The first thing Lorena Vezauska did when I asked for an interview was invite me to play tennis.
It told you something about her straight away. She is not someone who sits across a table and answers questions. She sets the terms, picks the ground, and makes the conversation happen on her terms. She invited me to play, so we played.
We met at Echo 3 in Clarks Yard for a takeaway coffee, walked up through the park, knocked a ball about on the courts at Stanhope Park, and then sat there for an hour talking about Darlington.
Photo: Lorena
Twenty minutes in, she was still selling the town to me.
The river. Walks around High Coniscliffe, Low Coniscliffe. South Park, West Park and the public tennis courts anyone can walk onto and play. The corners of nature she is still finding after years living here, the ones that stop her and make her think: I really like it.
Then she said the other thing.
Lorena is a personal trainer at The Gym Group on East Mount Road and runs her own training alongside it 'The Strength Studio'. She has a BSc in Food Science and Nutrition and a Level 3 personal training qualification from Darlington College. She got all of it the hard way.
She grew up in Latvia, in a seaside town on the Baltic Sea, and moved to the UK in her late teens. She had been heading for medical school. She arrived with almost nothing, and had to start again.
“When I first came to the UK, it was like starting my life again. I took my whole education from zero.”
She spent years in Portugal and Ireland before coming back north, learning the language as she went. A lot of her twenties went into catching up.
“I sacrificed my twenties for a better future.”
She did not drift into Darlington either. Her mother decided they would move to the UK, and Lorena followed. She quickly decided to spend a year with her sister in Madeira instead, before moving between the UK, Ireland and Portugal and eventually heading north.
She tried Northallerton, but found it too quiet. Too old. To Lorena, it felt like a market town that had decided it was finished, content to be pretty and slow. She looked at Northallerton and thought: there is nothing here for me. A lot of people in Darlington talk about Northallerton as if it is a step up. Lorena went the other way.
She moved to Darlington because there were more jobs, better education, and more going on. Then she built a career here from scratch.
Credit: Jamie Lawson
“You have to start like a baby. We all start from the basics.”
What Lorena teaches is not really about lifting. She is interested in where somebody is starting from, and she is suspicious of anything that skips the beginning. Her clients see a finished body on a screen and think: that could never be me. She says the only way through is to build the base first.
She is unusually direct about what a plan actually feels like.
“One day you will win and the other day you will lose. One week your weight will be lower and the next week it will be higher.”
She demands honesty from her clients, even when that means asking them to be vulnerable. When people start doubting themselves or believing their goals are out of reach, she wants them to say it. Once it is out in the open, she can work with it. She sees her role as more than giving someone a plan. She wants to be the person who supports them through the uncomfortable parts of actually following it.
Most of what she teaches is technique. She was surprised, when she first started working at The Gym Group, by how involved the staff were with members. For Lorena, a gym is a battleground: you need to know how to move. She believes beginners, particularly young people, need to be taught proper technique and given the confidence to keep going.
Then I asked her the obvious question. What would keep you here?
She did not have an answer, and I don’t think she was being evasive. What she has is a feeling that there is more happening elsewhere, and that she has not arrived at the place she is looking for yet.
In Durham or Newcastle she feels something Darlington does not have. More going on. More variety. More people doing different things. She goes to look, comes back to a town she says she loves, and notices the gap.
“I don’t get attached to any one location. It’s more about the feeling. Feeling like I’ve found what I’m looking for.”
She pauses on the important bit.
“I’m not fully there yet.”
There is a version of this story where Darlington is at fault. The town centre feels different to what it was. Too many young people are educated here and then leave, because there is not enough work for them to stay for.
She is not describing a town falling apart. She talks about Darlington growing, the newer development, the way it did not look like this when she arrived. The town is not neglected. It is well kept. Growth and momentum are not the same thing, and you can add buildings without adding much to do in them.
The median age here has gone up two years between the last two censuses, from 41 to 43. More of the town is retired, and the age profile has shifted. ONS census data
The thought I keep coming back to:
“People think you get old and then you slow down. I think you slow down and then you get old.”
That is a line about bodies. It is not a bad line about a town either.
There is a simpler explanation for Lorena, and I cannot rule it out. She has moved a lot. Latvia, then England, years in Madeira, time in Ireland and Portugal, then north. She has rarely stayed anywhere long. She says it herself: she does not get attached to any one location.
So is this Darlington failing to hold on to someone, or is this simply what she does? I asked her. I am not sure she knows either.
And I do not think the town should have to answer it. What Darlington could do is stop asking the question it has been asking. For years the conversation here has been about why young people leave. It may be the wrong question. If some of the people who come here are always going to move on, then the useful question is not how to hold on to them. It is what the town does with what they build while they are here.
Because look at what she built. She arrived with a plan and no money, and she leaves behind a qualification, a practice and the people she has taught how to move by someone who told them the truth about how slow it would be.
Lorena might stay. She might go next year. She might go somewhere with more sunshine and find that she is happy, or find that she has moved again.
Either way, she was here. She put her twenties into this town and got a career out of it, and she's still on the courts at Stanhope Park or at the Denes and still on the gym floor at East Mount Road, still finding the corners she has not walked yet.
Say hi while she is still here. You can find her on Instagram at @strengthstudio_lorena.
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