Day One: Toning the Fears

Difficulty: 

I have a very strange, non-existent sleep schedule.  Working the graveyard shift three nights a week has turned me into a quasi-vampire, mostly in the respects that I have a minimal social life and I prefer to sleep during the day. This lack of normalcy led me to wake up at five thirty this morning without the ability to fall back asleep.  At six fifteen, when I understood that I would not be going to sleep, something came over me and I decided to go to the gym.

Since there was no way in hell that I would take a spinning class at 7AM, I decided to participate in the 7 AM body tone class with Joanna Southerland.  I have been wanting to go to the class since the beginning of the semester, but have always put it off for one reason or another. Now I didn't have much of an excuse, and it sounded like it was going to be one of the easiest classes that the Leach had to offer.

I was wrong.

First, a bit of back story: generally when I get off work at seven in the morning I make my way over to the early morning yoga class.  It helps me stretch after a long night of sitting on my ass, and it helps me deny the fact that I am the laziest person you'll ever meet.  During said yoga sessions, there is always a class happening in the adjacent room. That class is loud, involves a lot of movement, and frankly is terrifying to witness.

What my naive self did not realize at the time was that this was that class.

The class was both easier and harder than I was expecting.  Some of the difficulty lay in the fact that I had no idea what was going on half the time.  Everyone already knew what equipment to gather at the beginning of the class, whereas I managed to look like a lost sheep in a How it's Made episode. I was smart enough, at least, to take the smallest weights because we ended up using them almost every minute of the exercise.  It was loud; it was intensive; yet the instructor was so pumped about keeping our guts sucked in and pushing ourselves, and that combined with incredibly loud music kept me going. 

By the end of the class I was coated in sweat, red-faced, and exhilarated.  It was the strangest thing; I wasn't even sore. During the exercise I could feel my muscles burning under the strain, but afterwards I was in some sort of high.  It was great. By the end of the day I started feeling the soreness all over, and right now (the next day) I'm whining like a little bitch every time that I have to stand up or walk the stairs.

I'm definitely coming back.