Years ago a young lady showed up in my gym as a part of a Girl's High School Basketball Team.  At the first practice she was put in a group of "Lightweight" girls that were not only that but also physically very young.  Her name was Smita Narulli which I turned immediately into "Smitz" as a nickname.

Her first session was to box squat only a modified bar, which became more of Bambi's first stand up on ice.  Thin arms and legs went every which of way and I shook my head and could only HOPE for her to quit.  THIS was going to be a project.

She stands eye to eye with me yet I outweighed her by about 120 lbs.  Waif like and wide eye, I daily hoped she would call it "too much".

She didn't!

From High School Basketball to Track to Cross Country this bright 4.0+ GPA female athlete had the world by it's balls.

She wanted to attend Stanford University and I encouraged her to go to Cornell.  3000 miles away to explore more than just an education.

What I didn't realize that this lesson in patience became one of my greatest accomplishments in that I now have a "daughter" of a sort that listened, pursued, relented and succeeded.

However I never heard her cries of desperation and help.  I made too many assumptions based on our relationship and what I expected from her.  I

She's about to Graduate from Cornell and move on to her pursuit of a Master's Degree at Duke University, but before she heads off to further greatness I'd like to share HER OWN story that she  tells in a paper she (now WE) hope reaches beyond just this scope.

Depression is a very serious issue.  Cornell University has a dark reputation (mostly because of the type of student and the topography that lends itself easily to) of far too many suicides.

Smitz is the hard charging, alpha student that never took the plunge (thank God) but this story needs to be told and told again.

She has given me permission to share it, so PLEASE take a moment and read it, share it, reach out to her for more recommendations.

"When I wanted to go to college 3,000 miles across the country, my mom had only one

  • condition — visit it first. Seems fair enough for someone who grew up in 70-degree
    suburbia to have to experience the bone-chilling cold and isolation of upstate New York 
    firsthand before committing to living there for the next 4 years. But I was 17 and knew
    everything, so naturally I refused. I told her I was going to college to run and get a good
    education and that was all I cared about. In my defense, I didn’t decide where I was going
    to school on a whim. I had done an extensive amount of research weighing my options,
    but I completely disregarded a lot of factors that I thought didn’t matter — like weather, 
    accessibility, distance from home, campus atmosphere, location. You know? Just the
    small things. I told my mom that I had already made up my mind and that a visit wasn’t
    going to change it. I said that even if I hated the school when I visited, I was still going to
    go because it was my best option to pursue my running career. My mom (and every other
    person I talked to) asked me to consider if I would still be happy at the school if I wasn’t
    running, “for some odd reason.” Offended by the mere suggestion of not running
    anymore, I responded in a condescending way that only someone with a lethal
    combination of naivety and arrogance could do — “Mom, if I’m not running ‘for some
    odd reason,’ I won’t be happy anywhere.” Never have I ever been so right and so wrong
    about something.
    If I asked someone to describe me today, I don’t think reserved would be the first word
    that would come to mind. Actually, I don’t think it would be the hundredth. But if I had
    asked someone the same question freshman year, it would have been the only word.
    When I was depressed, I didn't know that I was for about 80% of the time. I knew I was
    feeling sad and frustrated all the time, but I attributed all of that to the external
    circumstances around me — having a terrible cross country season, breaking my foot,
    getting off to a rough start academically in college, breaking my leg, not being able to 
    run, continuing to do poorly freshman year, having no close friends, breaking my back,
    almost failing classes. From an outside lens, that seems like a time that anyone would 
    have been sad and frustrated during. But the thing was, I wasn't. "Sad" and "frustrated"
    would have been if I was pissed off for an hour after a bad race or flung something after I
    got my grades back. But I was pissed off for the better part of 3 years and the only thing I
    was flinging was insults at myself daily.
    It's ironic because on questionnaires diagnosing depression, they ask you if you've "had
    feelings of sadness or loneliness lasting for more than 2 weeks." And every time I filled
    out one of those surveys, I answered honestly — "No". Because when you're depressed,
    it's not a mood or a feeling you feel — it's a mindset. So "sadness" and "loneliness" in my
    mind, didn't apply to me. They were just the new baseline. And I didn't believe that I was 
    depressed because I always thought things would turn around. I truly believed that "even
    the longest night was followed by a morning.”
    So I just thought I was biding my time until my morning came. And it did — my
    sophomore spring things started looking way up. I got a procedure done on my back that
    helped it immensely, got cleared to start cross training again, hit a subject I was actually 
  • doing well in, and had some friends. Yet, at the end of my best semester of college to
    date, I tried to jump off of a bridge. Confused? So was I.
    The external factors around me had done a complete 180, but inside I was panicking. On 
    paper, I should have been feeling happy and uplifted, but the only emotion I felt was
    guilt. I felt like an utter waste of people's time and energy and I couldn't shake the feeling
    that everyone would be better off without me. I never lost hope that things would get
    better when things were bad, but where did that leave me when things around me got 
    better and I didn't?
    Honestly terrified. Because now I had nothing to fall back on. Nothing to blame my
    depressing thoughts on. I couldn't figure out why I still felt so trapped and I didn’t really
    want to since that meant facing the harsh reality that my despondence came from within 
    my own self. So, as futile as the attempt was, I tried to run as far as I possibly could from
    myself.
    I figured I’d never have to confront my thoughts if I never gave myself time to think. So
    when I went home that summer, I tried to make myself as busy as possible. I would wake
    up at 4:45 and go to bed at 1, filling the time in between with work, working out, and
    wallowing. When my thoughts caught up with me, which they eventually always did,
    they would convince me that I was a drain on society, that my presence was hurting the 
    ones around me.
    Depression is insidious because it infiltrates your brain and attacks every known 
    weakness you have to tell you that you’re not good enough or that everyone hates you. It
    twists your worldview and skews your perspective and it’s hard to disentangle what your
    real thoughts are from what’s just the depression talking.
    One of the things I was most insecure about when I was depressed was being a “bad
    person.” I thought that no one liked me because I was a self-centered asshole. And
    ironically enough, I was right — but not for the reasons I thought. Being hypercritical of
    my every personality trait only led me to hate myself and in the processtry to subdue 
    myself. And all that ended up doing in the end was making me a hollowed out version of
    myself. So when I was interacting with the people around me, I wasn’t really bringing
    much to the table. I thought people cared about me because of my accomplishments,
    when in reality, they cared about me for who I was.
    I think I hurt a lot of people around me during that period because I was hypersensitive to
    everything people would say. Depression made me like an insulated wire, so that
    everything I touch set off an explosion. I think this was the case because I was so
    insecure about who I was that anything anyone would say would rub me the wrong way.
    It’s hard to have healthy relationships with people when they feel like they’re constantly 
    walking on eggshells around you. I was so in my own head that I pushed everyone else
    away and I know hurt those who cared about me and for that I sincerely apologize.
    That summer, my depression was deeply intertwined with my own thoughts and I had no
  • way of discerning the two. I was so mentally screwed up that instead of getting help after 
    the first time I tried to kill myself, I was convinced that it was the most “rational” course
    of action. My depression convinced me that as much pain as my family would be in if I
    killed myself, it would still be less than the pain I was causing them by being around
    now. So I came up with a plan to end things on my birthday because “that way people
    would only have to think of me once a year, instead of twice.” Well, my birthday came
    and went and I (thankfully) didn’t do anything because I slowly started to realize that my
    depression and my mind were two separate entities and that I didn’t agree with the
    warped ideas my depression was espousing. Once I could make that distinction, I started
    to realize the truth that if I had killed myself, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was my 
    birthday, or the day that I died, or the Friday after the Spring Equinox, my family
    would’ve thought about me everyday and it would’ve destroyed them.
    Realizing my depression was separate from myself gave me the power to fight back
    against it. Depression distorts reality and makes it hard to figure out a way to get out of it.
    It’s like you’re trying to escape a maze, blindfolded, drunk, and after being spun around a
    few times — you have no idea which way the exit is or even up from down.
    Differentiating between my depression and my thoughts was like turning the lights on in
    that maze. And everyone I’ve been lucky to get to know over the past couple years,
    whether you knew it or not, you were my guide out of that maze and I don’t know where
    I would be without that support. I can’t thank you all enough for allowing me to be
    myself again.
    I remember isolating myself in my dorm room freshman year because I thought I hadn’t 
    “earned” friends. I remember the heaviness of the weight of the world on my shoulders
    and I remember the agonizing frustration of feeling like you were constantly swimming 
    upstream. I remember clenching a fist in rage at myself and not being able to unclench it 
    for years. I remember not being able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple 
    minutes or sleep for more than a couple hours because my mind was too busy itemizing a
    list of all the ways I had screwed up or enumerating all the reasons why people might not
    like me. I remember struggling to get out of bed in the morning because every day just
    seemed like another opportunity to make more mistakes to stoke my personal hate fire.
    But I also remember the first time that someone called out to say hi to me in the hallway. 
    I remember the first time someone invited me to go out with them. I remember the first 
    time someone trusted me enough to open up to me.
    Revisiting the words of my cocky 17-year old self that “I wouldn’t be happy anywhere if
    I wasn’t running,” I was lucky enough to beat my depression because I realized that I
    needed to make some sort of change. I used to think that the greatest feeling in the world 
    was winning. And as incredible as that rush of adrenaline is and as much as I still chase
    that feeling, it pales in comparison to the feeling you get when someone is genuinely
    excited to see you.
    For someone who hates change as much as I do, getting out of my depression maze was
    the most uncomfortable thing I’ve had to do. Hanging out with people I didn’t really
  • know made me nauseous and I would shake as I was walking up to their houses, but I 
    forced myself to do it because I knew that it was part of my recovery process. Coming to
    terms with my deepest fears and recognizing they exist and why they exist was and still is
    terrifying. For someone who never divulged anything more than my favorite food and
    color to my “closest friends”, opening up to others about my struggles was the scariest
    thing I’ve ever done. Being vulnerable is not a comfortable thing at all and it still scares 
    me senseless, but I know it’s the only way to take the power away from my depression,
    so I force myself to do it.
    When I was a freshman, I was a premed, cross-country runner who was little more than a
    fly on the wall. Now, as a graduating senior, I’m going to business school, technically on
    the roster of a sport I’ve never played before, organizing events for the rest of the class. 
    Shockingly enough, cocky 17-year old me was wrong — I’m no longer running and I’m
    happier than I’ve ever been before.
    The reason I’m writing this article is because I want people to know that they’re not
    alone. Everyone has struggled or is struggling with their own mental demons, no matter
    how big or small. I still have the occasional bad day and I know I have flaws — I don’t
    have an inside voice, the word “moderation” isn’t in my vocabulary, I have the spatial 
    awareness of a 3-year old, and I drive my Prius like it’s an Escalade. But I also know that
    those flaws don’t define me. And I promise your flaws don’t define you either.
    Depression takes your insecurities and amplifies them until your view of yourself is just a
    caricature of all your flaws. You think that you’re everything you’ve never wanted to be,
    and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.

 

Today's Training:

Tier I:

Run:5K for me everyone else 14 minutes

Dynamic Squat: 12x2x Same Wt as Monday and Thursday of last week.

DeadLift: 12x1x Same wt as Monday and Thursday of last week

GHR: 2x25

 

 

Tier II

12" Box Squat

Split Squat

12" Box Squat

Rear Stepping Lunge:

Jump Squats (just clear the ground by an inch or 2)

Jump Lunge

 

Done as a continuous Giant Set w/ Body Weight Only

5 sets of 20 reps EACH exercise.