I wasn’t sure that I was going to go to today’s afternoon core workout, but I figured that if I skipped #2, that’d do me in for sure.  Still, after the surprise Circuit this morning, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to another set.  Still, I only did 3 1/2 repetitions of the circuit, cutting my crunches/pushups out of the last one because I was doing this, so I’d have felt even worse for skipping it.

But I didn’t.  Skip it, that is.  We did an hour of core work in the sweltering heat and, boy, was it hot today.  And humid.  Rather than going into too much detail, let me just talk about two of the exercises that we did.  The first one was plank.  You know plank - get into pushup position, but with your forearms down on the ground.  If you can hold it for a minute, most fitness magazines consider you in pretty stellar shape.

We did five minutes of it.  Yup, five minutes of plank.  I made it for almost two minutes before collapsing in a vibrating mess.  Of course, no rest for the wicked (alright, 5-10 seconds of rest) and it was back into position until failure again.  And again.  And yet again.  By the end, I was doing well to keep a 2:1 plank:rest ratio going.  And this is what Adam calls a “warm up.”  Yeah.   I was certainly sweating at the end of it, I’ll freely admit it, although I figured the little run we did before would have been an adequate warmup.  Still, that’s why I’m here - for the challenge, and to whip my core into shape.

The other exercise I’ll detail today was leg lifts.  Lie on your back, head up, feet 6″ above the ground, then raise each leg in turn as if you’re walking upwards.  The count is one-2-3-4-two-2-3-4-three-2-3-4 (et cetera, ad infinitum).  Well, maybe not ad infinitum, but it certainly felt that way.  One of the group had recently done her first Ironman in 12 1/2 hours, and Adam decided that we’d do 25 sets for each hour.  That meant 312 sets of 4 leg lifts.  It pretty much sucked.

I’ll tell you this though - I used to be a little scared when Gilbert would say that we were doing core work after our regularly scheduled workout.  After just two of these classes though?  Pfft.  Gilbert’s got nothing on Adam.  In this area, anyway.

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