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01 August, 2006
Call the paramedics

In a moment of temporary insanity, I decided to sign up for the boot camp class at my gym. It’s Mondays and Wednesdays, 7:30-8:30 (allegedly), for six weeks.

In short, what was I thinking? Was I high?

Here’s my glorious illustration to help make my case for why I was completely nuts to try this class. As you can see, there are five stations, each are clearly labeled. I was too exhausted and defeated by the spinning station to draw a spinning bike, so Google helped me.

So the class starts with a regular ol’ aerobic warmup, no big deal. Then we all go to our stations. There are three people in each group (we counted off before class). I went to the ab station first.

Ab-killing station
50 crunches
25 full situps with the stupid ball in your hands (you have to lift and lower the ball, it’s annoying)
15-second plank (isometrics thing, no big deal cause we do four of these for 40 seconds each in Cardio Funk)
10 each side, some hellish obliques exercise I can’t describe

You do this, and if the instructor hasn’t told you to change stations, you do it again. Luckily since I’m like soooo fit (yeah right), I got to do everything TWICE. At every station, TWICE. Okay time to change stations.

Lunges and quad-hurting station
10 reps: step up on the step with left leg, kick right leg back
10 reps: same thing other leg
10 reps: alternate legs
10 lunges on floor each side. You hold the 8 lb. hand weights during all this.

Time to move again and it’s time for spinning hell. I have never taken a spinning class, but it looks easy. Good lord it is not. Here’s what happens during spinning. There are three positions.

1: regular bike riding sitting down.
2: riding standing up
3: standing up, leaning over handlebars with your butt sticking out over the seat

You have to crank up the tension or the bike will fall over when you ride standing up, which of course makes it harder. The instructor stands there yelling at you, “ONE! TWO! THREE! TWO! ONE!” with about a second in between and you have to keep alternating positions. Oh my gosh. I almost died. Another girl in my group just gave up after about five switches and sat there and rode. I felt like I was going to fall off the bike, but since my feet were strapped into the pedals, I really didn’t want that to happen. So I rode hard. Oh lord. I wanted to die. The instructor was like grinning at me the entire time and I kind of wish the bike wasn’t stationary so I could run over her. Oh, time to switch stations.

Army Football practice
Run the steps
Shuffle back to other side
Run the steps
Weave in and out of cones
Stupid football drill where you run in place down low, picking up your heels (30 seconds)
10 pushups: go from standing, down to a pushup, back up to standing
Run steps in place 25 times each leg
10 “skiing” motions (involves jumping and stuff)

Time to switch again!

Arm-destroying station
15 tricep dips on the bench
15 pushups (on the bench or floor)
15 bicep curls with barbel (I think there was 20 lbs on it)
15 tricep/shoulder lift, I don’t know what this was called

Now it’s time to go to the floor and do kickboxing for about 10 minutes. Yeah that was glorious. Then guess what, time to go back AND DO ALL FIVE STATIONS AGAIN.

After that, we came back to the floor and started doing butt-work. On our hands and knees doing all manner of kicks, knee lifts and other things to kill your hip flexors. Then we did them all again, while crawling back and forth. By this time it’s like 8:45 and I’m thinking surely we’re done, this was only supposed to be an hour.

The instructor busts out with, “Okay ladies, now we’re going to do 200 crunches.” I laughed really loud because I thought she was joking, since everyone was laying on the floor dead. Another lady in the class glared at me and clearly it was not a joke. We then proceeded to do 200 crunches.

And then I went home and died. The end.

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