Weekend fun

This was quite a weekend. Friday evening, feeling guilty after having a few too many Girl Scout cookies (what?! I had to finish the box before Passover. God wanted me to), I did an hour on the treadmill. I had hoped to make it to a class, but could not get out of work on time. MAYBE 15 minutes of that hour was running -- maybe less -- but I think I did the best I could.

Saturday morning, I had plans to take a class at the gym with Kristen. As part of this whole program I am doing, I'm supposed to take the Beach Body class at Crunch once a week. A lot of the exercises that the trainer is working on with us are supposed to be from that class, and that's what will be running in the magazine and what we will apparently be demoing on camera. (Should be interesting, because I still suck at them.) I haven't made it to a class yet -- Crunch just switched to their Spring schedule of classes, so they have only been offering Beach Body for two weeks; of course I haven't been able to get to any of the evening Beach Body classes, and I was out of town last weekend. So this was my first Beach Body class, but I figured I would already know some of the moves, and it was a new class, so it's not like anyone could be all that good at it yet. Right?

WRONG. Kristen and I were in the class for 5 minutes when we started to realize something weird was going on. Though the crazy instructor did little more than yell "FOUR! FOUR!" and hold up 4 fingers with brightly painted nails half the length of my forearm, everyone else in the class collectively broke into a choreographed dance routine straight out of A Chorus Line. They were sashaying up to the front, then kicking their legs high as they danced back to place, arms flying and fingers snapping. There was twirling and clapping and leaping to the ceiling. If nothing else, it answered my question of which gym the gays go to.

At first I tried my best to keep up, or at least keep moving, but that quickly regressed to barely shuffling from foot to foot, my jaw dropped open, and a look of sheer terror on my face. WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON HERE?! How did everyone know this routine? WHY was there a routine? This was NOT what I had worked on with the trainer! Had Kristen not been there to share in the horror, I would have absolutely left after 5 minutes.

During a water break (and it is not easy to drink water while your face is frozen in fear), I was able to deduce from one of the other people that this crazy instructor had been teaching the same class at the same time for ages -- according to her, it used to be called Chisel, but they "changed the name to Beach Body." WTF?!?! They didn't just change the name, IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A DIFFERENT CLASS! Never in my life would I willingly submit myself to a class called CHISEL. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure taking that class every week would give someone a rocking body, "beach" or otherwise. It's just a little beyond my level at the moment. I felt like a hippo surrounding by leaping (in unison) gazelles. (Looking in the mirror only corroborated that image -- eventually I moved behind a pole.)

I did manage to stay the entire class, and eventually the dance number came to a close, THANK GOD, to make way for some equally impossible one-handed, one-legged push-ups. (I am not kidding.) I just stuck with modified push-ups, and that's pretty much how I treated the rest of the class -- just doing whatever I could do that was remotely similar to what everyone else around me was doing. (Also taking copious water breaks. You can never have too much water, so I don't feel as guilty about taking a break for that as I would taking break just to, say, keep myself from dying.) Somehow I made it through the hour, thanks in part to Kristen's encouragement, and my inability to find a clear escape route through the gyrating bodies around me.

Saturday night I met my family for dinner in Queens, then went back to Brooklyn and spent the night. Because I was out of workout clothes and desperately need to do laundry, I dragged an enormous suitcase (and by "enormous," I mean this suitcase is so big it is not allowed on airplanes) full of dirty clothes all the way out to Queens via bus and subway. (I purposely chose the entrance to the 7 train on 42nd between 3rd and Lex, because it has a giant escalator down to the subway. Of course, that escalator was out of service, and I had to pull the suitcase down the equivalent of 4 flights of stairs.) So surely that counted as a workout.

However, before leaving for dinner, I was feeling good after my two long workouts in two days, so I made the stupid mistake of trying on the bathing suits I am supposed to wear on camera in a week. Not a pretty sight. Realizing that I am still going to look like a "Before" picture, after doing this for a month, I cried on and off throughout dinner. With my family. At a restaurant. So that was awesome. And much appreciated by my dining companions. I literally could not stop it. Ugh.

On Sunday, I went with my mom to a pilates reformer class. We had to take a 40-minute intro before the hour-long class, and I was already insanely sore from the workout from hell on Saturday, so it was pretty rough. The nice thing about it was that I never got winded during the class, and it still felt like a good workout. The difficult part was that the instructor kept telling us to do things I am pretty sure were not physically possible, like "Pull your belly down inside your body." I carefully explained to the guy that my belly already IS inside my body (omitting the fact that I abhor the use of the word belly by anyone over the age of 6, which I thought was very big of me), so this was posing somewhat of a challenge for me. I would like to keep going nonetheless, but I believe it will be cost-prohibitive, as the classes are not cheap.

I wanted to keep the streak going and get up early and go to the gym this morning, or at least do the Pilates DVD Kristen gave me (thanks, Kristen!), but it didn't happen. (As if this stuff just happens -- clearly I hold the responsibility for the lack of happening.) But I packed a couple of sets of workout clothes so I can run ("run") on my grandparents' treadmill when I am out there for Passover. And I'm hoping that the dietary restrictions that are part of Passover will actually make dieting easier; between those dietary restrictions and my self-imposed dietary restrictions (aka, picky eating), I will pretty much be left with salads and chicken. Avoiding the endless cans of macaroons and matzah pizza will be tough, though. But the end is in sight -- by the time Passover ends, my Beach Body Makeover will be over! How symbolic; just as Passover celebrates the end of the Jews' slavery, so too will I end my slavery to this diet!

(Don't worry, I won't give it up entirely, I'll just make it a little more manageable. And I won't worry about putting a bathing suit on again until I feel ready, however long that takes.)