Aerobics OnDemand

Now, if King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail had really been thinking about it when God charged them with their sacred quest to find the grail, they would probably have at least wondered why God couldn't find it Himself. After all, He is God. Now there's an alternate ending for you...one that would end the movie approximately twenty minutes after it began.

These are the kind of thoughts that creep into your head when you're trying to follow a perky blonde aerobics instructor who is charging you with a very different, though no less difficult, mission. "Tone those arms! Work those triceps! Yeah, starting to feel the heat now!" By the time she said that I rolled my eyes and sank onto the ground. I'd been feeling the heat since the stretching segment. The Monty Python thought came first. Next, I am so screwed on the 30th.

The Bolder Boulder is now less than a month away and, instead of being characteristically seventy degrees and sunny, the weather has taken a turn for the worse or, at least, the more ironic. I'm glad Gregory's returning from his tri/business trip on Wednesday as it will give him at least a few more days of psychotic Colorado weather, something he's yet to experience as a resident. It's the first of May and as I sit here writing this snow is falling outside. I gaze mournfully at the tiny flakes. A combination of recent illness (24-hour stomach flu and severl-day-long cold) and incelement weather has pushed my training regimen off track. Gregory may be able to go run in a blizzard, but that's because the man owns more quick-drying and weatherproof outwerwear than Patagonia. And he's training for an Ironman. And I'm not. Training sick is never a good idea, so I made up my mind to take the last couple of days off, determining last night that I would do a serious run this morning and a workout segment courtesy of my cable company later in the day.

When I awoke this morning, it was sleeting. Now it's snowing. It's not really sticking but it is damned cold outside, and I really doubt that my still-recuperating immune system would be very happy with me if I forced it into overdrive right now. So I pulled my coffee table aside, threw on my yoga clothes, made sure ALL of the blinds in the house were firmly closed and snapped on the TV.

Now, I am a huge fan of OnDemand already; it's reduced those pesky trips to the video stroe significantly, but I've only recently discovered OnDemand fitness, which is basically a library of exercise videos available whenever the mood strikes you. I decided on Total Toning and Ultimate Abs, because I am currently Totally Out Of Shape with Ultimately Flabby Abs. Soon I was being guided through a series of stretches and movements by a bright-eyed no-name fitness queen, whose workouts not only drew my attention to the fact that I am totally out of shape but also to the fact that I'm a total klutz as well. At one point during an "obliques" session I nearly gave myself a black eye trying to bring my elbow to the opposite knee. Among pondering the subtle nuances of Monty Python's most popular production and my boyfriend's finish in his half-Ironman...a not-insubstantial total time of slightly over seven hours...and how badly I was going to be beaten at the end of the month, I came up with a couple of suggestions for the OnDemand people regarding their fitness segments:

1) We don't need to be told how to operate the remote and how it will stop, pause, rewind or fast-forward whenever we'd like. If we figured out how to get to the fitness programs on OnDemand, a daunting task in and of itself, we can probably handle the complicated functions of stop, play and rewind/fast forward.
2) Please, please, please, someday have an instructor who isn't perfectly fit and drop-dead-gorgeous. I mean, you don't have to have the fattest people in America either but it would be nice to have at least some more realistic looking people running these things...less of a blow to the self-esteems of the real people trying to follow them.
3) Show movements slowly before jumping into the routine. These are largely being used by people like me: who need to get back into shape. Our lack of decent physiques notwithstanding, we still deserve to be treated like normal people, and normal people cannot necessarily swing from one motion into the next without severely injuring ourselves.

Anyway, that's the beginning of it. By the end of the segments I felt more toned, a little more fit and soreness in muscles I hadn't had in awhile. Seeing as I need to make up for missing my run this morning, however, I am going to have to take on a cardio segment or two before heading out to the show I'm going to tonight with my friends.