. In high school and college she participated in just about any sport available — particularly cross-country running, track and field, and basketball. Since moving to the central Kenai Peninsula five years ago to work as an intensive needs special education teacher for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, she’s hiked, biked, snowshoed and camped far and wide with friends and her great Dane named Flash; cross-country skied the Tour of Anchorage; taught hula-hoop classes; played women’s roller derby and, in August 2010 at age 27, completed her first marathon.
“If I don’t have a fitness goal, then what am I doing? I needed something to train for,” Jordan said.
Lesson two: Don’t neglect the training part.
“The marathon went really poorly. I did it, and that is checked off my list of things to do — forever. That’s a place I don’t want to return to. Apparently, you’re supposed to train for those things,” she said.
Lesson three: Tackling physical challenges would be a little easier if she got a better grip on her health first.
Kim Jordan practices bodybuilding poses with trainer Darin Hagen at Northern Force Fitness on Sunday. Jordan, who began a weight loss and fitness regimen in November, is now training for a natural bodybuilding competition at the end of March.
“Have you ever taken a picture of your (backside) and looked at it? It’s shocking. I had no idea that was going on back there,” Jordan said. “I was just tired of being heavy. I was active, and I thought I looked good at 208 pounds. I did some killer hikes at that weight. And now to think I was carrying an extra 40 pounds up a mountain. Would you want to hike carrying a bag of dog food? Why work harder? Work smarter.”
The trouble was, she wasn’t as smart as she thought about fitness and nutrition. She was constantly active through her childhood, high school and college years, and that mitigated the effects of being a “corn fed” — as her truck’s license plate declares — Iowa girl.
“To my mom, food is love. Something’s wrong if you’re not, um, thick,” she said.
After college, though, structured activities took a dive.
“I was fit in high school and college, then I turned 21 and drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of cheesy fries and I didn’t do anything after college. All of a sudden I was 23 and a grown-up and I don’t have any sports to play anymore,” she said.
She was more of a weekend warrior — hit it hard biking or hiking on Saturday and Sunday, and figure that counted as a week’s worth of activity. Her estimation of her diet was just as skewed, thinking the cheeseburgers and fries with a beer, cream in her coffee and handfuls of candy here and there didn’t add up to as many calories as they did.
“I thought it was pretty good. I know I have a sweet tooth and I know I probably ate some crap food once in a while. In retrospect, I was eating twice a day and I was probably eating 500 grams of carbs a day and 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day. It’s not hard to do,” she said.
She started college weighing 154 pounds and graduated at about 190. She’s been as heavy as 250 — “well, 254, if we’re being honest,” and in October weighed 208.
“And I felt fine, but I guess I just didn’t know or didn’t remember what it felt like to be a little bit more trim,” she said.
She wanted to remember, so on Oct. 26 she met with Darin Hagen, a trainer from Northern Force Fitness in Soldotna.
“He asked what I wanted. I said, ‘I don’t know, I just want to get fit, I guess.’ He said, ‘Right now you’re a Pinto, and you want to be
Jordan works on her calves at the gym.
a Ferrari.’ And I said, ‘Yeah’ — having no idea what a Pinto is. So I Google-imaged Pinto — and Ferrari, because I’m not a car person. I definitely wanted to go from Pinto,” she said.
Hagen gave her a workout and diet plan to follow, and in doing so, set her on a new challenge.
“I’ve never seen as much progress as she’s made in the amount of time,” Hagen said. “The consistency of her workouts and dieting has just been outstanding.”
From the first week she started getting results, and that was motivating, Jordan said. Per Hagen’s instructions she was logging everything — workouts and diet details, then pounds, inches and body fat percentage lost. By December she was down to 190. By January it was 180. In February it was 167. Her body fat percentage went from 27 percent to 11 percent the last time it was measured.
Jordan has been taking pictures of herself in her underwear each week to gauge progress, first with a self-timer on her camera, then “I let my boyfriend take them now,” she said. She can click through the photos on her computer, making herself shrink in a flipbook effect. Around December she stopped shrinking as obviously and started visibly toning up.
Even in her face transformation is obvious. Chubby cheeks have receded, snugly stowed between her now-defined cheekbones andjawline, leaving giant brown eyes as her most prominent feature, now framed with a short, spiky new brunette haircut. The changes elsewhere have been even more prominent.
“I went from size 16 to belting up my pair of sixes. My skinny friends’ skinny pants are a little loose now. I’ve had to buy new underwear because by underwear was literally falling off in my pants.” Jordan said. “Diet and exercise do work, it turns out. Huh. Shocking.”
Strength to build on
Losing weight — check. Getting fit — check. All in about three months.
What’s a motivated, competitive, embracer of off-the-beaten-path activities to do?
“I met a lot of really cool people in the gym. I know Lissa (Cristiano), and I knew she has done figure competitions. And there was a sign up about a bodybuilding competition in Anchorage in March. I didn’t think I’d be ready for it, and it’s still questionable if I will be or not. But it was there and I was getting down to like 17 percent body fat,” Jordan said.
“I haven’t sent the form in yet. It’s filled out in an envelope on my desk. But I’ve got the body polish and I just got my bikini — and it’s like four little triangles of material, and that’s it.”
Jordan is a stamp away from sealing her fate of walking onstage in a tiny, shiny green string bikini and posing in the 28th annual Alaska Bodybuilding Fitness and Figure state championships March 26. After that, there’s a bodybuilding competition in May in Kenai that she’s thinking about.
“It’s the challenge,” Jordan said. “Can I stick this out? This is kind of like my marathon — can I hang on for 26.2 miles? Can I hang on until
March 26?”
Except this time, she’s relying on more than force of will to get her through. She’s been devoutly following Hagen’s advice, scaling
Jordan works on a pose with Hagen's coaching.
up her workout and diet regimen to get in the best shape possible by March 26. Currently, that means two gym visits a day for cardio and weightlifting, and a diet of about 1,200 calories and 80 grams of complex carbohydrates a day. That usually means hitting the gym at 5 a.m. and again after school, and eating a quarter cup of oatmeal with protein powder and cinnamon for breakfast, an open-face tuna sandwich with baby spinach leaves — on one slice of thin bread — for lunch, grilled chicken or fish for dinner and protein shakes throughout the day.
The diet, at first, was the most daunting part. Every time she met with Hagen it felt like he was taking away Christmas, she said — “Now I have to have a sandwich on thin bread? And now I can’t put a lid on it?”
But she has learned more about nutrition than she ever realized there was to know, and recognizes the importance of it.
“I’m in the gym a lot for an average person. I’m in there twice a day, three hours a day. But there’s still 21 hours left where you can really mess things up. The majority of the time is spent not eating 17 handfuls of M&M’s,” she said.
Diet is the typical downfall of aspiring bodybuilders, especially for newcomers to the sport, Hagen said.
“The weight training for the most part is the easier part to follow, but when it comes down to eating it’s 24-seven, and I can’t be there with them all the time. Kim’s stayed on course this whole time with focus and determination,” he said.
She’s fallen off the diet wagon — “hard, I really went for it,” she said — twice since October, and quickly realized that her taste buds and entire physiology had changed.
“Now my body is so trained to be run clean and to not have all this crap in it that it made me physically sick,” Jordan said. “It felt like the end of the world, and it’s self-induced, so no one feels bad for you. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I ate too many cupcakes.’ So now I just kind of go on broccoli benders and celery benders. Sometimes you just need to feel that fullness in your tummy. I told Darin I ate a whole bag of broccoli and he said, ‘That’s a bit much.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but the other option was a bag of chocolates, so I felt like I made the wise choice.’”
There may be no cheeseburgers and fries while Jordan is training for competition, but she’s had other things to chew on — what was left of her self-consciousness, for one.
“Shy” and “inhibited” are not terms Jordan’s lexicon. She’ll fling herself into any opportunity to entertain — be it karaoke singing, hula hooping or performing dual roles of the crocodile and Nana the dog in the Kenai Performers’ recent production of “Peter Pan the Musical.” She played a game show hostess in a Triumvirate Theatre play a few years ago, for which she crafted her own costume — a flesh-toned spandex bodysuit embellished with a strip of glued-on feathers, a la the swan dress singer and actress Björk infamously wore to the 2001 Academy Awards.
“My confidence level in the gym — or in life, let’s face it — has never really been a problem,” she said.
But starting out a new workout routine surrounded by mirrors and other gym patrons was a bit much, even for her.
“I started out thinking, ‘Please don’t look at me. I’m embarrassed. I can only lift 8 pounds and it’s killing me.’ And there are some exercises that just shouldn’t be done in public,” she said, noting some squatting maneuvers and positions involving an inflatable exercise ball that she at first thought Hagen was proposing as a joke. “And now there’s no exercise that I do that I am embarrassed about. It’s like, ‘lf this is what’s going to make my a– look great in that swimsuit, then this is what is going to make my a– look great in that swimsuit. I have no shame.”
As the competition date nears, Jordan has been practicing posing and a choreographed routine she’ll have to do in front of the
Kim Jordan makes a face at trainer Darin Hagen as she tries to flare her latissimus dorsi muscles in a back pose.
judges. That’s been yet another whole new experience for her.
“It’s not just get out there and give them what you got. You’ve gotta squeeze this, relax this, everything has to be activated and flexed at the right time and you have to hold it and look like you’re having fun, and relax your face and relax your hands because for some reason you don’t want to flex your fingers. There’s more to it than just getting out there in a teeny, tiny bikini,” Jordan said.
Each muscle has to be defined and shown off to its best advantage, which takes a combination of diet and time in the gym to build the muscle, posing practice, and a carefully and liberally applied coating of temporary tanning lotion so dark it looks like patent-leather shoe polish.
The posing is coming along, Jordan said, with practice and coaching of the subtleties — thumbs tucked in, shoulders rolled back, thighs engaged, lats flared — from Hagen and Cristiano.
“Things are just getting weird. It’s been a bizarre little science experiment on my body,” Jordan said. “You can see veins and things in weird spots, and new muscles are coming into view all the time. The other day I was at the gym and I finally found my triceps. It was like, ‘What? Hi. Thanks for showing up.’ I found abs not too long ago. ‘Thank you. Congratulations. Welcome. You made it.’”
Flexing her lats — latissimus dorsi muscle in the back — has been the biggest challenge.
“Even the relaxed pose, the one you come back to every time where you’re just standing there, which is ironic because my idea of relaxing involves not flexing anything, except maybe my thumb muscle on a tuner,” Jordan said. “I’ve never felt more helpless than in the posing sessions with Darin and Lissa. I was just trying too hard, I think.
“The nice thing about this show is I feel a lot more confident because I know I’ve trained for it. I’ve done everything I possibly can. I’ve been in the gym, I’ve followed the diet,” she said. “I have it now. I can do it — ish. Maybe not on command, and it may take me longer than the judges are willing to give me. That’s my worst nightmare, I’ll do the pose and they’ll be like, ‘Please flex,’ and I’ll be, ‘I am.’”
Hagen cautions her not to get too caught up in the actual competition. It’s a good goal to shoot for, but not the end all, be all of what bodybuilding is about.
“Bodybuilding is also subjective. There’s a panel of judges that are going to be judging you on your physique and everybody could be looking for something slightly different. You just put out your best physique that you can and let the chips fall where they may as far as judging is concerned,” Hagen said. “She’s going to do great. She has a commitment level that is beyond what most people do for their first show. She has a commitment level of a veteran bodybuilder who’s been doing it for a long time.”
Jordan said she doesn’t know how far or for how long she’ll go with bodybuilding. She dreams of “maintenance,” she said — hitting the gym just once a day and having the flexibility to eat out with her friends and boyfriend on occasion.
“It’s all been very humorous, and I’ve become more involved with it than I ever thought I would, but it sure has made winter go by really fast,” Jordan said. “I want to maintain a lot of this. I’ve worked really hard to get to where I’m at. And I enjoy it. When I stop having fun I’ll stop doing it and find something else to do.”
Whatever that something else is, Jordan will probably take it out in a full-contact flying headlock tackle, as well.
“I don’t want to sound cocky and say, ‘I want to win,’ but everything I do I want to win. That’s just who I am,” Jordan said. “If we’re going to go sit down and eat a burrito and you say, ‘I bet I can eat this faster than you,’ I’m going to win. I’m just a competitive person. That doesn’t mean I always do win. But with this, I feel like I’ve won already. I’ve lost like 47 pounds since November. So I don’t think there’s a way I could go up onstage and lose.”
The Mouth of The Kenai 