El Dugan

Today at bootcamp SUCKED. It was bootcamp #4 for me. The first one sucked because it was hard and we spent the whole damn time jumping rope and doing push-ups. Bouncing=bad. Push-ups=bad because my knees are such shit. The second one sucked at little less because I was ready for it and it actually helped my horrifying soreness. The third one was, like the second, was circuit training. Like nine stations you do it for a minute: push-ups, shoulder flex, bench press, sled push, wall squat, etc. You do the circuit three times. It reminds me of crew and I like it. It makes the time pass. It was good. I wasn’t sore…until today.

Today was really bad. Abs and then a series of 20 exercises written on the bottom of an orange cone. So you do like 15 leg raises, then hold a V for another 30 seconds, then you RUN over to the line of cones, pick one up and do the exercise written on the bottom of it. Squat thrusts 30 , 35 skaters, 60 sec. of wall sprints, running down the hallway and back, etc.  I have to say the time passed very quickly.

But I felt really weak and I LOATHE COUNTING. Part of the reason I am paying for this exquisite torture is so someone else will count for me, namely Trainerguy.  I am very bad at it. I count to like 15 or 20 then I get distracted (I actually try to distract myself by concentrating on form or the ceiling cracks so I don’t notice the pain) and then I lose count and do a few more and stop. If I actually keep count, my form falls apart and I usually stop early because it HURTS. This makes me sound like a dumb person who can’t do more than one thing at once. Perhaps I am, but WHATEVER! It’s 5:30 in the morning, I hate counting and my knees hurt. Waa.

I am slower than all the other women in the class, which is to be expected. They are all on their 4 or 5 bootcamp. Fine. But I simply am not strong enough to do some of the things he was asking today and it was very disheartening  to be a) not strong enough and b) not know A LOT of the exercises written on the cones and c) lose count constantly and know that I wasn’t doing the right amount and finally I just started not to care about that. Additionally, and this might be TMI, early-morning abs make me gassy. Always have. There I said it. Nothing much to be done about that, just didn’t help my mood.

Apparently when I come home, I look inches away from death. Red-faced and out of breath and sweaty. We don’t do a cool down, which is fine, so my heart rate settles a little on the drive home and then I walk up three flights of stairs and it kills me again, for some reason. The women in class give me little encouraging smiles (all but one, whom I call Witch-face in my head) but the smiles are a little pitying, because I look like the same shade of death in mid-workout. And I know I have a scaryangry workout face.  So they are probably just trying to appease me so when I go on a murderous spree with a barbell and a jump rope,  they will be spared.

What I wished this morning was that the ladies in my knitting group(s) could be the ladies in my bootcamp. That would be soooo much better. It is a distinctly different group, however. BC ladies mostly look very willowy and naturally thin and athletic or like they have been toying with an eating disorder for most of their adult lives. They seem to have no sense of humor (except one) and want to know how to get rid of  “armpit fat”.  I have to say, even at my thinnest, armpit fat was never something I spent any real time thinking about.  Knitting ladies are all, as far as I can tell, really really smart and very funny and of various body-types and would have a sense of humor, I am sure, about something called a “burpee”.

This is a lot of bitching about something I signed up for, I know. I am not going to quit. I have 8 more to go this month and plan to sign up again, unless that murderous spree thing happens first (kidding!).