the dreaded gauntlet - day 4

i made the mistake of googling blogs that would explain what the "gauntlet" entailed. after reading the blogs, i concluded the gauntlet sounded pretty intimidating. so i went off asking for expert opinion...the experts in question being people i know who exercise more than me. the unanimous response was "yeah, you're so going to puke" followed by some giggling. so i spent all afternoon psyching myself out, and at 5:15 i told steve just how mean he was being, and went and got changed.

indeed, the gauntlet is a hell of a workout. we started off by running to cones back and forth (5 in total), and each time we came back we had to drop and do 10 push-ups. at the end, plank hold for 30 seconds. if you finished early, you would start the plank early. luckily i had no such issues because i was (and will remain probably for a while) always last. then we did the same thing, but now 12 crunches. then we ran further, came back, and did work with the elastic thingies - squats (which, looking at my previous post this morning, was impossible for me. i could lower myself maybe a foot before i started cringing). then more running and this time we did arms - bicep curls and tricep curls. after that, just arms rotating between arm curls and shoulder raises, and deltoid raises and pumps (pumps are deathly - i wanted to drop the weights on my head). thennn we did suicides, a painful memory of why i stopped playing basketball in high school. finally, as a goodbye present, ari made us run up and down the hill (it's pretty steep!!) twice.

during the workout, i felt a tad sick as usual, and the exercises felt challenging for sure. however, i don't think i was as close to wimping out as the first day. i feel like my body has accepted this torture and is more willing to work with it rather than reject it completely. so at the end of the session, i didn't feel as whiny as the first day. it was intense, for sure, but my body is trying to figure out how to handle it rather than flat out hate it. so we're making some progress here...

i am still the last person in most exercises. part of this, i think, is because i'm such a princess when it comes to exercising. perhaps even life in general. when the going got tough, i was never really pushed (either by other people or by circumstances) to deal with it. rather, i was often encouraged to walk away or someone else would take on the burden for me. plus, there really weren't a lot of tough things in my little surrey life where fretting over what i got on a chemistry test was the biggest of my worries. not to say that i blame the people who raised me, because i love them for sheltering me from ever having traumatic disappointments in my life, but i think it makes me less tough and definitely more delicate. hence i usually dramaticize when i'm sick, when i'm hung over, etc. etc. even my flute teacher - he would tell me that if i felt like i was having an "off" day, just don't waste my time practising. so dealing with physical stress? forget it. this is a good lesson for me to learn in general to try to work up my stamina and my tolerance - like they say, so cliche, "good for my character".

when we were doing stretches some parents showed up in the parking lot to watch their kids play softball on the field close by, with mcdonald's. i blurted out how good it looked, and was punished to 10 extra push-ups. blah. kasia would know what it means to indulge in a big mac :)

anyway, i survived. tonight i'm getting very little sleep due to the dark knight premiere at midnight, so we'll see how i feel tomorow morning when i'm in mississauga at 8am for a darned meeting. i think tomorrow afternoon's full circuit will probably kill me.