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Fitness Trainer Travails

When relationships become too sweet, they can decay!

Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh
Middle-Pause
4 min readJan 13, 2025

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A woman works out on the floor of a gym. The window has curtains on it. This appears to be a bedroom of a home converted to a gym room. There are motivational posters on the wall and a full-length narrow mirror on one wall.
The room in which I workout with my fitness trainer in her home, five days a week. Author’s photo.

I work out 5 days a week with a fitness trainer who’s both fun and fierce.

Since starting in September 2021, I’ve done close to 1,000 workouts with her, and she’s been a breath of fresh air. Under her guidance, I didn’t just improve physically — I started saying “why not” instead of “no way” to things that might make me happy. I even became more punctual, consistent, and less judgmental.

“Know all to forgive all,” she’d say. It rubbed off on me, and I spread the gospel of her wisdom far and wide.

Back then, I was her only client. It took a year before someone else signed up — her husband’s colleague’s wife. Then came my brother, who had a shoulder issue she fixed in nine days while he was visiting India. He continued classes online after returning to the U.S.

Daylight Saving Time left my trainer marveling at “spring forward, fall back.” My brother’s workout classes, at 5:30 a.m. EST, translated to either 4:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. Indian Standard Time, depending on the month. She had no idea this biannual time shuffle even existed before.

Meanwhile, she kept up her traditional Hindu ways — fasting for festivals and mentioning it during workouts. My brother, who hadn’t heard about Teej in…

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Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh
Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh

Written by Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh

I don’t just create smiles, I inspire them! Dentist, mom—Jamshedpur, India.

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