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.