I’ve spent most of my life with some sort of active exercise regimen going, even if it’s just a matter of using my bicycle for transportation. I’ve spent years actively doing light lifting and running. I did step aerobics three times a week for much of my 30s and 40s. Yep, step aerobics. Go ahead, laugh. I know I did! But there I was, arms waving, feet stepping, wearing a doo-rag and tank top, sweating to club music that I would have otherwise never heard because I’ve lived my life as an old white guy who’s into opera and Bowie and Elliott Smith and those don’t really have a beat for step aerobics.
But in the last 10 years, I’ve gotten very little exercise. After my cancer and recovery, I felt like I’d been given a different body that didn’t work as well as it used to. It sucked. It still sucks. I still don’t recognize this flesh. Partly because it’s not shaped like it was, but also because so much of it is missing (I weigh now what I weighed when I was 14). I’ve been pretty good about staying moderately active, but going for walks isn’t the same. That’s not the focus and intensity that I’ve used as a kind of meditation for most of my life.
And maybe it’s time to do something about that. I don’t know if I’m in my twilight years, technically, but I’m feeling really old lately. Mostly due to some health issues that are still being troubleshot, but also just general wear and tear. From inside my body, 56 feels like the new 70. So what happens now?
Well, you sign up for the YMCA. I still qualify for two of the four letters! So that’s what happens now. I figured I’d start swimming some laps.
Which was awfully optimistic of me. I could swim the length of the pool, but then I had to rest for what felt like ten minutes. I have zero stamina or endurance, which shouldn’t be surprising, but is still dismaying. How am I going to swim laps if I can barely make it there and back without feeling like my lungs are on fire? I know it gets easier with time, at least in theory. At least when your body is young. So I guess I just have to push through this. It’s nothing new, it’s just harder.
On the way out, feeling thoroughly defeated, I looked into what classes are offered at this YMCA. Step aerobics has been dead for at least a decade or more, but there are other options. Hmm, what’s Zumba? Isn’t that a dance thing? I asked Kevin at the front desk, who’s about my age and hue.
“So these Zumba classes, what are these? Like dancing?”
“Well, yes, I think so. You could probably look at a video on YouTube to see if it’s for you,” he said very properly. He’s English, which is pretty cool.
When I later looked at a video on YouTube, I realized he was being polite. The idea of me doing that was probably the most comedic concept Kevin could experience in the front lobby of a YMCA. Needless to say, I did not sign up for the Zumba class.
There was, however, something called Aqua Fitness. Not to be confused with the Aqua Arthritis class, which I don’t need yet! So I signed up for Aqua Fitness. My first class was this morning.
There are maybe 20 people in groups of three or four, mostly women. I’m the youngest person here by probably ten years. I slink over to the far side of the walkway around the pool and stand against the wall; I figure I’ll kind of hang out and watch before joining in. A brassy woman about my age comes sauntering over, wearing a cowboy hat, dark sunglasses, and a floral one-piece bathing suit.
“Are you here for the class?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well get on in!” she says with a big ol’ grin. Ah, she’s the instructor. I slip into the water and she gets in right beside me, still wearing the cowboy hat, calling out to the class, which starts whooping and clapping. Turns out I’ve gotten into the pool at the very front of the class. Not what I had intended.
After some preliminary whooping and clapping, she starts moving her arms in the air as the music starts. I follow suit, so that means I’m now doing Aqua Fitness, waving my arms in the air, first one, then the other, then both. Every now and then, she moves her arms under the water, and I realize, “Oooooh, I’m supposed to do the arm movements she’s making in the air, but with my own arms underwater, for the resistance!” And here I had been at the front of the class thinking we were all supposed to be waving our arms in the air. A quick glance behind and I’m immediately disabused of that notion. We’re in the water for the purpose of resistance. I get it now. Now I’m doing Aqua Fitness for real.
So we do some arm stuff and I can see that, yeah, this is like very lightweight and very customizable weight training. So that’s why working out in a pool is a thing! The music has segued into Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy and I’m moving my arms underwater now, getting the hang of it.
“I like the way you dance.”
Those are words that no one, of either sex, has ever said to me. But if the words had ever been said to me, I would hope they would be said while I was dancing. Because what I had been doing just now wasn’t at all what I would consider dancing.
It’s a woman who’s moved up beside me. She shouts over the music, which is reverberating almost incoherently around the indoor pool.
“Oh, I didn’t, I mean, I wasn’t…that’s…yes, thank you.” I make a mental note to prepare a better response for the next time someone says that to me.
“She’s great, isn’t she?” the woman asks me.
Why is she talking to me? We’re in an Aqua Fitness class. For all I know, we might get in trouble for talking, and the teacher is right there.
“She is, yes,” I say, pretending to be very preoccupied with doing the exercise that involves using one of those foam noodles that I always thought were just for kids to whack each other with.
“It’s like she’s from a European spa!”
“Ah, yes, that’s funny, she is like that.” I’m looking around to see if other people are breaking into conversations and they’re not.
“Your arms are so long. I bet you could swim to the other side in three strokes!”
“Oh, yeah, maybe. They just came this way.”
“I’m Leslie.”
“I’m Tom.”
A different woman comes up behind me and plucks the foam noodle out of my hands while I’m trying to readjust. She thrusts her own larger foam noodle into my hands and then sits on the one she just took from me.
“Here, take this, it’s better for you,” she says with a smile and a thick accent. My last doctor was an Armenian woman who called me “Meester Cheek”. I had a girlfriend who used to do Arianna Huffington impressions that were indistinguishable from Zsa Zsa Gabor impressions and I loved them. I adore this accent. Did she just shoot a sly smile at her friend after returning to her corner with my purloined foam noodle? And I notice she’s wearing make-up, as if she’s going out somewhere after this. She’s not the only one. People put on make-up for Aqua Fitness.
“Oh, thank you, that’s better,” I say, struggling with the new foam noodle.
The Billie Eilish continues. In fact, I think the instructor is just playing the whole album, including songs that have a terrible beat for exercising. For instance, you couldn’t use Strange Addiction in a step aerobics class. That song is all over the place. And I don’t know if I can exercise through that stretch at the end, with Listen Before I Go followed immediately by I Love You. That’s crying music, not exercising music!
Fortunately, the instructor bellyflops herself onto the side of the pool to reach over and change the music. Not that it matters because, well, indoor swimming pool acoustics. I do the thing where I have to force myself to stop looking at the clock, and the hour is up quickly enough.
“I hope you’ll come back,” Leslie says. She’s got to be someone’s mother. She looks at me as if she’s thinking of a child who’s grown and gone and I feel a pang for us both.
And that was my first Aqua Fitness class. The next one is Monday.
