Janine’s bootcamp story at Stave Hill

Janine came to Bootcamp SE16 six months after a breakup that flattened her, and six weeks after her first proper consultation with Steph she completed the Mudderella obstacle course. She wrote her own account of it, and it is one of the best things anybody has written about training at Stave Hill.

It starts, as she says, with a boy. She was dumped over lunch, at work, by someone she shared a floor of the office with, and then had to watch him avoid her for months. What followed was a February in London, late nights at work in the run-up to year end, red wine as a coping strategy, and crisps and pesto pasta as a policy. By the time she flew home to Australia in May she had no energy and her clothes did not fit.

She did not choose to come

Her best friend chose for her. Janine is clear that it was not a request. Her first session was a Saturday morning at Stave Hill in Canada Water, and she arrived expecting military drills and someone shouting at her, and worrying about whether she would have to climb a rope.

The warm-up alone was three laps up and down the hill steps. In her words, one lap and she sounded like an emphysemic smoker. She wore the yellow hi-vis vest that marks you out as a newbie and hated every second.

Then she noticed something odd. Everyone else was happy. People were laughing while they squatted. That was the hook.

The consultation

A few weeks later she asked Steph for help properly. The first question was not about her weight, which she was grateful for:

So what do you want to achieve?

Janine's answer was not a dress size or a number. It was this:

I would like to fit in my body better.

They built a plan around what she actually enjoyed, added a food plan, and set a date. Mudderella, six weeks away, on 30 August. Janine asked whether she would be ready. Steph's answer was five words:

I will make you ready.

Six weeks

She trained Monday to Thursday evenings plus Saturday mornings, added personal training sessions, stuck to the food plan and gave up wine. She went from pressing 6kg kettlebells to 10kg. She got smaller, though slowly, because she was putting on muscle at the same time, and people started noticing her face and her eyes rather than her weight.

She finished Mudderella. Afterwards another member told her she had changed, and when Janine protested that she had not lost that much weight, the reply was:

It's not how you look but your attitude and the way you train.

What the group did

Her account is full of small things other members did. Someone swapping the heavy tyre for a lighter one without making a thing of it. Someone pushing her through squat jumps. A drill partner who still asks to work with her. A group chat that filled up with messages the night before Mudderella so that she stopped being frightened.

She eventually earned the orange vest, which meant four laps of the hill instead of three, and she notes she was still wheezing. Her summary of the whole thing is hard to improve on:

Somewhere in between the smash and grabs and plank walks, I lost my hurt and found my smile.

If you are at the bottom of something similar, you do not have to arrive fit or cheerful. You just have to book the first one.