A month of Fridays

My Friday mornings used to be very laid-back and peaceful. Things here at the office tend to be very relaxed on Fridays compared to the other days during the work week, so those mornings typically involve a leisurely breakfast while perusing my e-mail and numerous newspapers.

And then I had the bright idea to take classes at various gyms, fitness centers and the like this summer. Since news for the Sports section is notoriously slow in the summer, I figured I’d go out there and find the news. I wanted to know what these classes are like for an average person like myself.

Boy, did I ever find out.

The first place on my list was Velocity Sports Performance. When they first opened their doors a few years ago, I took the tour with owner Barry Falcon and saw the facility as the finishing touches were being made. I saw the basketball court, the football field, the weight area and the track, and it looked unlike anything I had seen before. I thought to myself, “Wow, if I were an athlete, this place would be like Heaven.”

Over the years, I stayed in touch with the people at Velocity, put their events in our sports briefs and went out to take pictures at things like their annual “Lineman’s Challenge” or football combine practices. Earlier this year, I found out they offered classes for the non-athlete as well. When I decided to get active this summer, I gave them a call, told them what I was hoping to do and they let me take the adult fitness class at 8:30 a.m. each Friday for a month to give it a try and then write about my experiences.

Looking back on the past month, I am amazed I am still alive to tell the tale.

As I entered the facility that first Friday, I found myself surrounded by some familiar faces, like Landmark Christian School graduate and Anderson College basketball signee Stoney Hill. I was instantly nervous. If this was a class that a high school athlete was taking to stay in shape this summer, I was in some serious trouble. My fears were unfounded though, or so I thought at the time. It turns out Hill and the others gathered around the warm-up area were in a class specifically for the rising college athlete. My class only included two other people, both women and each a little older than me, and our instructor, Angela, soon found us.

Things started off with a dynamic warm-up, which kicked-off with jumping jacks and included exercises like mountain climbers, which involves you getting down into a crawling position and appearing like you are climbing a mountain, and scorpions, where you are still in the crawling position only now you are extending your legs backwards in a kicking motion. I suppose to the person looking on, the person doing the exercise looks like a scorpion. To the person doing the exercise, it looks like they won’t make it through the next 50 minutes.

The warm-up lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. At the end of this period, my heart rate was accelerated, my throat was dry and I had already worked up a good sweat.

We then made our way over to the weight area and did exercises like chest presses, bicep curls, squats and an exercise that I can only describe as “the rack.” It involved me lying on the turf of the football field with my arms by my side. I then had to lift up my arms, legs and top half of my body with my thumbs turned upward. I would raise up and slowly go back down until a minute was up. Each of us completed this circuit of exercise twice, and “the rack” was my last exercise each time.

Sweat was flooding out of me onto the turf and I was embarrassed, thinking of how one of my comrades in arms would be lying here next. It was also during this exercise where I first felt like I was going to be sick. I couldn’t believe that I was this out of shape because I had been going to the gym, three times a week on average, for about a year. Yet none of my workouts were like this. I had never pushed myself like I was being pushed that day.

When the circuits in the weight area were done, we moved to doing cardio and core. The area where we would have run was taken up by a group of campers, so Angela had us run around the building. It was a nice morning, not brutally hot yet, but the second lap of the building, even though it was a flat lap, began to feel like Heartbreak Hill to me. I was cramping up and my legs felt like they weighed hundreds of pounds. I was done. My two classmates made another lap. I later found out that these brave souls came to the class at least two other times a week.

I sat down in the cool down area and looked beaten. I was so sweaty that it looked as if I had jumped in a pool with my clothes on. I retreated to the locker room, cleaned up and headed to work. Somehow I made it through the day but by the next morning I was extremely sore. The soreness lasted for several more days and by the time I was feeling like my old self, I had another class.

Two of the remaining three classes were with Angela, while the second class was with Monica. The workouts were never what I would consider easy, but I found that I didn’t hurt as bad afterward. I began to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment after finishing a grueling hour and while some of the exercises were painful and difficult, namely the sitting against a wall at a 90 degree angle without a chair, others were almost fun. I felt like I could feel the exercises working and I knew I was getting a better workout than I had ever conducted myself at the gym.

I still have a long way to go before I can master the classes like some of the people I have seen there, but I now have a good understanding of why Velocity has found a following. In that one hour class, a person learns the proper way to warm-up and work out and they also learn what their limits are and that even those limits will one day be surpassed.

For information on Velocity Sports Performance, phone 770-632-5432 or visit www.velocitysp.com/ptc