last night was another fabulous new experience at the y, & that is not at all meant with the dripping sarcasm that one may intuit, honest injun! so jenn & i finally attended the famed boot camp class led by the intimidating holly. honestly, holly is one of those women that is beautiful, fit, & looks like she could totally kick your arse from one side of the planet to the other & barely break a sweat. she's definitely not someone i would want to cross. incidentally, jenn & i first met holly in the kick box d'oh class, she was a co-instructor one night. after class she told us we should come & see her at boot camp class. jenn immediately said "will do" & looked too peppy for someone who had just finished kick boxing class, & my response was "yeah, i'll work on that" meanwhile shooting jenn the you are mother frickin crazy daggers with my eyes.
well, oddly enough, i was the one that pushed jenn to go to the class last night with me. i think i just heard a thud, someone must have passed out from shock. well, they'll rejoin us again very soon. typically jenn is the one that takes me kicking & screaming, almost literally, to the classes (like body pump & kick box d'oh) but, for some strange reason, last night i was feeling particularly energetic & i told her that we should take the class. that was after we did some laps around the track, about a mile and a third, the last half of it we alternated between walking a lap & then jogging a lap. don't worry, i won't break my arm patting myself on the back, BUT, i am pretty flippin pleased with myself that not only did i make myself go to boot camp, but i got jenn to go along with me.
now, i will admit, i was having some serious shooting pain in my left ankle & my right hip was twinging a bit after the jogging, but there was something inside me that said i just had to go to boot camp last night, it was like a life or death pinnacle moment for me. usually i can't tell those pivotal moments in my life until they're in the past, the ones on which an entire future turn, but i know that last night was one of those moments, & going to that class would be, IS, the event that changes everything. i can't see what it is changing for me, but i know it is. to quote a song miss jenn & i listened to last night during our mc-crack fix: "the past is just the future with the lights on." btw, i /heart that line & i think it's really a motto to live by. it's deep man, super deep.
i'm not even going to pretend that boot camp was a cake walk. mmmm, cake. but, i'm also not going to say that it was impossible, because it wasn't! it was a challenge. since neither of us had been to the class we didn't know all of the moves. & our bodies are still not at the michelle kwan flexibility stage yet, but they're getting there. so one move, the garbage picker, neither of us did very successfully. basically you start a couple feet away from a stepper, you hop in, put your hands on it, hop just your feet back keeping your hands on the step, do two push ups, then hop your feet forward & stand up. yeah. i know. read it a second time. my reaction when holly showed it to us was: WHAT?!
&, at one point, mentally, i did pull out the "homey don't bend that way." much like last week at power down, holly very calmly said (while everyone was sitting on their step): "put your right ankle up on your left knee, ok, now put your hands behind you on the step, & slide yourself forward off the step, feel that wonderful glute & hamstring stretch." now, to my credit, i held in the snorted laugh that i was tempted to let loose, but i did give her my patented homey-don't-bend-that-way-look. & i did do my best regardless. i crossed my ankle over my left leg, i leaned back, & i scooted my butt forward as far as i could. i knew that if i moved my butt off that step that i would proceed to fall & crack my head on the studio floor. which is bad for business. interestingly enough, the staff at the Y don't like their members passed out & bleeding all over their floor. i know, how rude.
once again, this is a class that i would like to attend again. the big down fall of boot camp is that on tuesdays it is from 5:30pm-6:35pm & the power down class i like is on tuesdays from 6:00pm-6:40pm. yeah, that makes me a bit of a sad panda :( there is a yoga class after boot camp called power yoga, so once i feel a little less awkward from boot camp i'll have to try that also. luckily, boot camp is offered twice a week, so i could always drag my butt the 25 miles from my apartment to minnetonka to go to that some morning with the fabulous miss jenn.
boot camp did live up to its name, definitely! today i am one hurting unit. interestingly enough i have found glute/thigh muscles i didn't know exist. & my chest is hurting in ways it never has before, all of which is very good. if your local Y has a boot camp, i highly recommend it. holly was great about pushing everyone in class (we even got an extra set of running steps because no one told her their glutes were hurting. . .i won't make that mistake twice!), but she was also great about showing everyone adaptations of some of the tougher exercises so that those of us who aren't yet able to do all of the exercises, could keep pushing along. she also came up to jenn & i at the end of class & made a point of telling us that we did a really good job for our first time at boot camp *beaming*
with that said, boot camp gets an over all grade of an A from me. a really great workout, i can feel it the next day, but also very adaptable for different skill levels, & not nearly as intimidating as it sounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment