We are the champions - Queen

"I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime
And bad mistakes
I've made a few
I've had my share of sand kicked in my face
But I've come through"

Sorry Dominique, I know quotes at the beginning of anything are a slack way to explain what you're thinking without using any literary skill - but I feel a little song lyric sets up a wibble rather nicely :)

So it is eight weeks on and I completed my mofo bootcamp!!!! Wooohooo.

It has gone fast and there have been many glaring changes to my life and several that will ripple onwards for some time. Here are the few that catapult to mind immediately:

1. I get a hangover after two glasses of wine - proving that sobriety. does indeed. bite. Hypothesis proven :)
2. I've gone down a dress size.
3. Normal pants fall down.
4. My arms, shoulders and legs are showing muscle definition.
5. When I'm looking in my fridge for tasty nibbles I approach in a dogdown fashion with beautiful bendiness.
6. I cut all my hair off and got lots of nice compliments.
7. I haven't been out on a Saturday night for two months.
8. I run a lap of the footie pitch in 1 minute.
9. I plank without putting my back out.
10. I finally went to see a physio who is helping me with my back problems.

Looking back at notes I scribbled down in my blog, I was freaking terrified that first Saturday night before the whole terror of Bootcamp began. It was just something I had never envisioned myself doing. I'm just not that alpha-winner type. I like to mooch about smelling the flowers rather than whizzing about getting there faster. The fact my body is built for comfort and not speed (where does that come from, I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember?!) meant that bootcamp was not for me. Bootcamp was for people with chiselled abs who received a strange perverted joy whenever someone screamed at them. My abs have been sculpted, using cake icing, no chisels required and if someone shouts at me I become strangely quiet and plot their downfall. Anyhew, I was doing it.

I imagined everyone else would be mega fit and that I would vomit. This is what I blogged of my new comrades of Boot:

"And then I saw them, the first few boot types entering the court and walking towards me (I clearly resembled a 'booter' due to my trainers and apprehension). One larger man, one slender man, and a woman who looked like she already ran ultra-marathons.... A cheerleader type replete with ponytail came next, then another fellow fashioning an Ed Hardy T-shirt. Then the Boot Camp Leader herself... Dora, the yoga teacher..."

This was the reason I was able to complete the course and do so happily and bouncily - Dora.

For some reason, I had imagined Bootcamp to be recreations of the exercise scenes from Officer and a Gentleman, with Richard Gere. I guess this was the first time I saw someone be forced to perform the indignity of a push up while being shouted at. Yoga teachers tend not to be too much into abusing their students, as they have the concepts of mind, body and spirit which need to work in unity for any success at all. So long as I tried my best, I was applauded. So long as I sweated and grimaced then smiled, all was well.

For the first few weeks of Bootcamp, I eagerly checked my progress. Did I do an extra star jump? Leap higher up footie nets? Run further? Skip faster? But by the end that didn't feel so necessary. The fact is there were consistent warm weather warnings, so 30 minutes of any kind of movement in the still hot air outside left you feeling like Lawrence of Arabia staggering about seeing mirages of cool water. The simple fact that your body could now actually perform the feats that seemed impossible at the beginning was good enough. So we were effectively slowed down by the oppressive heat which led to us feeling more drained once inside. Luckily, a great ipod selection of music would always help us get up on our TRX systems and make sure everything hurt and we were in fact hobbling by 10am of the same day. Thank God the heat cancelled those wheelbarrows, as it turned out that I have a dysfunctional lumbar/pelvic thing going on (hehe) which explains why so many exercises have proved so painful in the past. Praise the Lord for Bootcamp, as without all this exercise, I would not have forced myself to seek out a physio in the first place.

Of course it wasn't just the two hour exercise on Sunday mornings that made so many changes in my appearance. The fact you KNOW the bootcamp is going to hurt you, means you feel most inclined to get fitter during the week. This meant yoga on Mondays and Wednesday, pilates on Tuesdays and TRX on Thursdays, all at Dora's Island Life Gym, and all under her watchful eye so she could help with any exercises you struggled with to ensure you were pushing yourself without hurting yourself. That's one of the joys of this little Lamma gym, classes often only have 3 or 4 people in, so you really do get a personal training service for an relatively tiny financial outlay.

As I noted in my blog - for the second bootcamp:

"In fact, there were only 5 of us. Mr Ed Hardy T-shirt was there, but had been out on the piss all week so had done zero exercise and felt rough. Little Miss Ultramarathon was there and whizzing around the activities in a sporty person type fashion. Herman the Incredible Shrinking Man was there doing his thing, as was the 19 year old uber-ripped Keira Knightley doppelganger. So we all got that little bit extra attention from Dora, our Trainer."

We ended our final bootcamp with 5.
Herman (our editor), Adrian (husband of Liz the ab slayer), Elissa (the physio professor), Lydia (ripped sleepy doctor chick) and me.
Five very different types of people. All very pleased with themselves.
I leave you with another lazy lyric that I think rather sums up who should get their arses to a bootcamp near them:
"Big ones, small ones, some a big as your head"
I hear the next one starts in a month, and will be by moonlight... leading us neatly up to the 10K run I've signed up for at Disney in November?
Strange, strange world
Exhausting just thinking about it!
x