The Love, Blood, and Rhetoric School

For the past two weeks I have been working out at the Y every day but Sunday. They have these small group training things, for free, that meet 3x a week. I'm doing Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday at 1030, and it's only myself and another woman who's about the same age. She's already lost 60 pounds of baby weight working with this trainer, Jason. I really feel like I lucked out with not having a million women in the group who have zero experience working out. When that's the case you end up standing aroud a lot, waiting your turn on a selectorized machine and not really getting much of a work out.

Jason is also really good with kick-your-ass interval training, and apparently gets bored easily. So Tuesdays we're in the pool, Thursdays outside, weather permitting, and in the gym Saturdays. He's also good enough to come up with some variations on things that my knee can't handle that are still just as hard, not just the standard "if you can't jog then walk" stuff, which lowers the intensity so much.

After this six week session is over I might sign up for the M/W/F as well. Jason teaches that one also, and I really like having a set time and set people to work with. I'm enough of a pleaser that the idea of letting down people who are waiting for me will get me up and out the door no matter how much my hamstrings hurt. And they have been hurting like a son of a bitch lately. Right now my schedule is 20/20/20 on Mondays (a Jason class that is 20 min nutso cardio, 20 min freewieghts, 20 minutes abs, and all incredibly hard), pool Tuesday, sculpting class and pilates on Wednesday (and we're not even going to talk about how bad the pilates is...the other week I got stuck halfway through some very complicated type of sit up), outside Thrusday, deep water aerobics Friday, and gym Saturday.

Katrina loves going to the Y because the 2+ old nursery has a preschool-like curriculum and she gets to do crafts and play circle games and sing Wheels on the Bus and ABCs. Apparently she tried to teach everyone Swinging on a Star, which must have been completely unintelligible if one didn't know what the song was. And they have a baby room with swings and bouncy seats and mobiles for Robbie. What I particularly like is that all but two of the people working there are women with their own children, so they actually have a clue. There's one college girl who's okay, and a college-age guy who is the idol of every toddler in the place. It's so nice to get two hours to myself without having to worry about the critters. Plus I get to shower alone, which is a thrill.

So far I haven't passed out, haven't thrown up, and only cried a little bit once and that was mostly because Robbie had never been away from me for a whole hour before and I was hormonal. My long term goal is to lose 65 lbs., my short term goal is to lose 10lbs. in six weeks, and my ongoing goal is to suck less every week. I like that goal. It's a challenge, I won't outgrow it anytime soon, and it reminds me not to get too serious about things. I keep reminding myself that three months ago I was still pregnant, whenever I feel pathetic or get angry with myself about how much weaker I am than I feel I should be.

Today was two weeks from my first workout back, and I'm down five pounds.