This morning, I am tired. I drifted off to sleep around midnight then drifted unwillingly back into consciousness around five. I am still shaking the sleep off and predict a late afternoon nap.
But, really, there may not be time. In the late afternoon, I also have to go down to Jake’s gym and do a series of “floating goblet squats” and “Pendlay barbell rows” punctuated by frantic sprints on a stationary bicycle.
After a year, I have grown (relatively) comfortable with Jake’s gym.
I also feel trapped.
Now that I *can* swing kettlebells over my head with ease, I don’t want to *stop* being able to. And, 45-year-old woman that I am, if I stop Jake-ing, even for a moment, all the new muscles will atrophy, leaving me a withered, kettlebell-eschewing shell of my current self.
I tend not to think too hard about the usefulness of my iron-tossing abilities. They call it “functional” strength training, but most of it seems like the functions of some distant, other time. Like, yes, if I were regularly anchoring the bucket brigade to save Sven’s blacksmith hut from flame or casting nets upon the ocean to stock the village’s cod supply before winter, all of it would make sense. As it is? Well, like I said, best not to dwell.
But, as I have learned recently, *some* self reflection might be apropos. For example, considering, even briefly, how ridiculous I felt at Jake’s gym for months on end might have served as some kind of natural immunity against a) joining a spin class at the YMCA and b) listening to Bridgette.
Some caveats. The spin class is actually fine. Bridgette is very nice, and her name had been changed to protect her innocence. She was the woman on the bike next to me who was so cheerful (!) and friendly (!) — the one who sucked me in with her invitation to the Strength Train Together class occurring immediately after Cycle Together 30 (the spin class’s alias).
“It’s so much fun!” said Bridgette.
And I, contemplating only my newfound, relative comfort at Jake’s, said “Sure!”
Oh. Well. Sure.
I knew things were going south when I entered the “aerobics studio” and realized everything was themed in pink and green, like a Miami condo from 1984. Women (and one lone gentleman in an Ohio State T-shirt) were assembling those little molded plastic step-up things and grabbing mini-sized barbells and plates from a rack. The teacher, noting my confusion, came over and ticked off the equipment I’d need.
“What’s the weight on these plates?” I asked, trying to calculate what I could actually do.
“They come in small, medium, and large,” she said. “The weight is probably on there somewhere.”
And then she was gone. And then there was music. And then, we were dancing with barbells.
Yes. Yes, dear reader. We were dancing. We were hoisting the barbell to our shoulders in what Jake has taught me is called a “clean” and then pressing it over our heads to the rhythm of some woman singing incomprehensibly about her baby. We were ripping the plates off the barbell and swinging them in a wide circle. We were skipping to the right, to the right, to the left, to the left. We were adding stutter steps. We were doing “hip bumps…”
Well. Let me clarify. *They* were doing hip bumps. At the hip bump phase of the evening, Sarah stopped. She just stopped, holding her plate limply by her side and standing dazed rather the way she does at church when the praise music gets out of hand. She began referring to herself in the third person, thinking, “Sarah only needs to survive the next fifteen minutes, then she can flee this over-lit prison never to return…”
The next Thursday, she — OK, *I* — the out-of-body experience has passed — went back to spin class. Bridgette was there. “How did you like it?” she asked brightly.
“Oh, er…it was fun!” I lied.
“Great! I’m teaching tonight! Come on back!”
I may or may not have been making up excuses not to go to Strength Train Together for the last three weeks. This may or may not be a topic for therapy this morning. But one thing is certain: You will never, ever so long as you shall live get a video or even a photograph of Sarah dancing with barbells.
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