Tuesday, 27 September 2011
RT #5: "Day One"
Staggering out of the workout room, the class just ended, I'm wrapped in sweat-drenched towels and borderline incoherent when a woman says to me, "Make sure you write that we're hot."
Who she meant by, "we," was the other 25 participants in the class, all of whom were women. The other gentleman participants evidently knew better than to show up for the noon class on Day One and risk being shown up by a coterie of ridiculously fit women, many of whom were moms. In any case, being the only guy (not to mention the oldest person) only intensified for me the growing sense that the workout room is a place I do not belong.
I'll come back to the matter of "hotness," in a moment, but first, to describe a small fraction of what it is that makes everything else in the room irrelevant, including the attractiveness quotient of the other participants. Imagine an exercise in which you are holding two weights, say 15-pound dumbbells, in front of you at chest level and then, with your left foot stationary, you step to the right as far as you can, your right knee bending but not too much; as you do this, you push the weights out in front, straightening your arms and then you swing the weights to the right in a controlled, circular motion. As your arms extend fully now to the right, your right foot touches down and almost immediately springs back returning to its starting position alongside your left foot; your arms simultaneously return the weights to chest level before pressing them overhead, then returning, still under control to chest level.
OK, that hurts, that's one.
You repeat this -- only quickly now, very quickly -- seven times stepping to the right, for a total of eight, then do another set of eight stepping to the left. All this, 16 "repeats," you do in about 60 seconds to the beat of loud, pulsing music. (It's the only time in my life I've been in a room with music like this when I didn't have a drink in my hand.)
Feeling it? Congratulations. That's one minute down, 59 to go.
The exercise is called, "stir the pot," and I described it because it is one of the easier ones, because I have a basic understanding of it and I can perform it in a rudimentary way. Like all the exercises in the room, it works multiple systems which is to say the effort it takes to do it and the speed at which it's done leave me out of breath and the picking up and maneuvering the weights leaves my forearms, upper arms and shoulders feeling weak and jelly-like.
We've taught our kids to almost never use the word, "hate," partly because it's an angry, nasty word, but more so because it's usually inaccurate. There are really not that many things we hate, for instance, we don't actually hate our homework, and very often when we're moved to say we hate something, it's usually something else we're upset about. Hate is a word that usually obscures a deeper truth.
That disclaimer aside, I hate these exercises, especially the ones I can't do, and that's most of them. To begin, they're completely unfamiliar to me. One of my roommates in college, Craig, studied physics by explaining the concepts out loud to his dog, Rexxy, and I hadn't seen anything quite like the bemused expression on that dog's face until I caught a glimpse of myself on the mirrored wall looking at the workout leader as if to say, "Knee up, elbow down, arm kick, leg out, left, right. what?" When the cheerleaders were off behind the bleachers learning steps akin to these, I was on the field learning how to fire out of a crouch and slam another boy onto the ground. Almost four decades later that skill isn't good for much, one more example of how youth prepares women to live longer, healthier, more fluid lives than men.
Yet, even in my despair, I'm aware, as I've noted, that these exercises are not difficult and there is nothing structurally wrong with me. I will somehow create new pathways among the rusty dendrites and somewhat rigid synapses in my middle-aged brain. I'll probably start getting comfortable with them around the time the program is half over and the leaders introduce an entirely new package. It would be much worse if getting in shape hinged on my learning to play the piano or speak Russian.
The exercise ended, I try to put the weights down without dropping them and creating an embarrassing double-boom , although I want to fling them out of my hands and never see them again. I catch myself thinking, "Those damn things are like lead," when I realize, they are lead.
There is something cool about living up to the level of an expression that represents exaggeration. I feel like a million bucks. I'm in love with the world. I have a friend who emails me every Monday morning, "Go big or go home." I don't mind being outrageous. My father wrote a book about it, but that's his story.
Coming out of the room, my arms are quivering and I wonder if I can pick up a pencil. "Make sure you write that we're hot," the woman says. Consider it done.
It was like stumbling into a Laker Girls workout, all spandex and muscle and not a lot of body fat, but without so much emphasis on hair. If it came down to a choice between hair dancing and obesity I'd have to work out with the sumo wrestler.
But what's more relevant about my fellow participants than their attractiveness quotient, or that they can move on a par with world-class dancing girls, is that they're athletes. In the cool down period, the last five minutes of class, the music slows somewhat and they slip impressively in and out of yoga poses more difficult than you'd expect from people in a class that goes up a very different side of the Zen mountain. They're strong and quick, they're thin, they have limitless endurance and they're flexible too?
The story is, they got all that by coming repeatedly into this room, so that's my plan too.
... more to come
