Dancing Fool

On Friday night, Ted and I went to an 80s and 90s dance club with a group of friends of ours. It was a “Generation X” meetup, so we were all 36 and up. Not exactly folks with a foot in the grave, but not exactly coeds, either. We had a blast; we had drinks and danced for hours. We stayed out until 3:00 AM. It’s been years since I’ve done that.

There is a boot camp point to my telling of my Friday night shenanigans; on Saturday morning, all our friends were posting messages about how sore they were from dancing. Sore legs, sore feet, sore upper bodies; but guess what? I wasn’t sore at all. Apparently, five hours of goofy dancing is no match for regular attendance at boot camp. How’s that for an unanticipated bonus?

(I may not have had sore muscles, but that isn’t to say I didn’t suffer. I had a headache from the deepest chasms of Hell, and bruises. Don’t ask about the bruises. There was alcohol involved.)

This morning was a definite challenge on the getting-out-of-bed front. Some last-minute rescheduling caused me to have to stay up way later than I had planned. So when my alarm went off, I had the fleeting idea that I may skip today. Then I thought about how good it felt this weekend when my daughter saw my arm and mentioned that she was starting to see some muscle definition. I thought about how good it felt to put on the jeans I wore Friday night and not have to girdle myself down to prevent a muffin-top. I thought about putting on a tank top this summer, and having the only hesitation about whether I should wear it be whether the color looked good on me, instead of whether I actually wanted my shoulders to show. So I went.

Today was one of those all-over-cardio-and-strength days. It’s difficult for me to judge how well I’ve done on these days, because it’s such a continuous flow from one exercise to the next. With accumulators, there is counting of reps, so I know whether I did every repetition of every exercise; on circuit days, I know whether I repeated each circuit the required number of times; on running days, I know whether I made the entire distance and completed all the drills, and what my time/speed was. I have a frame of reference on those days; but on days like today, I never feel sure whether I took too many rest breaks, or did enough repetitions, or worked fast enough and pushed hard enough. I know that it hurt; I know that I exhausted myself; but I don’t really know whether I could have actually pushed harder. I guess time will tell.