One of the people at dinner tonight was a fitness instructor at Good Life, and the issue of why she doesn’t do personal training came up. She knew I did personal training and she didn’t want to say, because she didn’t want to insult me, but I figured I’m probably not a typical personal training client, so it probably wouldn’t apply to me.

She says she prefers to deal with the people who come to classes, because they’re self-motivated, while the people who get trainers need the external motivation and she didn’t like dealing with those people.

So, I guess that is me.

I’m just not sure I agree with her value judgment. It was tempting to just point out that if she could only handle teaching people who already exercise and enjoy it to exercise, she must not be much of a teacher, but I don’t think that would have been a fair value judgment on her, either.

So, yeah. I need the external motivation, the external accountability. It’s why I have a trainer. It’s why I have this blog, and my food diary, and my weight tracker and everything else. I can’t trust myself to push through the ‘do not want’ to ‘doing it anyway’. But with a little help from my friends (even the ones I pay $50 an hour), I can make that leap.

So I’m not having fun. At least I’m doing it.

The one thing I forgot to mention about my trip home:

I had to buy a belt until my mother took in the waist bands on my pants.

Contrary to the usual wisdom that someone who isn’t keeping their diet blog also isn’t keeping their diet, I actually am keeping my diet for the most part (just ignore those days last week when I was drinking). It’s just that ‘Ayep, I kept my diet again today’ doesn’t exactly make for exciting blog posts, you know?

So, some comments from my vacation, some of which have already been mentioned in status updates, but which I’m recording for posterity anyway.

I missed a few days of exercising while I was away because a) my mother only goes to the pool during the week and b) I had the cold from hell for the first week. That said, I came home 7 pounds lighter than when I went out west 10 days prior, so I’ll take it. I wonder how much of that weightloss was from my body trying to keep itself warm while I was watching curling, but I don’t really care. I’ll take the pounds however they want to come off.

I also managed to come home almost completely free of jetlag. As it turns out, my mother basically lives on my schedule except that it’s 3 hours earlier her time. While I’m in my 9:30 aquafit class, she’s in her 6:30 aquafit class. The only thing is that going to bed at 10pm vs. midnight means an hour less sleep and a lot more exhaustion.

Easily the best moment while I was away was when my mother told me she didn’t think I would be able to swim laps in the 50 meter pool. Admittedly, I had my own doubts on that subject, but hell if I was going to let her be right about something like that. So I swam 10 laps / 20 lengths, just to make a point. Then, in a truly classy move, I rubbed it in all that day and part of the next.

I did try swimming laps with fins while I was there, as well, but man, that was hard. I don’t normally use my legs a lot when I swim and bringing them into play was more tiring. Plus, I had to slow my arm stroke down to match my leg stroke, which meant breathing less. I was moving faster, so 8 laps only took about 1/2 an hour, vs an hour for 10. But by the time I had finished those 8 laps, I was exhausted and had to stop. That, and I butchered my left ankle with the fins, something that took about 5 days to fully recover.

One interesting aspect of getting back was all the comments I got at the gym about having been away. It’s nice to have established enough regularity that my absence was noticed. Plus, on my first morning back at training, someone told me I was ‘really working’ on the treadmill. Given that I was only warming up at the time, I can only assume she doesn’t know what really working a treadmill looks like, but I’m trying to take that as a non-delusional compliment.

So, I didn’t gain any weight while I was in California. I think we can all agree on ‘Go, me!’ over that. I didn’t lose any, either, but that was never going to happen.

The ongoing saga of aquafit now sits at this:

– Aquafit instructor constantly late, wants to move class to later. Boo!
– New Aquafit class added on Wednesday, and given to tardy instructor, thus getting her out of my schedule, since I train on Wednesdays anyway. Yay!
– New Aquafit class on Wednesday cancelled, thus returning tardy instructor to Thursdays. Boo!
– Pool is being closed entirely and permanently effective December 15th. OMGWTFBBQ!

I am not okay with this. I spend 4 days a week in the pool — 3 aquafit classes, 1 day of swimming. And the one day of swimming is the only exercise I get that I actually enjoy.

I am going to try to void my contract over this, but then the problem becomes where do I go from here? There are other gyms in this area that have pools, but I’m rapidly running out of time to sign 1 year gym contracts, given that about a year from now, I plan to be living a hell of a long way from here. I also have 30-some-odd personal training sessions left that I’ve pre-paid for at this gym, and much as I rag on her a bit, I like my trainer, and I don’t particularly want to go find someone else.

I’m finding this really, really hard to take. Like, spent most of today’s aquafit class trying not to cry hard to take. It’s really not been easy for me to make working out part of my life, and I’m not sure my commitment will survive this.

I have some bits and pieces I’ve been meaning to post but haven’t had time for, but I wanted to make a general update on the aquafit situation.

Thursday aquafit instructor is apparently being moved to Wednesday and someone else will be teaching on Thursday instead. It’s not clear whether someone else is teaching at 9:30 or 9:45 yet, but hopefully whenever the class starts, they will be punctual.

Thus concludes the saga with a sort of non-victory for anyone.

Okay, so they didn’t so much rain as water slightly until I wiped my face with a towel, but I was definitely crying at the gym today, and Katya felt really bad about it.

I didn’t hurt myself or even over-exert myself, but I’m always slightly afraid of falling down, and doing squats on top of a bosu ball was only very slightly likely to work.

We started out trying to do them with the platform side down, which is a little more stable, but I couldn’t get my feet into a position where I didn’t feel like I was going to turn my ankles. So then we tried doing them platform side up, and I was able to do the squats, but when it came time to get off the ball, I couldn’t find a way to do it that didn’t make me feel like it was going to tip over and I was going to fall and hurt myself and embarrass myself in front of the whole gym.

And I ended up afraid, and embarrassed, and embarrassed about being afraid, and afraid of being embarrassed, and it was all bad. So when I finally did manage to get my feet back on the floor, I was blinking back tears. Katya clearly felt horrible about that, but it’s not really her fault. She couldn’t know how much I’m afraid of falling nor that I’d be able to do the exercise itself and then flub the dismount.

Still, I don’t think we’ll be doing that one again, ever.

So, Stephanie, who is the scheduler of all fitness classes at the gym also teaches Tuesday Aquafit. And as she often is, she was late.

So, at the end of class, she was talking about how she’s managed to convince the gym manager to add another morning aquafit class to Wednesdays, starting after the long weekend. So someone else brought up Nicole’s idea about moving her Thursday class to 9:45 or 10 because Nicole can’t make it to work on time.

Stephanie thought that sounded like a great idea, and I think now she’s probably going to move all the morning Aquafit classes to 9:45 so GRRRR to that.

But even more GRRRRRRRRRR to the fact that on the way out of the pool, one of the other class members mentioned that a couple of years ago, all of these classes started at 9:00. But the instructors were always late, so they moved them to 9:15, so they didn’t have to leave right during rush hour to get there. But the instructors were always late, so they moved them to 9:30, so that rush hour was pretty definitely over by the time they had to leave. And now they’re proposing to move them to 9:45.

It seems pretty clear to me that the problem here is not with the time that the Aquafit classes are scheduled for and that moving them is thus not going to be much of a solution.

So, I was going to the gym 7 days a week, and that was working out okay, except that I was pretty tired much of the time.

So then, the doctor suggested I take at least one day a week off, and Katya agreed that would be not a bad idea. It concerned me a little because I do need the gym to be just something I have to do, and not something where I “decide” if I’m going or not, because let me tell you, if I have to decide every day, I’m not going. But between the tiredness and a lot of achey muscles, it seems like a good idea.

But then cut to yesterday, when I didn’t go the gym, and also didn’t sleep all night. I can’t help but wonder whether if I had gone, I would have gotten tired and fallen asleep instead of staying up until 2AM and then tossing and turning until 4AM.

A friend suggested I could go to the gym on the 7th day anyway, to keep up the habit, but just walk slowly on the treadmill instead of really working out. That would possible solve the habit issue, and the ‘being tired all the time’ issue, but possibly not the ‘not tired enough to sleep’ issue. Which may in fact be mutually unsolvable with the tired all the time issue, unless of course I just indulge my TylenolPM habit.

So, all in all, I dunno. Is it better or worse to take a day off? What about a slack day instead of a day off? Anyone else have any thoughts?

Ha, Katya wanted me to support myself on my elbows and toes above the floor as long as I possibly could today. She was not expecting good things, I gathered, by the fact that she suggested that ‘even if it’s only 2 or 3 seconds, that’s okay’.

Little does she know that that was the rest position for one of the exercises I was doing while I was walking. Of course, I never mastered those actual exercises — but the rest position, I figured out.

She was more than slightly surprised when I could hold it for 30 seconds.

So, in an entirely unsurprising turn of events, given that Aquafit instructors at my gym are routinely late, today, our Aquafit instructor was late.

Very, very late.

She apparently can’t get their any earlier because she has commitments elsewhere earlier in the morning and traffic is just so horrendous that she can’t possible arrive in time for class. So then she wanted to know how we felt about rescheduling the class until 10AM.

I pointed out that that would not be acceptable for me, that 9:30 is already later than I’m really comfortable with, and that if she does so, I would have to stop taking the class. Based on the collective reaction to that comment, I can only assume that while I was making it, I unknowingly kicked a puppy.

In my defense, I don’t think puppies belong in swimming pools.

Then, as we were arguing, I pointed out that I am not a morning person, but that I bust my ass to get to class on time every morning so I’m not so disrespectful as to interrupt the instructor’s class and that it’s not entirely unreasonable for me to expect the same consideration from the instructor. The ‘unlike half the people in this class who show up whenever the fuck they want to’ was apparently sufficiently strongly implied that it didn’t sail over people’s heads, so that didn’t win me any friends.

So now I am the class pariah. Which is fine with me, I was the class pariah before this all started, too, because I don’t stand around and talk in Russian, on account of a) I don’t drag my ass out of bed and to the gym every morning in order to stand around and chat and b) I don’t speak Russian.

I guess, given the choice between them moving the class to 10AM and having it start on time, and leaving the class at 9:30 and not having it start on time, I’d rather they moved it. Then I can just admit that the class is not at a time that works with my schedule and find something else to do on Thursdays. It would be too bad, because I actually think the class, which is stretching focused, is valuable, and it also counts as a sort of rest day, since it’s got no real cardio or strength components, and replacing it with some other form of exercise will not fit quite so well with the rest of my schedule, but I’ll cope.