Trying to type is painful. My hands don’t want to be this close together. It makes the muscles in my shoulders hurt.

Let me back up and explain what brought this about- this torture in which I am a willing participant. But it can’t be too long- I keep having to take a break and stretch.

We have this secretary at school and she is buff. I mean, she’s about knee high to a grasshopper, can’t be more than 125 soaking wet, but she could put a hurtin’ on me. And I’m a tough girl.

And she decided that our school needed to get fit … namely our teachers … actually our grade level … okay probably just me. Anyways, she stands up at a staff meeting in December and announces that personal trainers will start coming to our gym 2 afternoons a week and for a price, we can join them. As she’s talking, my silent mantra is “please Tuesday Thursday please Tuesday Thursday” [because, see, I went to grad school at the time, you guessed it, on Tuesdays and Thursdays]. Sadly, she said “And we’ll meet every Monday and Wednesday.”

Doh.

So there was no getting out of it. I mean, there WAS, officially, but the peer pressure and the sideways glances made it clear that sister here needed some gym time. [Back off, folks, I have a great personality.]

Fast forward to 3 weeks ago when the trainers arrived. First of all, they leveled us. As we are doing jumping jacks [I want to punch the man who created THIS exercise], they are moving us from row to row. “Come up one row”, “Go back 2 rows”, etc. Then, in our rows that are now our groups, we move from station to station, doing exercises that focus on different body parts. Bizarrely enough, none of the stations involve napping, which is how I prefer to spend my 3-4pm hour.

There were about 18 of us that first day. Everyone in pretty good spirits. “Gonna look great in 08” and all that jazz. Our smiles quickly turned to grimaces as we realized that we had inadvertently signed up to be punished. And this is not the humorous part of the blog post.

You may be thinking this whole idea of almost twenty elementary school teachers doing high knee runs down the gym is pretty funny, and to be honest- it probably is. But let me assure you that “funny” is the farthest word from my mind from 3-4pm on Mondays and Wednesdays. There are some other words, but I’ve made a promise to myself….

Each training day, as I see another victim [okay, “workout partner”] in the hallway, she’ll say (with a look of strong distaste), “You know what today is, right?” and my answer is “I really want to skip.”

But I don’t skip [even though I can almost hear my car starting like Kit in Knight Rider, begging me to bolt]. Because stupidly enough I PAID MY HARD EARNED MONEY TO ATTEND. Seriously? I have got to get my brain checked.

Now in all fairness, the trainers couldn’t be nicer. But the things they ask me to do, always in sets of 10, make it easy to forget that they are good people. I have to let you see them; you need a visual – so here is the link to their page. Yep. Those are 2 of the 3 trainers. They are all very knowledgeable but GOOD GRAVY they have no compassion for my whining.

We have 7 more weeks to go, I think. That makes me cringe just thinking about it. I’ll keep you updated. If I ever quit blogging, it might mean my arms finally gave up and just fell off. Impossible, you say? Come next Monday and you’ll agree that losing a limb or two after one of Rik’s workouts might actually feel really good.

Oww. Seriously. Can someone bring me some Icy Hot? My left tricep is cramping.

I’m spent.