Personal Trainer

I have started working with a personal trainer; but before any of you start envisioning Jennifer Lopez or Madonna, with live-in personal trainers who are weighing their grapefruit slices or taking core samples of their poop, it's not like that.

Our country recreation center has a team of personal trainers. For only $150, you can get 5 one-hour sessions. People usually spread the sessions out over several months. I meet every three weeks with Katie C., a sadist who, even 6 months pregnant, is fully capable of lifting me over her head with one arm, Popeye-style. At our sessions, she shows me exercises guaranteed to render me useless for days to come. I practice until I'm able to do them and still get out of bed the next morning; then she devises new torture.

So it was today. Seeing that I was capable of handling my free-weight routine, she said it was time to work on core strength. Cool, because I want trim and rippling abs. I guess it's not that simple. S***.

She showed me a machine that I have hitherto avoided because it looked incomprehensible: the one with weights that you lift by pulling on cables. Whatever it's called. At one point, she attached me to the thing my one of my ankles. Picture one of those emaciated medieval prisoners, shackled in a dungeon. Then she had me move out away from the machine (picture an angry pit-bull rushing to the end of its chain and being yanked back abruptly when it reaches the end of the line). The exercise was...I hope I can describe this... I had to let the cable draw my leg out to the side, then bend my knee and draw my leg up toward my chest like some sort of geriatric can-can dancer. The weight was not a problem - I couldn't balance, though, and wobbled all over the place, arms flailing. Everyone else in the (crowded) weight room carefully looked straight ahead into the middle distance. I was grateful. After a few of these, she decided to add a little extra interest and handed me a small-ish medicine ball. It's only about handbag-sized, but filled with some sort of fluid to make it heavy. I was supposed to hold this over my head at a diagonal; then, as my knee came up, I was to lower the ball, creating a kind of crunch effect. Before I had at least been able to flail my arms, at this point I just tottered all over the place.

Then (oh, the horror) I glance off to my right and there, also working with a personal trainer, is my hot next-door neighbor, Kent. Oh, great. I pause to smile at him, with my doofus ball held up over my head, swaying frantically on one foot while tethered to this cable. Hi, Kent! 'Scuse me while I just fall flat on my ass.

This clinches it: the personal trainers sit in their little office at the end of the day and laugh their asses off. "OK! OK! I've got one! Oh, God, this'll be great! Let's try making someone do this, like, sideways leg-lift thing!" [Hilarity] "Oh! Oh! You're killing me! No, wait - this is even better! We'll have that same person try to do it while holding the medicine ball in the air!" Everyone just about pisses themselves laughing. Katie C. says, "I know the perfect person to try this on."