I was starting to think that again, the weather reporters were off their gourd regarding thunderstorms when the skies began to darken. It got to an ‘end of the world’ kind of black over the farm until finally the rains came. And how they came. For over 30 minutes, it rained harder than I’ve ever seen. The creek and pond on the property overflowed, washing away the carriage trail and the road out front was under 8 inches of water, as passing motorists experienced. I did my best to clear overflowing gutters to keep the water from entering the stalls and carriage room, but to little avail. We have a couple of acres of roof and the water it caught couldn’t possibly stay in the gutters and downspouts of the structure.
It had slowed by quitting time and I drove away knowing I’d have a mess to deal with over the next several days. I headed to LuAnn’s thinking about the workout I wanted to create and put her through. As I approached her place, I noticed the local high school not five blocks away. ‘Bleachers’ ran through my devious mind.
She was dressed in a t-shirt from a 5K event and I started thinking things about running. “Oh no – I don’t run. This was just an event at McKinley school in North Willoughby I was helping with,” she said. It also happened to be the same shirt she’d been wearing in a facebook posting her daughter had put on her page the previous day, which I mentioned.
“I HAVE other shirts, John,” she said.
“Me too, but I like this one. Facebook would show that I was wearing it last night too. Thought I’d get that out there before your daughter got home and pointed it out,” I confessed.
I started with my typical explanation of the workout and the keys to success, like going to failure on the different exercises regardless of how many repetitions that took. I told her we’d start with push-ups.
“I can’t do a single push-up,” she confided.
I looked at her arms, upper body and lack of body fat and said, “yes – you can.”
She continued to nay say as she got to the ground and into the position. I put my foot on her butt, pushed it down and told her to think of herself as a plank. Giggling slightly, she lowered herself to the ground and pushed up to her starting position. Then did it two more times before getting up.
“I told you…I can’t do a push-up.”
“Umm…you just did three?”
We argued about the definition of ‘can’t’, but I think I convinced her she could do more than she thought and that ‘can’t’ had little room in my exercise vocabulary. As we toured her property looking for rocks and logs to lift, steps to climb and things to jump on top of, she said again and again that she couldn’t only to demonstrate that, when properly motivated, she could. “Stop kicking me,” she said. “Stop saying you ‘can’t’ and just do what I tell you,” I replied, as any good trainer would.
We walked to the track and did some bleachers, karaoke’s, sprints, walk the line for balance, squats, and bear and crab walks. She walked some funny, girly way at some point with her hands waving back and forth and looking generally silly. “You can get away with that, but I’d look quite unmanly if I did it. And you do know people are watching you…right?”
She didn’t seem to care and was rather enjoying the workout. Was I doing something wrong?
We returned to her place and did some core work after which I wrote down the different sets she’d done with descriptions to remind her what they all meant.
“When are we doing this next? I need to get back over and put Kristen through the paces,” I said, referring to her daughter who had missed the evening’s festivities.
“Well…next Monday might work,” she said, noticing the disapproval in my eyes. “Or this Thursday?”
She mentioned an auction as a way of an excuse to get out of the workout – or so I took it. “Thursday it is. Auction? I don’t care about no stinking auction. You’re working out, too,” I said. I can be so tough and forceful. I’m sure she was frightened and submitted.
I drove home, fed Dakota and hurried up to the track where I added to what I’d already done with LuAnn by hitting the bleachers with my pack. Half way through my 22 sets, a young girl who’d been running on the track came into the bleachers to watch and question.
“Do you have lots of weight in your pack?”
“About forty pounds,” I said.
“Well…how come you’re walking up and down the steps?”
It probably seemed rather pointless to her. I told her about climbing mountains and how this got my legs strong and my lungs able to handle it. She seemed quite interested.
“Do you put your clothes and food in there where you go?”
“That and my tent and sleeping bag and lots of other stuff, too,” I said.
She was going to be a backpacker someday, I’m sure.
Bleacher workout: 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 120 bpm.
Calories burned: 500
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