There is something quite beautiful about pushing ordinary Muslim women completely out of their comfort zone and watching them emerge on the other side transformed.
Mostly they are mothers, normally devoted to their families, and often they arrive dressed for a halaqa on Friday evening with a mixture of worry, dread and quiet anticipation. They return home on Saturday night almost reborn. The mud is still in their hair. The ache is still in their legs. But something behind their eyes is different, and you can see it if you know how to look.
This transformation is, however, entirely lost on the fitness fraternity, who have in mind a challenge of an altogether different kind. So let us be direct: Trials & Tribulations is not a fitness event. It is not a mud run, a fun run, a marathon, or an endurance event. It is not designed for fitness fanatics or lovers of extreme sport, and it is not designed to showcase athleticism, test personal bests, or reward those who arrive best prepared.
It is designed for and around ordinary Muslim women — mothers, students, workers — who for one day taste a fragment of momentary hardship, who walk in displaced people’s shoes in a way that extends beyond metaphor into practical, muddy, exhausting reality. Refugee women don’t choose optimal athletic wear when fleeing. They traverse terrain wearing whatever they have, most often traditional modest dress, and the challenge asks its participants to do the same.
Your first reaction to all of this, as a fitness professional, is probably instinctive: sceptical, reluctant, perhaps dismissive. Leading women through a physically demanding obstacle course whilst they’re wearing full-length abayas sounds impractical at best. You understand better than most the importance of appropriate clothing for mobility and safety, and everything about this setup runs counter to that knowledge. That instinct is understandable. It is also, in this particular context, beside the point.
What this challenge is actually for
The impracticality of modest dress on an assault course is not an oversight in the design of Trials & Tribulations. It is the design. The challenge is deliberately inappropriate and uncomfortable, because its purpose is to say to ordinary Muslim women: this could be your reality.
To be thrust from the ordinariness of your daily life into circumstances you did not choose and cannot control, to navigate terrain and obstacles whilst carrying the weight of everything that makes you who you are — your clothing, your faith, your dignity — without any of the practical accommodations that make difficulty manageable.
Through that experience of everyday ordinariness pushed to its limits, something remarkable tends to happen: the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the women who doubted they could complete a single obstacle find themselves helping each other over the final wall.
Your fitness expertise matters here, but not in the way you might expect. The women you’ll lead are not athletes in training, and they don’t need to be treated like ones. They are Palestinian mothers, Syrian women who have walked to safety, Rohingya sisters who have navigated flooded landscapes carrying children and everything they own — or rather, they are women whose comfortable lives sit alongside those realities, who have chosen for one difficult day to acknowledge that proximity.
What they need from you is not optimised performance cues or heart rate management. They need someone who understands physical challenge, who can read when a woman is struggling and needs encouragement versus when she genuinely needs to rest, who can create an environment safe enough for women who have never done anything like this to attempt it anyway. Those are skills you already have. You simply haven’t used them quite like this before.
What it asks of you specifically
Leading Trials & Tribulations requires something that no fitness qualification prepares you for: setting aside the professional framework through which you normally understand physical challenge, and replacing it with a different one entirely. This means trading your training gear for a modest abaya and hijab, which will be inappropriate, uncomfortable and unsuitable for the task — intentionally so.
It means experiencing alongside your participants what it feels like when your clothing works against you rather than with you, when mud-soaked fabric clings and drags, when the obstacle ahead demands a physical range of motion that your dress simply doesn’t allow. You will not be demonstrating technique from a position of superior preparation. You will be figuring it out alongside everyone else, and that shared uncertainty is part of what makes the day work.
What you bring to this shared uncertainty is the thing that changes everything. You already know how to motivate a woman who believes she cannot continue. You know how to assess whether someone needs to push through or genuinely needs to stop. You know how to build the kind of trust that allows women to attempt things they find frightening.
These capacities, developed through years of fitness work, are exactly what Trials & Tribulations needs from its leaders — not because the day is a fitness event, but because it asks women to go beyond what they believe themselves capable of, and that requires the presence of someone who has guided that particular journey before, even if the terrain is entirely different this time.
What you’ll understand by the end
There is a moment that leaders of this challenge consistently describe, and it tends to arrive somewhere in the second half of the course when everyone is cold and muddy and the initial energy of novelty has long since given way to genuine exhaustion.
A woman in your group, who arrived on Friday evening quietly terrified and spent the first hour of Saturday wondering what she’d agreed to, is helping another woman over an obstacle she cleared with ease. She isn’t thinking about her abaya or her aching legs or whether she looks ridiculous. She is simply present in the difficulty, and in the solidarity of helping someone else through it, and the look on her face is one you will not easily forget.
This is what ordinary Muslim women carry home from Trials & Tribulations, and it is not a fitness achievement. It is the knowledge that they persisted through something genuinely hard, that their faith and their modesty and their ordinariness were not obstacles to that persistence but part of it, that the women whose struggles the challenge honours faced something immeasurably harder and faced it with the same stubborn human refusal to be defeated.
By the time your group breaks their fast together at iftar on Saturday evening, still muddy, aching, and quieter than they were when they arrived, you will understand something about empowerment that the gym has never quite managed to teach you. This wasn’t just another event. It was a journey of transformation: for them, and, if you let it be, for you.
