I have now taken my first weight training class in an attempt to improve my health make my niece Elizabeth quit yammering about me taking a weight training class, and she has indeed buttoned up the yammerbox, so I am considering this a win. In addition, I can safely report that the class did not kill me, although that was clearly the instructor’s intention, mainly because of my inexperience with being dead.
I started by lifting the average age in the room by fifteen years when I walked in. But I thought I might do all right. Thanks to being utterly dissolute in my early twenties, I am not in the worst shape of my life. My legs have rarely let me down, and I’ve taken a weight-training class before.
Forty-four years ago.
Pushups to start. Awesome. My personal best for pushups is one-half of one pushup, followed by a nap on a rubber mat. Iris, my instructor, instructed us to pick a number between ten and fifteen and commit to that. I picked ten, and did them from my knees. Success! Then it was on to some kettlebell thingy, followed by some stretchy number on a mat, followed by a half minute of jumprope.
I don’t suppose anyone in the gym failed to notice I couldn’t do more than one jump before being tangled up. After a bit of humiliation and despair, I noticed that the jumpropes weren’t all the same size, and I found the smallest, and whacked off sixteen in a row. Things were going great! “I’m done,” I told Iris.
“You did all those things four times?”
Uh. Not exactly. Back to the pushups, the kettlebell, the stretchy thing, the jumprope. And again. And again. The last set of pushups was getting pretty wobbly. And all that, my fine friends, was what Iris called our “warmup.”
I think getting up off the mat a hundred times should count for something too.
Next, squats. This was always my specialty. Why, I remember being able to do three sets of ten squats at 140 pounds. Instead, Iris started me at just the plain bar and also put a bench behind me so I had a place to land in case my legs got gelatinous. The other women were merrily pistoning away with massive plates on the bar. Those were in kilograms so I don’t know what they were in real weight, but already I realized I’d have to work up to being able to add a pair of bagels.
Then tricep curls and bicep curls with a disc the size of a beer coaster, then something else, and something else, and then the whole thing all over again three more times. Then two more sets of something or other that I can’t recall after having essentially blacked out. It never ended. It was just go go go. I went went went. Then I walked home with all the vigor of a slime mold with a hitch in her plasmodium.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I can’t help but consider that someone had to have tested that notion to see where, exactly, the line is. Marked it down in a data sheet. “Stronger…stronger…stronger…stronger…dead.” Tick.
I know how this is supposed to work. You never get to rest. You work your muscles to the point of unraveling and then you recover for a day or two and as soon as you feel all knitted-up you shred your muscles all over again. The idea is to stress your body out to the max and it comes back stronger, and you just keep doing that so that you’re always recovering from a new assault. I don’t see where the end of it is.
It might be when I get strong enough to shot-put my niece into the next county.
The idea of training in a class terrifies me! Too many memories of third grade gym, which was probably the low point of my life. But I do like resistance training (and tracking things on spreadsheets, but that’s just the autism talking). And at my age I just cheerfully give up on things that are too hard. The cat, who is the only one who watches me, never gives me a hard time about it if I switch out to something easier. I’m not trying to beat the Reaper: I just want him to know he was in a fight.
God, third grade dodgeball. It always felt like a Civil War reenactment to me.
Thank you! I was afraid I might be tempted at some point.
Same
terrifying!!
Good on you Murr! Soon you’ll be tossing kegs into your car with grace and ease.
You do have a grip on priorities.
Oh, fuck me–such a good laugh!!!
So–at the risk of hijacking this post–who decided what particular arrangement of consonants and vowels were to be considered vulgar and unspeakable, and which were not? (NOBODY has pushed back at the time of this writing–Cardboardeaux is the main influencer here, on this safest of safe spaces.)
I’ve become much more comfortable with the sounds of the letters F, uh, and K strung together (thanks to Eddie Izzard’s routines), and it turns out my siblings have also adopted this phrase (adding “me” to the end of the sounds) while dealing with their own caretaker challenges. I’m just, in general, wondering why certain strings of sounds are considered so horribly taboo-still–in this day and age?
Add a hyphen:
“…horribly taboo–still–in this day and age?”
Carolyn, I don’t think that there are any “bad” words. Only words. And fuck is a very versatile word. It can be used as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb. and even on its own as an exclamation. I have friends who don’t use it because it’s “bad”. They will use a circumlocution like “effing” or “the f word” instead of just saying it. I call those people pussies — though not to their face, as they would need their fainting couch.
I never flinch at post hijackings. And so tickled you consider this a safe space! [I have a lucrative arrangement with the Department of Homeland Security]
I should think it would have to be, there in Portland! Stay safe, so you can keep us thusly so!
C