Observations from Boot Camp: Day 1

No, I’m not writing from Camp Pendleton. While I am still of the opinion that New Year’s Resolutions are pure silliness (except for Yen’s, which is to be less fussy about cat hair—pray for him!), I signed up for a biweekly Fitness Boot Camp here at work. All the kids seem to be doing this lately, and I thought it would help get me back into a regular exercise routine after a few months of willful negligence. Having survived day one (of which there are 16 to go), a few thoughts:

  1. 5:30am is much earlier than 6:00am. Thirty small minutes doesn’t seem a like a lot. But when you don’t manage to fall asleep until 1am, it comes fast and vengeful. I have gotten used to leaving the house as the first rays of light appear in the East, but this morning we were well into a set of jumping jacks before I stole a glance out the window and saw a band of pink.
  2. Apparent fitness doesn’t correlate to actual fitness. Or perhaps I should say, thinness doesn’t correspond to fitness. When I arrived, I was a little irked to see some fit-looking people hanging around near the mirror. Our class is beyond capacity, and I had a mean, impossible little thought that only people who “need” the class should be allowed to take it. Nonsense, of course. How would that work? Fitness Center Manager looks you up and down. “Ok, you’re in. You? Go drink a smoothie or something.” But as the class went on, some of the first people to switch to the modified versions of each move were the fit-looking people. Maybe they just don’t want it as much as we do. Maybe they only appear fit because they lack muscle. Either way, I felt a little smug even as I furiously wiped the sweat out of my eyes.
  3. Women stay with the instructor more, following the moves more precisely and staying until the end of each count. I don’t know whether this is because we are more obedient or have been conditioned through years of watching Kathy Smith on VHS, but we do what we’re told in these classes, even when we’re way past comfortable.
  4. Stretching is seriously undervalued. A full third of the class left when the instructor switched us to the stretching/cooldown portion of the program. I can understand frisky little high school kids skipping this “boring” portion, but by this – our 30s and 40s – haven’t we all discovered how much harder it is to get out of bed the day after a workout? Or actually, any day?
  5. A variety of small moves for 60 minutes is infinitely more interesting than running for 35 minutes. Plain and simple.
  6. I am not getting more coordinated as I age.

2 Replies to “Observations from Boot Camp: Day 1”

  1. Interesting observations. Bryant is offering a 30-min. noontime boot camp Mondays and Wednesdays during the winter break. I went Wednesday. The instructor plays music so loud that it hurts ears and you cannot hear her. At all.

  2. Are you supposed to just follow along and do what she does? That’s ridiculous. I guess that’s the nice thing about exercising with fellow old people instead of students – everyone needs quiet and instructions repeated twice.

    Oh, and speaking of being old: we went to see Tin Tin Saturday night and all I could think during the previews was, “Why is it so LOUD?!”