14 Days of Peloton Barre: Day 1

I have resolved to do fourteen days of Peloton barre, because I don't really do anything, and this seems like a good way to hang out with Hannah without her actually being there. 

The original plan was 14 days of fitness. After talking to Rama, I added 14 days of also doing whatever else I want, which includes eating donuts, because fitness should not be about getting skinny, it should be about luxuriating in my dumb body that rarely wants to do anything but eat donuts.

I feel good about this plan, and decide to execute. 

I think that I will do twenty minutes of barre, because that is a Good Workout, but I also want to go to the store to buy a particularly excellent pair of shoes I saw, and will not have enough time to do that if I do twenty minutes of barre. So I opt to do the ten minute Intro to Barre class. This is good because as I start the class, I remember that I had made a plan two weeks ago to do the classes in increasing difficulty, and then work backwards, back when I had thought I was going to start the program and then kept saying, "Maybe tomorrow," until the shame of disappointing myself became too much to bare and I finally said, "FINE I WILL DO IT."

Dan agrees to do barre with me and I am elated. He is a strong and capable athlete, but I am a solid small box of balance, and am thrilled to be better at something for once. I am very proud of my balance, because it was honed completely by accident and through boredom at a Courtyard Marriot front desk hotel job in Spokane where they did not have any internet, and I did not have a smart phone. I would try to sneak read, but my manager was strict, and wanted my eyes up in case an errant guest wandered across the lobby and became livid when no one looked at them. So instead, I would stand on one foot, and then the other, and then my toes, and eventually I had more balance than someone with a complete lack of coordination or athletic ability has a right to.

Dan and I enter our ten minutes of barre, thinking it will be a light workout. This is not the case, because Hannah is a slave driver in spandex and her graceful body full of functional muscles moves her effortlessly through the moves, and she is able to dance at the same time. She tells me to find the beat. I do not find the beat. I lift my legs up in complete un-rhythm. She is a fluid dancer, I am a Rock-Em Sock-Em Robot but doing barre.

Halfway through, my butt hurts. She tells me that this is just an intro and it is 'just a taste,' much in the way the first guy who got me stoned said, "This isn't even that much weed," as I wandered aimlessly in a field wondering if I would ever remember what feeling normal felt like again. I am fluttering my dumb legs filled with concrete and I am upset that there is a future in which I have to do this but for twice the amount of time.

The class ends and I lay back in child's pose with Dan. "If you breathe out of your butthole, it feels good," I tell him. He asks what that means, which I find absurd. Doesn't everyone know how to do this? "You know, like when you sit back, and then you breathe in, but you imagine your butthole is breathing out?" He stares at me, but ever the sport, he lays back in child's pose and tries it.

"It feels good, right?"

"I feel like I'm in prison," he says.

Day one, complete.