One look at Callie Enne and there is no doubt that she has successfully followed a fitness lifestyle. What is not so easy to see is the mountain of challenges she’s had to overcome along the way. Her journey, with all its twists and turns, has helped her discover who she is. Her fitness pursuits have assisted her in managing the ups and downs of life. This has led her to grow beyond the mere physical into areas of self-discovery and personal development. Fitness anchors her to an important part of who she is while she pushes to explore who else she can be.
Callie’s life is a still-unfolding story. It has the potential to go beyond anyone’s imagination. The work she’s put into improving her physical development is being matched by the work she’s putting in to maximize her career goals and pursuits. She understands discipline, consistency, sacrifice, and the need to overcome obstacles from first-hand experience. She’s learned how to make the most out of the opportunities that are present and to create new opportunities when circumstances dictate. Callie’s story is a perfect example of how what is outwardly visible rarely tells the entire tale. Her dedication to pursuing a fitness lifestyle has helped her manage things that would have limited many people. As she continues to evolve and learn while on her journey, Callie is turning the world into her personal stage. It’s promising to be an amazing performance.
Photos courtesy of Callie Enne, all right reserved! (Click on images to enlarge)
Bodysport: Where are you from originally?
Callie: North Pole, Alaska
Bodysport: How did you first get involved with sports and fitness?
Callie: My Mom. She used to bring me with her to the studio while she took Jazzercise. Most of the moms brought their kids so eventually they decided to have a movement class for the kids. So I started in an acrobatics class when I was 3.
Bodysport: You’ve had a very well versed athletic background, what are some of the things you’ve done?
Callie: Growing up I was always a dancer and competitive gymnast, but eventually soccer became my main focus. I played competitively from the age of 8. I was selected for an Olympic development program when I was 13 and was also selected to go to Europe on an all-American team when I was 14. I got a soccer scholarship to Cal Lutheran. I went for a semester and earned a starting position. In high school, I competed in gymnastics, soccer, cheerleading, dance team and wrestling.
As an adult, I’ve competed in bikini, figure, and fitness competitions, Crossfit competition’s, strongman competitions, and OCR races. I competed in the beginning of the Florida Grid league and did a 24 hr OCR race when I lived in Miami completing 55 miles…I also raced on the first run of NBC’s World toughest (Mudder) mile. I spent a short time pro wrestling for FEW Survive in Miami as the Alaskan Assassin and was recently on the amateur MMA team at Xtreme Couture. in Las Vegas.
Bodysport: What were the good things you got from your sports participation and some of the not so good things?
Callie: The good things; The relationships, friendships, confidence, my sense of identity, discipline, and drive. From a young age, I worked really hard to be a good athlete and spent a lot of time by myself improving my skills. I was pretty self-motivated and that’s carried over as an adult. I’d say it also kept me out of trouble in high school and kept me focused on getting out of the small town I grew up in.
Not so good things…while it made me confident, a lot of my self-esteem came from what my coaches thought of me. So they had the ability to make me soar or crush my spirit. I had some pretty tough coaches at certain times. Their style of coaching was more disciplinarian and negative which wasn’t really effective with me. It made me doubt myself and not perform well and also develop a bad attitude. I actually quit ballet and gymnastics because of the insensitivity of the coaches. Gymnastics and ballet have a fair amount of body shaming involved if you’re in tune with it, and I guess I was. It made me really uncomfortable as I grew and it became more competitive. I felt like I didn’t belong anymore.
I had a ballet teacher shame me in front of the other girls all the time. She disapproved of my “gymnastics” body. She hated the arch in my back and my muscles…it was awful. She made me feel fat…at 12 yrs old when I was just an awesome little mass of muscle. I’d cry every day I had to go and eventually my Mom let me quit. To this day it bothers me that she had that influence. I tried to remember that when I became a coach.
Bodysport: You mentioned in a conversation that you competed in physique sports and even did some fitness modeling. Did those things turn out to be what you expected?
Callie: Not exactly lol. I had high aspirations competing, mostly of getting into fitness modeling. I dreamed of being in Oxygen and Fitness RX, idolized Nicole Wilkins and Jamie Eason…I was a pretty naive Alaskan girl. However, there were a couple of women in the NPC Alaska circuit who were breaking into fitness modeling in the states and figuring out a path so I believed it was possible. In my first competition, I took 1st in bikini short. The next couple of bikini comps I traveled to Anchorage and didn’t do so well and started to become more aware of the politics. Alaska is a small place so it’s probably easier to pick up on those things. I was getting discouraged with bikini and felt like I was competing against girls who weren’t really training. They were young and skinny and didn’t have healthy habits…it bothered me to not be placing as well as girls who weren’t all that driven, they were just known in the circuit. I felt like I wanted to challenge myself and not just be judged on my physicality but my athleticism. Like that could change politics or something…
At the time I was starting to be a trainer and coaching multiple sports, youth soccer, and high school volleyball. I was pretty immersed in fitness all the time. Competing in bikini competitions was suggested to me when I started working out at a local gym because of how I looked at the time. I’d moved to San Diego when I was 25 to escape an abusive marriage. I was broken, extremely insecure and lost, but working out a lot. Fitness gave me new life and purpose. It empowered me and brought me hope, so I had a great attachment to it and wanted to share that power with other people. Competing, coaching, and fitness modeling felt like my true path. I was on a mission!
With that being said, competing elevated me initially, it started to give me some confidence and focus. However as I became more aware of the dieting of other athletes and supplementation, I started to worry about my past and the potentials of falling back into poor habits. I was pretty rigid in my eating and was over-exercising, not out of the ordinary for competitors but my family had seen me go through a pretty scary bout with anorexia when I was younger, and so I was a little paranoid and certainly afraid of being too involved in my appearance and exercising. And that’s the thing, the more I competed the more aware I became about the environment I was in.
I actually remember my last competition. There were some little girls watching me warm up and I could hear them saying they wanted to look like me and all the other girls and it made me feel terrible. A kind of alarm went off. I had my reasons for competing but I realized I was giving a false image to people, young girls especially. At this point, I wasn’t having fun anymore with the process. It was beating me down. I was always drained. Obsessed with getting my workouts in and overly focused on the food I was eating or not eating. Not really participating in life outside of fitness, just burnt out. So that was the tipping point. Then there were conversations of if you were serious about modeling than the reality was that you’d need breast implants to compete with the market and to always be competition ready. That awareness really discouraged me. I started to see this wasn’t the right realm for me and figured I would get a better experience focusing on sports performance and approaching fitness as an athlete.
Bodysport: How did you get involved in MMA and what do you like about it?
Callie: Honestly MMA was suggested to me by a friend as a form of therapy. To be completely candid I was stalked and sexually assaulted when I lived alone in my apartment on my 20th birthday. I was going to audio school. Unfortunately, I chose not to report it or speak of it and coped poorly for years through isolation, severe depression, drugs, over-sexualization, an abusive marriage, and many toxic relationships before finding fitness and health again. Since the attack, I’ve always lived away from my family in Alaska so I lacked any strong emotional support and was pretty lost for a while. I’ve lived in multiple cities, kind of running from situation to situation before I’d get really grounded or stabilized. I just couldn’t let people in and I was holding back a lot in life outside of my profession. Even in fitness, I’ve been somewhat addictive and drained myself physically to avoid myself emotionally. And now in my 30’s, I’m finding I’m not so well-developed personally and I still have an extremely hard time building close relationships. I wanted to change that.
MMA has helped me process, grow, and heal in a significant way like nothing else has. I can’t say that I knew it would do that when I started. I’ve just always had the mentality to fight. For so many years that’s been my survival and what’s kept me going. So it was a natural draw to test it and put my anger somewhere. MMA broke me down so I would rebuild. I learned to protect myself first. I’ve learned boundaries. It’s given me the tools to be calm and calculated in small spaces and overcome my anxieties. It also made me cry a lot and want to run away….and disappear.
Certain techniques, chokes, positions had me unexpectedly reliving trauma I’d buried. And it’s not super fun to be overly emotional in front of your peers, experiencing shame or embarrassment, not wanting them to know why hardly knowing why yourself. At times it was incredibly overwhelming. However, it led me to connect with women who had similar experiences and no matter how triggered I’ve been people have accepted me. The coaches and some of my teammates have given me space to process and find myself. Whether they know that or not I’m extremely grateful for how they’ve helped me.
The community is my family and safe zone. They keep me accountable to my dreams and self-worth.
Grappling is my favorite. I’ve always had an affinity for wrestling. Since my accident, my striking has gotten a lot better, which is pretty cool. It’s important for my psyche to know that I’m training my instincts so if something happens I know I will fight for myself. It definitely transfers to how I carry myself as a woman in everyday life as well. I’m grateful for that strength.
Bodysport: Tell us about your accident and how that has affected your fitness pursuits and goals.
Callie: About a year ago I was t-boned going 50 mph through an intersection. Needless to say, my car was totaled and my back took a pretty good hit. MRI revealed 5 bulging discs, 2 in my cervical spine and 3 in my lumbar. Now I have scoliosis and spinal stenosis. I did intense traction and physical therapy for 8 months. I just received an MBB on my L5, S1, and am scheduled for an ablation.
Basically I will be managing the pain for the rest of my life and for the most part can no longer do compressive loading, plyometrics, or activities that affect the spine. So no more Olympic weightlifting, Crossfit, or grappling/MMA. It’s forced me to shift careers out of fitness into the entertainment business. I can no longer teach group exercise classes or work fulltime as a trainer.
It’s a double-edged sword really. On the one hand, it pushed me to follow my true passion for singing music and working in entertainment. But being an athlete and implementing fitness into my life has been a huge part of my identity, source of confidence, and mental and physical health since I was a child. It’s been challenging to identify myself, deal with my emotions and shift into a new mindset. But it’s also teaching me a different appreciation for myself. That it’s ok to slow down, take care of myself, and create a better relationship with myself.
Bodysport: How did you first get involved with music and performing?
Callie: Music was a big part of my house growing up. Everyone in my family loves music, it’s a shared bond that I’m extremely grateful we have. Singing has always been my dream and makes me happy since I was a little girl. I used to play outside and have my own “shows” singing and performing. Music class was always my favorite class. I started singing in the choir and in plays in elementary school and continued singing in through middle school and into high school. I started asking to do solos.
One of my best friends played guitar so we started writing in high school. After I briefly went to college for soccer I dropped out and decided to go to an audio engineering school in Orlando. There I met musicians and I played in a rock band. I had a couple of RnB projects with some other solo producers and linked up with a couple of producers. I eventually followed up on that in San Diego and played in a couple of reggae bands, worked in a studio, and did some songwriting. I took a hiatus into fitness for about 10 years, dabbling here and there but nothing serious until moving to Vegas and having the car accident. I’m currently working on audio and staging and have a rock cover band called Ground Zero and two rock acoustic projects.
Bodysport: The entertainment industry is often viewed from the outside as being potentially less than healthy for some people. Have you observed any truth to this belief and how does your fitness lifestyle intersect with your music industry pursuits?
Callie: Yes, absolutely! Musicians and artists are a different breed. It’s hard not to get sucked into the party and the drama. I don’t think a lot of people know their limits with alcohol and drugs and the music lifestyle leads you straight into the fire. Plus, artists are just emotional and crazy so add that to the mix and it’s hard to stay on the path. A lot of entertainment and music is about the party. If you’re not surrounded by good people or you’re not focused on your goals, it’s easy to get distracted and caught up. I haven’t found many people who care about what they eat, how they take care of themselves, working out and helping others. That is a big energy shift from being in the fitness industry where there is a lot of positivity as well as accountability. My fight family has become a really significant part of my life. Just showing up and tapping into all the positive energy that’s there keeps me balanced. They’ve become my biggest support system.
Bodysport: Where would you like to see yourself going over the next 5-10 years?
Callie: I would like to be on tour with a band! Definitely making a living playing. I would like to perform in some Vegas rock theatre shows as well. If my body heals well enough I’d love to compete again. Whether that be in fitness or MMA.
Bodysport: What advice could you offer to others on having goals and possibly needing to modify them on occasion as the circumstances of life dictate?
Callie: I would say don’t be too hard on yourself. When you need to modify do it! It’s not a race. You need to know yourself before anything else. It’s wise to be intuitive and listen to your body well if you want it to do well for you. The goal should be to continue doing the things you love for the rest of your life. It’s not realistic to think that is always going to be the same intensity.
Setbacks are temporary. It’s ok to rebuild and reflect. That’s where we learn and grow, and when we come out of it we’re stronger. It’s not always easy to remember that, but it’s the truth. Reaching a goal is about perseverance and staying the course.
Bodysport: Is there anyone you would like to thank or acknowledge who has been helpful or influential to you throughout your journey to this point?
Callie: I’ve had many influences and great coaches but my Mom is the greatest. She’s my heart and she’s always allowed me to live through my spirit. She let me dream as a kid and supported me in my endeavors. With all the traumatic events I went through as a young adult, I was able to come back to myself and my dreams because she gave me the freedom to find that as a child. She has always been my confidant, no judgment, no matter what. Just love! She’s amazing!
Bodysport: Thank you Callie!
Follow Callie:
IG: @Callieenne
FB: Callie Enne
Band’s FB: Ground Zero
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