The other thing I remember is learning to teach my first step aerobics class. Do people still do step aerobics? Well, in 1991, step class was the shiz and everyone was having it. Simulate walking up and down stairs? With some jaunty side kicks? Genius! After receiving around twelve minutes of training, I “taught” my first class, which was an unquestionable disaster.
With no mastery of the language, I’d give instructions like, “Put one foot on the ground and one on the stair, and do your arms kind of like a soldier and we’ll do like a march move and in a minute we’ll change our feet more like a boxer.” What did this mean? No one knew, my friends. I didn’t even know to lead each step series on the natural four-count; I just started on whatever beat was happening. Think of someone clapping to a song whenever their hands decided to clap instead of on the two and four. I’m pretty sure I caused a few seizures. My step class looked less like an exercise commercial and more like preschool gym time. I’m sure those women were thrilled to pay $49.99 a month to have a sixteen-year-old in Umbros give aerobics instructions by saying “use this hand” and waving it in the air because lefts and rights are hard.
Since 1991, I’ve had a difficult relationship with working out. I want to love it. I do. I possess a fully developed mental vision of myself as a runner—long strides, fast pace, athletic gait. In reality, I am a lumbering, heavy-footed run-walker whose fingers get swollen after one hundred yards so I hold them upright at a ninety-degree angle, like I am about to clap, resembling Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights: “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” It is secondhand embarrassing for anyone who must bear witness.
The problem is, I prefer watching Netflix and eating snacks. This is fundamentally superior to sweating and breathing hard. You get to watch shows and arrange your remote controls on one side and your chips and dips on the other. If your cell phone is within reach, you don’t even have to get up to parent. You can call your kids from the couch like a true modern mom. This is one million times better than getting a side stitch during Body Pump while breathing in everyone’s crotch sweat. I don’t even know why I have to explain this.
To be fair, my checkbook communicates that not only do I love exercise, I like to pay for it in monthly bank drafts that are easy to activate but strangely difficult to discontinue, even if, say, you haven’t gone to that gym one time in ten and a half months. The point is, I pay for it like a committed attender, so surely that counts for something. I am helping fund other people’s exercise space. You’re welcome. My enthusiasm is always concentrated on the front end: Here! Here! Here, Gold’s Gym, Lifetime Fitness, Personal Trainer, Boot Camp Instructor, Fitness Coach, Yoga Master, Nutritional Mentor, Holistic Wellness Practitioner, take my money! Take it! Keep it! Buy some groceries! Pay some bills! Get you something nice! I will use your services for a short amount of time and then not, but please enjoy my money!
None of this gets easier as you get older, dear reader. Every time I drag my fluffy behind back to the gym, class, or studio, I imagine myself as entirely more fit and capable than I am despite all evidence to the contrary: Well, let’s see, I’ve been working my sedentary job every day and haven’t exercised in fourteen months and ate like it was a paying job this winter and haven’t experienced an elevated heart rate since I watched the season finale of Parenthood, so . . . I’ll take the ninety-minute Bikram hot yoga class because that makes physical and reasonable sense!
And then I die.
The aging, uncooperative body is one thing, but the gym is a whole ’nother situation. It becomes immediately clear that many people there have been using the membership they paid for. What is this, the Try Hard Convention? Where my sloths at? And of course the treadmills are at the front of the gym with the TVs, so when I haul up there to get my run-walk on, I give everyone a full rear visual assault, and there is no way their membership fees cover that sort of emotional distress. At the height of what I want for my life plan, having fifty people watch me run-walk from behind while my back flesh flaps squeeze out of my sports bra has to be at the top.
And seriously, I’ve been in (and out of) gyms for twenty-five years, but inevitably I’ll approach a weight machine absolutely flummoxed on how to use it. So instead of asking for help like a mature adult, I loosely figure out where the butt, hands, and legs go and just push, pull, squeeze, lift accordingly. Sometimes I am facing the entirely wrong direction. Sometimes, in an effort not to look like a Nancy, I put the weight on the lightest setting, then fall off the machine because pulling with all your might on five pounds tends to unbalance a person. If everyone is looking at me even one-tenth of how much I think they are, I am certainly an unwitting star on YouTube already: “Watch this chubby mom try to use the tricep machine and hit herself in the face and act like nothing happened!”
At this writing, my girlfriends and I are doing hot yoga. Wait, I’m sorry, practicing hot yoga. (All yoga is a “practice” and specifically “your own practice,” which I take to mean I can lie flat on the mat sometimes because my practice isn’t interested in balancing the entire body on one elbow. That is not a thing my practice wants to attempt. Namaste.) Also, I realize it is fundamental to this brand of yoga and is even found right there in the name, but every time we enter the room, one of us says, “Why is it so hot in here?” Then we spend the next hour trying with all our strength not to get the toots or the giggles, but we often get both.