Welcome to Boot Camp

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Signing up for a four-week boot camp session with my gal-pal neighbour who, for the purposes of anonymity I’ll call Mieke, (Sorry, Meek) to convince the last ten pounds of stubborn baby weight to melt away.  Sounds like a bucket-load of fun, right?  Hmm…

After stuffing supper down the kids’ throats, convincing my nephew to babysit and giving baby Dylan an abbreviated boob-juice feeding seconds before I flew out the door, my ever efficient Mieke gets us there with plenty of time to spare.  We parked where we could get the skinny (pardon the pun) on the class before ours, which was now in its last ten minutes of butt-kicking splendor.  Our first revelation was the class was being held outside.  What?  It’s October, folks.  In Canada.  And we’re doing an hour-long exercises class outside?  Ugh.  We can’t see much else from our obstructed view, but we can hear a lot of, “Come on!  Now!  Ten more, nine more …” and some grunting and puffing from the minions.  “It’s still not to late to say screw it and go to McDonalds,” I suggested hopefully.

But we sucked it up and with our warm winter jackets, marched onto the cold asphalt with as much enthusiasm as the situation merited.  Very little.  There was about 15 or 20 other crazy people, all with the same ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into’ look.  Our instructor, clad in pink army fatigues, was actually quite nice.  Despite a questionable taste in music (just once I’d love to exercise to Pearl Jam and not that dance crap all the kids these days love) and a fondness for burpees (a tortuous jump-touch your toes-kick both legs back-re-touch toes-and back up move) she was pretty cool.

Ten minutes into it I had my jacket off and was cursing the weak elastic on my pants.  It’s hard to look cool with your underwear around your knees while doing a burpee.  I did dig looking up at the stars when we were doing our ab exercises but didn’t like the gravel biting into my hands whenever I did something on the ground.  So I’m torn on whether I like being outside for the class.  I’ll keep you posted.
Next class: Wednesday.