Oxygen USA — September-October 2017

50 oxygenmag.com

U-Turn

Ence returned from Italy just six weeks before the

Regionals and found she had developed severe

tendinitis in her knee. “I had not squatted below

parallel in months, but I thought I could still excel and

qualify for the Games, even though my preparation

was so much different from everyone else’s,” she says.

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Regionals and missed qualifying for the Games by a

single spot. Subsequent social media was a relentless

barrage of negativity, and Ence began to question her

veracity as an athlete. With the help of friends and

family, she realized that her haters were just that —

haters. None of their criticism was true, and none of it

mattered.

Then, just as she was in a positive headspace and

back to a purposeful training regimen, she woke

over the 2016 Christmas break with inexplicable

pain radiating down her arms. On her Instagram,

she described the pain as if “I were the patient in the

game Operation and whoever was playing the game

TOTALLY sucked.” No amount of chiropractic, physio

or massage work helped, so in February, as the 2017 Open

began, Ence was getting an MRI. Though she had never

dropped a bar on herself or incurred another type of acute

injury to explain her pain, the doctors discovered she had

herniated two cervical disks. For Ence, the 2017 Games

would not happen.

“It’s a cliché, but you don’t realize what you have until

it’s gone,” she says. “Movement is how I cope with stress

and am able to release and let things go.”

Lassoing Opportunity

At the time of this writing, Ence was just 13 weeks out

from a spinal fusion of the C6 and C7 disks in her neck,

and by August, she expects to be training at 100 percent

intensity. In the meantime, Wonder Woman was released

and Ence was blown away when she saw herself on the

big screen and her name in the credits. Moreover, she was

surprised at her overnight notoriety.

“I had no idea the scale at which I would matter,” Ence

says. “My part was fairly small, but when I would get out

of a car at an event, they would announce my name and

people would start screaming and taking tons of photos.

I don’t think I realized how big and amazing this would

be, and now I have a whole new audience to reach and to

give a super-positive message. I mean, what better positive

message than a woman — Wonder Woman — who

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Like this princess of the Amazons, Ence also wants

to empower women and let them know that it’s OK to be

themselves. “My biggest goal is to motivate people

HANDOVERHAND SLED PULL

Load a Prowler or another kind of sled and secure a long rope to one end.

Extend the rope along the ground and stand at the end with your feet

spread wide, core braced. Pull the sled toward you with the rope, using a

continuous hand-over-hand motion. When it reaches your toes, walk the

rope out to the end and repeat that process until you’ve traveled 50 feet.

ENCE’S ADVICE: “Really use that twisting of your torso to gain ground —

reach forward as far as you can and pull the rope to your hip.”