By Leandra

Well, I survived.  And guess what? I have a little secret.  Come over a little closer.

I liked it.

I know!  You could have knocked me over with a feather too!  Actually, you probably could have knocked me over with a feather when we finished last Tuesday because I’m pretty sure my legs would not have withstood the assault!

When the instructor showed up, my friend who has been going to this boot camp for a while whispered to me “she likes to run us.”  My first thought was great.  Actually, that wasn’t my first thought, but I’m trying to keep this post g-rated, so we’ll leave it at that.  You see, running has never been my forte.  I ran for about 6 months in college, but that had a lot more to do with the guy that I was dating at the time than any real interest in running.  And even our relationship was tested by our nightly runs, mostly because I was cussing him every step of the way.   He usually took it in stride but one night he got fed up and turned around and started running back the way we’d come.

Needless to say, when we broke up my running days were numbered.  I’ve run a time or two since then, but it’s never lasted because it was boring and it hurt too much.

So, when we started out the workout by running, I’ll be honest, I didn’t have high hopes.  But y’all! It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.  I don’t know if it was all the women around me telling me what a great job I was doing, the scenery of the cross-country track I was running on,  or if it was knowing that there were all different kinds of fitness levels there that night, but I felt inspired.  I felt like I could do it.

I did have to stop several times, but I was able to recover and run again faster than I had expected.  And there were times that it actually felt good to run.  I was kind of astonished, really.

That good feeling was somewhat short lived when we followed up our long run with a set of 4 sprints.  Each sprint ended with 10 push ups and 10 sit ups.  I really pushed myself on the first sprint and did the all the sit ups  and push ups (girlie, natch) required.  But during the second set of sprints the first bout of nausea hit me and I felt like that was my body saying “Whoa, girl, are you trying to kill us?”  I took it pretty easy on the 2nd and 3rd sprints and then pushed myself again for the fourth and final one.

The sprints were followed by 30 tricep dips, which I did fairly easily.  If by easily you mean taking a break after every 10.  Then she made us do 20 step ups onto a wall that was about a foot and a half high.  I was only able to do 10 of those because my legs were quivering stalks of jello by that time, but because the nausea had returned I cut myself a little slack.  I really, really didn’t want to revisit my 4:00 snack of roasted almonds.

We ran one more loop, cooled down, and then we were done.  My face was beet red, I was drenched in sweat, I could barely get my legs to move, but I felt…good.  Powerful.  And proud that I had pushed myself.  And I can’t wait to go back this week.  I don’t even know who I am anymore.  But I like this girl, this new me.

I’ll leave y’all with the haiku I wrote in honor of my first boot camp:

Sweat pouring like rain,

Tags: Boot Camp, Sisters in Pain

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Blogs, Fixin' To Get Fit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.