Sunday, May 29, 2011

The Boot Camp Diaries Addendum (aka Please Ma'am May I Have Another?)

It seems that my transformation from semi-couch potato to semi-athlete is moving quite along. Although we're on a two-week break between boot camps, our instructor set up a "drop-in" day last Thursday at the Capitol for anyone who wanted to get an extra session in. I signed up to attend, and when I read her email asking us to bring our mats with us, I thought that maybe she'd take it a little easy on us and that we'd get to do some yoga.

WRONG. Thursday's session was one of our toughest sessions, which is saying a lot. Our mats were not used for some peaceful, relaxing yoga. Instead, we began by doing 5 push-ups, 10 squats, 5 burpees, and 10 full sit-ups. And we repeated that cycle 8 times.

She then has us--you guessed it--run the stairs for what seemed like an eternity. We ran singles 10 times, followed by doubles 10 times. Then we shuffled up and down. We stopped twice along the way to do 50 triceps dips (for a total of 100). By that time my legs were burning, which meant that it was the *perfect* time to run sprints up and down the stairs. Suffice it to say, by that point I was ready to drop and starting to regret my decision to "drop-in" that day.

After all the stair running, Margaret has us do four more rounds of our mat exercises before finally cooling down. Despite the exhaustion and pain, I'm glad that I went. I figure the more active I stay during the break, the less difficult it will be when boot camp starts up again in another week.

By the way, I've also started the Couch to 5K program, which I plan to do on non-boot camp days. I completed week one yesterday and will do week two this week. I'm hoping that it will help me have more stamina for boot camp and, of course, enable me to run a 5K non-stop. At this point I'm doing good to run a minute without stopping, so it will be a minor miracle of this program transforms me into an actual runner. But miracles DO still exist, so we'll see...

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