What a thrill! What an accomplishment! I feel über-cool!
You see, for the past five weeks, Bootcamp and I have had a love-hate relationship.
Here is how it evolved:
Every morning, Monday through Friday, my alarm rings loudly from across the room at 5:00 AM and I stumble groggily over to turn it off. Most mornings, (after I got into my bootcamp groove), I actually woke up two or three minutes before the alarm and let the early morning rays dance across my face as I slowly embraced the morning. As the alarm chimed (or blared, depending on the morning), I eagerly jumped out of bed anxious for the morning’s challenge. That’s how it started! With child-like anticipation. And then… much to my chagrin, I would often painfully discover as I opened the blinds and took B for a walk that 75% of these morning workouts would be tarnished with rain, rain, and more rain.
In case you were wondering: Doing pushups in the rain is not fun.
I was wet. I was sticky. My hands, legs, arms, everywhere were caked with grass and mud. Little gnatty bugs pestered me during reps. It was downright awful, actually. But I still went. Mostly because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this. And, quite often, aside from the grassy imprints on my hands and my pants soaked through past the underwear and straight to the skin, I actually felt invigorated.
“You’re hardcore,” my coach said to me and two other devotees one black Wednesday morning when the rain was pelting down more like hail then drops of water.
And I felt vindicated.
Our schedule was rigorous:
MONDAY: Arms Day. This involved sets shoulder presses, chest flys, bicep curls, tricep kickbacks, chest presses, shoulder raises, etc. When we can’t possibly fathom lifting our arms for one more lift, we rest our arms and pump up our hearts with some intense cardio intervals: Football shuffles the length of the field and back, then sprints, then jumps, etc… This is how it persists. Arms then drills, arms then drills, arms then drills. For the last ten minutes (this is the time when your arms are absolutely incapable of even holding up your cereal spoon at breakfast), we go for a 15 minute run. “To cool down,” my coach says. Right.
TUESDAY: Core. This is abs day. All day. Although the cardio component in minimized to just a short warm up run and a few laps in between sets of ab work, this day is one of the hardest. We crunch our abs. We curl them. We reverse curl. We bridge. We plank. We work those little muscles to the point where sitting up in a chair at home becomes torturous. I love it. It’s killer.
WEDNESDAY: Legs Day. Like Arms Day, Legs Day is a series of intervals with weights (squats, plies, lunges, kickbacks, glute raises, etc,) and intense cardio (squat jumps, shuffles, knee jumps, one-legged hops, etc.) I usually have a hard time pressing the gas pedal in the car when I am heading home after this session. That’s how I gage the success of this day: whether or not I would be considered a threat on the road thereafter.
THURSDAY: The Gauntlet. This day IS as bad and as torturous as it sounds. It’s the most intense cardio day. Drills drills and more drills without reprieve. There are five pylons the length of a football field. We start at one end and, for example, run through our first drill like this: Run to the first pylon and back, do 20 pushups. Run to the second and back; 20 pushups. Run to the third and back. 20 pushups. And so it continues until you’ve run the length of the field and back, to each of the five pylons, and completed 100 pushups. Then you move on to doing situps in between each run. Then jumping jacks. Then squat jumps. Then shuffles. It goes on like this for an hour. By the end, I can barely walk but I feel like a million bucks. And my bum has started to jiggle less. Which I can’t say bothers me in the least.
FRIDAY: Total Body Day! This day is a culmination of everything we have done all week at a fierce intensity. It’s arms. It’s abs. It’s legs. It’s gauntlet cardio. It is both brutal and beautiful.
So I got this cool t-shirt as a reward for surviving (5 members of our little group failed to complete the course and dropped out a various stages throughout). I also got a lot of unexpected gifts from this experience (I love surprises!):
- Improved self-confidence (I do kick butt. And that’s cool!)
- A tighter ass (see you later Havarti bum!)
- An inch less around the middle, my thighs, and my calves (cool!)
- A half-inch bigger biceps (Strong arms! Woo!)
- 35 seconds off my per kilometer race time (I’m defying the slow-McMullen genes!)
- New friends (and running buddies)
- A sense of accomplishment (my favourite thing)
So, naturally, I signed up for another five weeks.
I start Monday. Can’t wait!
