In this inspiring episode of Epic Begins with 1 Step Forward, host Zander Sprague sits down with Kim Rahir, a competitive weightlifter and life coach who proves it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. At 55, Kim embarked on an epic journey from battling chronic illness, including a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, to becoming a competitive weightlifter. Kim shares how she overcame fear, embraced mindfulness, and built physical and mental resilience, turning adversity into strength. Discover the importance of small, consistent steps, the power of reframing failure, and how structure can simplify even the most daunting challenges. Whether you’re navigating life transitions, seeking motivation to begin your fitness journey, or looking for tools to cultivate a strong mindset, this episode is packed with empowering insights. Kim’s story reminds us all that epic choices lead to the epic life we deserve. Tune in and be inspired to take your next step forward!
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Epic Choices, Epic Results: How Kim Overcame MS To Compete In Weightlifting
Introduction And Kim’s Background
Hello, EPIC people. Welcome back to another exciting episode of EPIC Begins With 1 Step Forward. I’m your host, Zander Sprague. I am so honored to be joined by Kim Rahir. Kim, tell us who you are and what you do.
I’m a 61-year-old mother of three. I coach women who are in what we call midlife to become strong, muscular, happy, and healthy. I also lift weights competitively and I started that at the tender age of 55. I used to be a journalist. I do what I do today because I went through some life-changing experiences with illness and anxiety. I decided that I wanted to do something with my life that would be impactful.
That is great. From reading your bio and stuff, it sounds like you’ve been on a few epic journeys. If you don’t mind, let’s explore for a moment the transition from not being well to lifting competitively. You’re starting that at a time when lots of people aren’t starting lots of new things. If they are, it’s not nearly as intense. I’m interested to know.
It’s a great question. I remember that moment when everything happened. I had been on an autoimmune disease journey at some point, and then I was diagnosed with MS. I was told that I would need lifelong treatment and that I was supposed to be careful with exercise. I decided I wanted to be physically strong. I was not going to give up.
This transition, I don’t know where exactly, I could place it. One thing that I can put my finger on is because this diagnosis was so scary. When you think about what’s going to happen in the future, you have no idea. If you have MS, your future is a big question mark. You could be in a wheelchair. Some doctors told me I could go blind, which I didn’t need to learn but they told me anyway.
There’s only one thing that you can do if you want to stay sane and not live your life in fear, which is to focus on the moment, focus on today. That’s what I did. I learned mindfulness techniques and everything to be very present with what I could do on the day. There was like no grandiose motivation like being in the present and mindfulness. That works, but for me, it was self-defense. If I started thinking about the future, I was going to scare myself out of my wits. That’s what I did.
This is what helped me to do things. When you focus on today, you’re not going to be lost and thought, “What am I going to do tomorrow?” It’s like, “I’m going to do this.” I felt this desire to become physically strong because I had been in the hospital paralyzed from the hip downwards. I had experienced complete physical weakness, where I had no power at all.
I decided that I was going to train. I did what I could in the day. This is something about the transition because now I help women also transition from a state of being discouraged, weak, overweight, or whatever it is to something else. In the transition, we always imagine that we wake up one day and say, “I have this epiphany. I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to do all these things.” I’m convinced now that in reality, it’s exactly like what your podcast says. It’s one step that I take today. That’s how transitions occur. In hindsight, that is like, “I have changed so much,” but on the day, it’s just the next small step that you take.
You mentioned that you were a mom. I’m a father myself and I remember when my daughters were babies. I was aware that in that first year, there was so much incredible change that happened. Every day I tried so hard to focus on what was new and what was changing, but they are little imperceptible things. As you say, you look back and go, “In the last month, my baby learned to roll over and hold its head up.”
When we’re on these epic journeys, a lot of them are long and the change is not something you notice until you look back and realize, “Now, I’m able to do this thing that before seemed impossible,” be it bench pressing 75 kilos. I don’t know metric that well. I was going to say pounds, but I know you’re in Europe and the rest of the world does not use the imperial system. I ran marathons and I remember when I started. I thought, “How will I ever run 8 miles or something?” As I was doing my training, it was day by day. I was doing it and doing what I had to do that day. I heard myself saying one time, “We only have an 8-mile run today.”
Many people are on these much longer epic journeys and you’re not aware of the change that’s happening because it is imperceptible. I have to imagine with weightlifting, it’s not like all of a sudden, you’re you’re lifting some huge amount of weight. Every day you’re working. You find that now you’re able to lift a little more. You go, “Look at that. When I started, I could do this. Now, I can do this. That used to be my whole workout and now that’s just warming my muscles up.”
Something that we have to remind ourselves all the time is to always measure backward. When we have great goals, we have places we want to go, we want to be there, we want to be this, and we want to achieve that, but then we don’t stop often enough to look back and see how far we’ve got. I’m tempted to say, “I’m still not doing this in my lifting.” As you said, if you look back at where you started, it’s a long way.
It’s the same when you change your lifestyle, when you want to eat better, and when you workout more. You think, “I’m still not getting 10K steps every day. Maybe I’m getting 5K and I used to walk zero.” Looking back and celebrating how far we’ve come is not something that we do naturally. We always have this striving approach. We want to move forward and look at where we’re going. Looking back is encouraging and empowering. Until a year or two ago, I wasn’t even aware that my story was epic.
The Importance Of Mindset
It is epic. With any adversity that we may find in our lives, mindset is so important when you have a chronic illness or you find yourself being diagnosed with something. I am such a firm believer that what we tell ourselves about our healing journey is so very important. I crashed on my mountain bike two years ago and busted my shoulder up pretty good. The whole time, I’m like, “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to get back. I will get back on my bike.”
I haven’t gone down the same trail I went down, but I’m not afraid to get on the bike. I’m like, “Here’s where I am. I can’t change the fact that I broke my shoulder. I can lament that I’m not happy that it happened, but it did. It’s the same way when you had a diagnosis of MS. You could have changed this. You can pull the blanket over your head and say, “Woe is me.” The fact of the matter is your life is going on whether you participate in it today or not. Your MS isn’t miraculously going away because you ignore it.
That’s the thing. This situation taught me something crucial that I’m happy I learned and I’m using it every single day, even in the tiniest of situations. There’s no point in asking yourself, “Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Who is to blame? What happened exactly, at what point in time did I make a mistake? Did someone make a mistake?” All these questions are useless. There’s always only ever one question that you want to ask yourself, which is “What can I do now?” The situation is what it is. You can question as much as you like, but it will not take you anywhere. It will not change anything.
There’s no point asking ‘Why did this happen?’ Ask yourself, ‘What can I do now?’
If you ask “What can I do now?” you’re going to do something. It could be the smallest of things. It doesn’t matter. As soon as you’re doing something, you feel empowered. You feel like you’re acting. You’re a human being who is doing stuff instead of pondering, lamenting, and thinking, “It shouldn’t be like this.” It’s also a big one. We always have this idea of how it should be. When life doesn’t live up to that, we get very disappointed and think, “This is not what I wanted. This is not what I thought.”
Of course, this was not what I wanted for myself. I had no specific plans for my life, but I didn’t have any plans of being an MS patient. I just did what I could. When you talk about the mindset, this is also where the lifting is a bit of a silver bullet because it gets you physically better and stronger but it works wonders on your mental health.
It gives you so much confidence and experience in your bones and your fibers that you can overcome resistance because that’s what you do when you lift. With this physical action of doing resistance training, you can also train your mind and your mindset. You don’t have to wait for this epiphany one morning and say, “I’m going to become a weightlifter.” You can try lifting and then you will be one.
I agree with all of that. I try and remind people that there are things that we do every day and we don’t think about it, but there was a time when we couldn’t, like learning to write. If you remember back to kindergarten or first grade, when you first started learning your letters, it was challenging to make an A, make a B, and all of that. Now, you don’t think about, “How do I form an A? How do I form a B?” All of that, and you look back and there was a time where it was a struggle for me to write and now it’s not.
There was a time when it was challenging to read and now I read all the time. I agree. You were talking earlier about looking back to see what you have accomplished. In my book, I have this idea that I call the 97-3 Rule. It is that 97% of our day is good and up to 3% isn’t so good. We have the days for that. It’s a bad day and it’s more than 3%. In general, it’s a good day. Yet we focus on the things that didn’t go right in our day and completely ignore all of these fabulous things.
You woke up this morning, but I’m not trying to trivialize it. People laugh when I say that, but I’m like, “We started by waking up.” That’s a good thing. You got out of bed. You had your day. The other thing that people forget, depending on what they’re doing. If you start weightlifting, you understand that there’s a journey that you’re on. It’s going to take you time to build muscle to be able to lift more, etc., and yet in some of the other parts of our lives, you said, “Here’s the way it could be ideally. Why didn’t this come easily?”
The things that we achieve, we achieve because it took time and because we practiced. You said that you do weightlifting competitions. You made that decision, “I want some goal to get towards.” Not like some kind of an event or competition to help motivate you to say on the days when you don’t feel so good about going to the gym, “I have to go to the gym because I have this event.” When did you do your first event?
Kim’s First Weightlifting Competition
That was in March 2019. I had been doing what you described, bench pressing and stuff like this, which we call powerlifting. A personal trainer that I was working with asked me if I wanted to try Olympic weightlifting, which is different. Olympic weightlifting is these two moves. You have to put the bar from the floor overhead in one move and then snatch it in two moves. I tried it and it’s extremely difficult. It’s so complicated. It’s not only physical. It’s also physics. You have to outsmart gravity, but I loved it.
This is lifelong learning at its core. You can never make the same lift twice. There’s always something different. I loved it so much and I found it so challenging and exciting that I switched gyms. I joined a pure weightlifting gym. After two weeks, they said, “It’s great that you joined us. Do you want to compete?” I said, “What? No.” I was 55 and they said, “Everybody’s competing here,” then I said, “Okay, fine.”
Especially for a woman my age, it’s the best thing you can do because it’s very challenging. It is scary. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating. It is everything that makes you feel alive. The very first competition I did was a local meat and we started. I had such strong emotions all over the place. Everything that I described. I have nowhere to go. I told my coach, “I’m going to cry. I’m not unhappy, but this has to go somewhere. It’s so strong.” He said, “Don’t cry now because that’s going to relax you. You don’t want to relax until you’ve done your lift.”
If you want to feel alive, try something challenging and exciting, like weightlifting. It’s exhilarating!
It’s also challenging because the light is on as they call your name, and then you have to step out and you have one minute to make the lift. You cannot go and say, “Last week, I lifted this. Next week, I might be able to lift that long.”
You could do it right now.
Absolutely. You also learn how to fail because you cannot make every lift. You’ll fail a lift and then you need to reset it and go on to the next one, not thinking about what we talked about before, “What went wrong? Why did this happen? You have to reset and start from scratch. I’m going to do this again. This is one of the most rewarding situations. This is the competition I’m most proud of. You get three attempts in every lift. If you fail the first two, you have one left in your third attempt to put points on the board.
Failure is part of the journey. Learn from it, reset, and start from scratch.
If you’re thinking, “What happened? Why did this not work? What happens if I don’t make it?” you’re lost. You have to focus and reset. I talked to a lady recently. She said, “This is mindfulness on steroids because you have to block out everything and just focus on this one. That helps you in all parts of your life if you develop those skills of resetting, focusing, or accepting failures. It makes you physically strong too.
Failure is part of the journey. No one gets it 100% right. We do learn from it. From competing in sports most of my life, there were times when I won or my team won, and there were times that we didn’t and there were heartbreaking losses. All of that makes us better people. We learn how not to do it. I’m sure you’ve been in training and competition, maybe you go into competition in a way that last week was no problem.
You get into the competition on that first try. You don’t pull it off and then you think, “Kim, what’s up? Come on. You did that last week. It was no big deal. You should be able to snatch that with no problem.” There are so many factors that go into it. I always loved to ask those questions to people who are doing competitions and stuff. When you got done with your first event, how did you feel?
I was on cloud nine. I wasn’t even touching the floor. It was also because I got six out of six, which is super exceptional. I was thriving on adrenaline and endorphins. I just felt fantastic.
That’s awesome you’re doing it. When I finished my first marathon, I was so excited. I dreamed about this. I was on cloud nine. I had the endorphins, but I had what I call the “Now what?” I had worked so hard to get there. I accomplished it. I was incredibly excited about that, but now what? I worked so hard, I accomplished this, and I’m so excited. but now what? I’m going to guess that you’re “Now what?” was “I should enter another competition.”
On to the next, which is great because it gives some structure to this natural fluctuation that we have. I always insisted I was on cloud nine and I was also very happy, but I tried to keep my highs low because that would help me keep my lows higher. The higher you rise, the lower you crash afterward. Physically, you can tell that right away because when you have a big competition, you have such an adrenaline rush that the next day, you want to eat sugar. Let’s calm this whole system down here with some sugar.
I want to be happy and I enjoyed this, but I’m not looking for this even better or stronger kickoff thrill or something like this. I’m happy with my highs. I don’t keep them low deliberately. It’s just that I’m not striving to get higher and higher. I’m having to do what I can, and then if you can sign up for the next competition, it gives structure to this high or this amplitude. You were very happy on that day.
The next day, you may be a bit tired and you want to have some sugar. You think, “What now? What next?” You then set your eyes on the next competition, which will be months out. You know that you have to rebuild very gently so you don’t go crazy. You stay in your routine. You enjoy the emotions that you get from this, but it’s structured.
The Importance Of Structure
I talk about it all the time. The structure is so important in it. It makes what you’re trying to achieve doable. I had a training schedule for my marathon and I set training schedules for road bikes now. If I was training for a century or something like that, I’m like, “Let me set a schedule,” because then I don’t have to think about it.” I’m sure with your powerlifting, you have a schedule. You know that you’re doing arms this day, legs another day. You know what your workout is. It makes it much easier because you don’t have to think about it. You’re like, “Here’s the workout I’m doing today.”
It’s crucial. It’s important. This is something I also work on with my clients when we build the routines and the systems to start training regularly and to start eating better. You need to take a lot of decision-making out of the whole thing. Some things must be said in advance. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to negotiate in your head because this is also something that happens.
When you don’t have a structure in place, then you’re left to your own devices and then your head starts negotiating, “Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I maybe not do it?” That’s a big waste of time and energy too, and it doesn’t help you move forward. When you can set some structures and systems in advance, it makes it easier for you. You don’t have to worry.
You don’t have to think and then you work with a professional. I have a professional coach with it and he knows what he does. It’s all written out there. There are microcycles, mesocycles, macrocycles, and all this stuff. You can just focus on the lifting. You don’t have to worry and think about anything. You can create that for yourself in other parts of your life. Good structures and systems stop the negotiation, the thinking, and the worrying.
One final thing I love to ask my guests about is I write about the concept of these two powerful words, “Not yet.” I think not yet is so wonderful. It’s so optimistic. When I was writing my book, “Has your book come out?” “Not yet.” It doesn’t mean it’s not coming out. It means I haven’t achieved it yet. “Kim, have you had your competition?” “Not yet because it’s not until two months from now.” No one is like, “It’s coming up in two months.” For you, what are 1 or 2 of your not-yet?
Embrace the power of ‘not yet.’ It’s optimistic and acknowledges that you’re on a journey.
One is I would love to be able to snatch 40 kilos, which is about 4 kilos above what I’m able to do right now. That’s a not-yet. I would also like to be these guys, mostly guys but it’s going to change over the years because more women get into weightlifting. I see close to 90-year-old guys showing up for competitions. They traveled the world. They stay at a hotel or a hostel. They go to the weigh-in because they have weight before. They carry their breakfast. They step on the platform. Sometimes they even have trouble walking, but they go there and they lift. I want to be that person.
That’s awesome, Kim.
Not yet, but I hope it’s going to happen.
There you go. As you said, exercise is key, and you seemed to be well on your way.
That’s one thing. It’s simple and it helps you stay focused on doing stuff that makes a difference and not get sidetracked, When you enjoy it as much as I do, then you find the perfect mix.
Connect With Kim
If people want to get ahold of you, how can they?
Find something you enjoy, like weightlifting, and it won’t feel like a chore. You’ll have found the perfect mix.
The easiest way is to go to my website, which is KimRahir.com. If you want to find out how you’re doing in your everyday health and fitness, you can take a free assessment there, where I’m going to give you some pointers on where you are at and what you can do next if you want to get stronger. It’s about how your health and strength fit into your daily life. It’s not about whether you can do five push-ups. It’s more like how you tie your shoes and stuff like this to make it very useful and functional. You can follow me on Facebook or Instagram with my name Kim Rahir, where I share lots of tips, tricks, and fun stuff, as my weightlifting adventures. You can find out more about me there.
Kim, thank you so much for joining us on this epic conversation. Congratulations on all the success that you’ve had.
Thanks, Zander.
I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. This is exciting. I have a TV show coming out. If you want to be a guest in the studio with me, go to EpicBegins.com and look for the TV guest. As always, I want to remind everyone that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
About Kim Rahir
Kim Rahir is a 60-year-old mother of three who was diagnosed with MS 10 years ago and decided to ignore her doctor’s advice and muscle her way back to a happy life. Last year she became European Champion in Masters Weightlifting in her age and weight category. Her journey inspired her to leave her career in journalism in her 50s and become a health coach for middle-aged women – with a big focus on reactivating and rebuilding muscle. Today, she helps women tap into an abundant source of vitality. It works by reactivating and maintaining muscle and eating to nourish and flourish.