West Vancouver Moms Club Loves: Pilates
When a mom does Pilates, you know she’s been through it.
Obviously, Pilates isn’t for everyone, even in West Van. My friends who have nice lives and ordinary problems don’t do Pilates. They like weight-training or cardio or yoga, or daily walks by the sea, although I do have one friend with a chaotic inner life who really likes spin class. Pilates is more for:
The woman with too many children
The woman who had a stillbirth
The woman whose teen is tiptoeing toward a BPD diagnosis
The woman struggling in her marriage, while the shadow of her own mother –sad, chaotic, twice divorced—looms always overhead
The woman whose husband had an affair with her best friend
The woman who had an affair with her best friend’s husband
The woman who is going to have a baby even if it kills her (and it actually might)
That last one is me! I found Pilates early, even before I became a mom. My first pregnancy ended in a complex miscarriage – the first of many—and at that time I was afraid of SSRIs. So instead, I got really into Pilates. More specifically, I got into the Lagree method. This particular modality uses a proprietary reformer that looks like it was designed by a meathead on bath salts; it’s called, hilariously, a Megaformer. Classes are expensive and almost exclusively populated by hot woman and, if you do enough of them, you’ll be hot too. I personally have never been hotter than when I was blowing three hundred dollars a month to treat my PTSD with Pilates.
Exercise itself is a neat metaphor for trauma recovery. You literally tear at the fibres of your being, lean into the pain, and in time, your body just knits itself back together, stronger than ever. Like magic. I myself find this narrative kind of suspect—there was nothing on the other side of my own crucible but a newfound interest in EMDR— but I can understand the appeal.
Still, I can’t deny that there is something healing—even transcendent?—about controlled pain. At Lagree, the classes were so intense that they shut my mind down altogether. Back then, my mind was a very bad place to be, a black box of pain, a house on fire, a rusty rat trap hammer snapping down on my neck all day. Except at Pilates.
It’s hard to describe how difficult the classes are, especially in the beginning; you work a muscle group to fatigue, methodically, until every inch cramps and shakes and screams. Then you move on to the next group, and the next, and the next and the next. You can’t even think through the pain. When that first class was over, I realized my mind had been quiet for forty minutes. I didn’t even think that was still possible, and the relief made me physically weak. I had to lay on the carriage for a while before my legs stopped shaking and I could walk. That’s true.
If you told me that Pilates was specially engineered for moms in crisis, I’d believe you. Classes are almost always taught by women for women, and in the studio you feel shut off from the world, hidden from prying eyes. I guess the feminine urge to cloister yourself away like a happy little nun is real. The only man I’ve ever seen at Pilates was someone’s husband, and his energy was so pleasant and mild that, after a while, I didn’t mind him being there at all.
The other key is that the instructor talks all the time. Unlike Soulcycle, there’s no leader setting intentions or encouraging self-reflection or trying to pry at your box of pain. Pilates isn’t spiritual. It’s just a beautiful woman with a tight ponytail counting, adjusting, cuing and transitioning, all business. And every exercise is so precise that all you can do is focus. Engage this muscle. Relax the other. Breathe in. Hold on. Keep pushing. Your mind wanders. The instructor brings you back. Your mind gets quiet once again.
I eventually had two kids (two! And I didn’t even die!) and bought myself a reformer. I mostly work out at home now, but from time to time I’ll dip in at the various studios around town. The best classes on the North Shore are Lindsay’s 9.00 am and 10.00 am sessions at Hollyburn—it’s a fact—but if you aren’t a member, Foundation Pilates on Marine will do. I hear that Ali is amazing there. Lagree is still running in North Van too, if you're looking for real pain. I'm not in that particular market right now.
Still, there are times when I’m on Lonsdale, visiting the doctor or picking up doughnuts or running some other errand, and I’ll walk down the little alleyway between Esplanade and 1st and peer through the windows at Lagree.
I can’t see the class itself, which is tucked away behind the welcome desk, but I imagine the women in there, tight-bodied, beautiful, desperate, planking and piking and pulling heavy cables. Faces pinched and drawn. Crying in the bathroom before class, like I did, then spritzing on a cooling mist and hitting the mega. Hunched over in child’s pose afterwards, totally spent, riding a rush of love and gratitude so intense they can barely say “thank you” when they leave. Telling themselves, “I did this for me” as they get back in the car and drive home to their nightmares.
So when that wheel turns, as I know it will, as it always does, I’ll be back at Lagree. I’ll pay more, I’ll push harder, I’ll bash my fucking brains out on that mega. And you’ll know when it’s happening, because I’ll look hotter than ever. I guess that’s what you call “upside.”