Member Spotlight: Kristin Hedges

“Being angry is part of it, but you can’t stay there.” Kristin sometimes tells her students “Frustration, all of those other feelings aren’t bad… but you can’t live there.”

I have seen people train at Title Boxing Club for a lot of reasons, often as a way to relieve stress or as an act of self-love, as an outlet, or an escape. Sometimes it’s for the outward stuff too--bikini pics and bragging rights, medals, weight lifted, or inches lost. And while none of those are bad, by far the greatest accomplishment I have seen here was by a person who would never even boast about it at all.

“In my mind I come in here and do what everybody else does. Everyone works hard,” she shrugged. “Except that I started at such a terrible place so I’m going to have some progress --I don’t know how to explain how I’ve been successful at this.”

Since I first started at Title I’ve been wanting to tell Kristin Hedge’s story. Each time I asked, she just smiled or gave me a hug and nodded, “Someday.” A guidance counselor at Glenellen Elementary School, she has been training relentlessly with Gabe Redel 2-3 times a week for the last year, in the ring working boxing and kicks one day, circuit training the next—and classes and strength training on her own in between. It was rare for me to even see her when she wasn’t red in the face and dripping with sweat.

I sat behind the front desk and watched as she moved from basic drills to Mittology, from doing laborious hooks all class to roundhouse kicks—to single leg jumps, and higher and higher box steps-- to running, even sprinting—as her body seemed to shrink right in front of my eyes. Every week stronger, faster, more agile, but more than anything; I had never seen someone smile so much.

“People probably want to hear ‘Oh it’s hard you’ve had to push yourself’ but I can’t tell you that because it has almost seemed too easy to me--then I think ‘gosh you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough!”” she laughed. “I took that first class and fell in love with it—now, a year in and there’s never been a day where I thought, ‘Ugh, I need to go do that today.’”

When she finally felt ready to open up to me she asked me to talk to her with Gabe by her side, she credits him with her success as much as her own determination. “I absolutely did not do this on my own,” she said. “We’ve built a strong relationship of mutual trust and respect and we do this together.”

When I came in to meet with them they were lost in their own world joking about Kristin’s latest injury from training, a bloody elbow.

“She takes it as a war, a battle--the injuries she doesn’t care she smashes right through them, the cuts and things” Gabe explained. “That’s a fighter mentality—that tough attitude that’s the most prominent thing she does, that’s how she’s gotten to where she’s at.”

“However it sets us back sometimes, I wish she would put Band-Aids on so we could kick without getting blood everywhere, I mean we aren’t a fight gym.”

Kristin laughed. “The physical pain doesn’t hurt me--it frustrates me because when something serious happens it sets us back—I might not be able to run or jump or kick that week.”

They began kickboxing together last October. “That was a huge milestone for her,” Gabe told me. He said that for months they worked on just getting her able to move her feet.

“How do you know when she’s ready for something new?” I asked.

“When she can perform the exercises in a way that shows that she has it mastered. But she wants to do more than she’s able to right now—her eyes are bigger than her stomach, but it’s a good problem to have.”

“I can come in here and trust in Gabe and his experience and trust him to keep my desire in check,” she added. “I might not know where we’re going but I know that he does.”

“I still tell you from the beginning it just feels like fun,” she said to him with a smile, “It’s like toys, it’s the playground, it’s something new every week.”

“There was a day that he took the dumbbells away and handed me a heavier weight--even if I can’t do it just yet I know--One day I’ll be able to do it, I’ll be able to open that box.”

“That’s just because I like being mean,” Gabe replied and we all laughed.

“I can only put the exercises in front of you,” he responded. “You had to have the determination to go out and make it happen.”

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Talk to Kristin for a while about her training and you will hear her mention the “unlocking of boxes.”

Gabe also happens to be a prolific writer, and early on in her training Kristin was inspired by his poem The Man in the Box about a man trapped within boxes, using the tools at his disposal to escape until he opens the final box and sees the whole world and that there are more possibilities than he could have ever imagined.

“As we got into training and these boxes started unlocking it was like ‘ok now you’ve got that you’ve got that ability’; there is no deeper more powerful feeling to me than that.”

Kristin will never refer to her goals, she says that she never really even knew how to set a goal—to her this entire process has always just been about that next thing.

“I can give you numbers but that’s not what I came here for, when I walked through the door I didn’t realize what I was getting in to I didn’t realize it was a fitness center, I just wanted to hit something,” she explained.  “At first I couldn’t even get up and down off the floor, couldn’t walk up stairs—couldn’t walk anywhere without getting out of breath.”

In college when she was 19, Kristin was told that she had an insulin resistance.

“I didn’t know what that was, other than first of all your body makes too much insulin then also your body doesn’t metabolize it well--that raged out of control for some time and my blood pressure was getting high.”

“I think part of it was how quickly I saw the health benefits here--In 6 months my blood pressure dropped 20 points, heartrate dropped 30 points, all of the lab work is the best it’s ever been in 17 years--6 months is not a long time to reset yourself. It didn’t take a lot to make a significant difference.”

“And what I ate, that was a part of this. Nothing tastes as good as getting results—I’ve drastically changed what I eat. I had a job where I was in the car a lot, lots of fast food—I haven’t had a Coke, French fries or a cheeseburger since I started here--I just flipped that switch, good or bad I do that in other areas.”

“I would have never set a goal to lose first 25 pounds because I never thought I would have done that,” she said. “I never met anyone who lost a significant amount of weight, and even if I had, I would not have thought that I would be able to do it.”

Now more than 200 pounds lost, it’s hard to even imagine the place that Kristin started at last year.

To anyone looking in, Kristin seems like the most laidback, happy person—she said that Gabe saw through that when they began training.

“I’ve never had anybody in my life be as honest and I needed that. If you don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong it doesn’t make me better,” she told him with tears in her eyes. “That’s what I love about training with you, you called me out from the beginning, you would say ‘hey you’re getting frustrated--you saw that and I don’t know how you saw that.”

“You took me when I couldn’t do anything,” she said with tears running down her face. “And I will always be grateful for that.”

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It is human nature to want to quantify that—to try to harness it. But there was no secret to her success, there are no quick fixes. But anyone who meets Kristin knows the power of her positive influence. Whenever I was having a bad day—I would look over at her training mitts with Gabe and remember what Title was all about. I told her how motivational she had been to me on a personal level, but for someone who has devoted their life to helping others, she still couldn’t see how much she did without knowing it.

“I think there are a lot of people in life who are frustrated and they don’t know how to fix it--I think they just accept that. Where I was at, how much frustration I had; I was blessed to find that this fixed so many things in life,” she said “In that way it’s the beginning—this all feels like it’s just beginning in a lot of ways--I’ve lived life in shutdown mode, Now I see how the rest of life can look.”

“I might still be a school counselor ten years from now or I might take a mission trip out of the country, now I can do that. I have the freedom to live life how I want to now. If I wake up on a Friday and want to fly to D.C. to visit the museums I can do that. If I want to go to Florida for the weekend I can do that too. The things I have learned here translate to other areas of life not just physical freedom”

Over spring break she took off on her own in her car—visiting other Title Boxing Clubs in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa. She is also going on a mission trip to Boston and her son Connor is traveling to Brazil over the summer.

“The motivation was just thinking about where I wanted to be--why not get in the car and see other places? I don’t mind traveling by myself,” she said. “I didn’t know if I’d go in and be quiet and not talk to anyone, but I kinda like that, experiencing it that way--That’s something I don’t always seek out very often.”

While Connor’s gone she is going on another road trip—this time to Titles across the Midwest—in Indy, Chicago and St. Louis, Ohio and Kentucky. Where she will go from there we can only guess.

“That’s one thing, I’ll never call this a journey because that implies the end point,” she said. “I want to accept that there’s always that next step and there is no endpoint.”

“Last year the unlocking of the boxes was huge this year I said we need a theme,” she explained. She read to us a passage from Gabe’s book The Amazing Pittsville and the Beggar’s Invisible Railways.

“What kind of an adventure would be living a rural American life? Everybody does that, that’s safe. Adventure is supposed to be shredded with pain, and trials and struggle because that’s what makes an adventure great.”

“I don’t know what this looks like but I know this next year is going to be a bigger plan—that point where it’s hard, it’s a struggle, that’s where that adventure part comes,” she smiled as her eyes shone. “That’s what makes this adventure so exciting. That’s what makes it great.”

Article by Kirsten Hall