Welcome to my very first blog! I’m really excited to share my journey with you as I continue to explore my passion for pole dancing (pole fitness) and living the paleo lifestyle. I hope to focus this blog mostly on these 2 subjects, but I’m sure there will also be posts about my day-to-day happenings and random musings. I’ll just go with the flow and see where it ends up taking me.

I’ve always been really into fitness. I was an active child growing up; from climbing trees to taking karate to eventually becoming a competitive cheerleader for 6 years. I stopped cheering after my freshman year at the University of Maryland (mostly because I wanted to focus more on classes and have a real social life) and that’s when I went into an exercise funk. I remember that feeling of dread I associated with going to the gym – I felt like I had to go on the elliptical for 45 minutes every day just to offset the amount of calories I was ingesting from all the junk food and alcohol. Fortunately, during my senior year at UMD, my boyfriend Zach introduced me to the wonderful world of weightlifting. I fell in love: squats, deadlifts, overhead press, bench press and all. I continued to lift heavy weights even after I graduated and moved back with my parents in New York.

Fast forward a year and I found myself back in Maryland, renting an apartment with Zach and working in DC. After living here for a couple of months and realizing that I had yet to join a gym, I knew something had to change. The environment I work in can be pretty lonesome (think little to no human interaction for ~10 hours a day) so I knew I needed more of a hobby than just working out at the local gym. That’s when pole dancing entered my life and changed me forever.

I have always been fascinated by the grace, beauty, and incredible strength that pole dancers possess. I’ll never forget the first time I watched the USPDF 2009 championship highlights – I remember sitting in my dorm room in complete and utter awe and thought to myself “I wonder if I could ever learn to move like that…”

And here we are now. I took my first pole dancing class on October 16th, 2012 and never looked back. There are a million things I love about pole. Being able to defy gravity. Not only gaining strength and flexibility, but also becoming more confident in my own skin. That incredible feeling you get when you finally nail that move you’ve been working on for a month. The list goes on and on.

My first inverted crucifix! (Dec 2012)

Twisted Grip Handspring (July 2013)

I was planning on talking about how I discovered the paleo lifestyle, but it seems like my obsession passion for pole has taken over this entry, so it will have to wait until next time!