Zumba!

I’ve had a membership at some sort of gym for, like, ten years. Twelve years, maybe. A long time. But for the past few years, I’ve had a rather spotty relationship with cardio. Given my profession – that of bossing people around until they are in shape – one would think that I would LOVE cardio. But with my health condition, I would start running or get on the elliptical or whatever and could usually take about ten minutes before I would start whining the Lord’s Prayer and wonder if going up a pant size was really such a bad compromise given my heart was about to explode. I would quietly get off whatever machine was causing this reaction and rub it enthusiastically with my middle finger until I felt better.

So I hadn’t darkened the door of any gym other than my workplace for a while. And then someone whispered the dulcet tone of “Zumba!” in my ear. I heard about it from a client – a person who sees me regularly but has a pathological aversion to cardio and hadn’t driven by her gym in half a decade. She takes an "all or nothing" approach to exercise - years of lying on the couch punctuated by brief spurts of rabid workouts that leave her unable to walk for weeks at a time.

But! She had heard of this thing called Zumba! which sounded fun and was at a local gym that also had a full service spa, all kinds of saunas, granite counter tops in the locker room, and... like, some other gym shit, I don't know. Mats or something. Wooed by the fancy interior in a weak moment, she decided she would try Zumba! but did not want to undergo this particular type of self-flagellation alone. So she called me! Her trusty trainer who is always saying, “BITCHES! If you want to fit into your skinny jeans for GODS SAKE do your cardio!” knowing all the while that I was full of shit since my own routine consisted of three minutes on the stair stepper followed by some heavy drooling and a collapsed lung.

"We're going to go," she told me over the phone. I heard her opening a bottle of wine in the background. "Because I don’t want to make a fool out of myself alone and you might actually look more retarded than I do while dancing."
"Ass," I said. What she didn’t know was that in taking my new medications, I had suddenly found myself full of energy and able to run without my heart exploding and leaking out of my eyes. Well-played, modern science!

We went on a Wednesday night. The instructor was a gorgeous man who looked Latin but was actually Vietnamese. Strange, I know. Gleaming women who were 98% perk and 2% insanely good hair surrounded him. They were unreal. These chicks could have karate chopped me in two using only their triceps with a little help from their hair. The instructor smiled at my client and me and she said, “Fuck. No one told me he was going to be hot. We should just go to the sauna.”

"Uh, no," I spat wetly. “If you dragged me here, away from The Rachel Zoe Project, we are going to do this.”

In we went. The room was packed. I stood next to a woman who reeked of coconut tanning oil and was the exact color of an armoire I had at home. Burnished, if you will. The music started and our instructor, the hot Vietnamese/Latin man started dancing. And HOLY HELL could he MOVE.

And, I found, so could I! I had no idea that my hips had that kind of range of motion completely independent from my upper body. Apparently I missed my calling as a salsa dancer as the instructor kept coming up to me and yelling to everyone over the music, “WATCH HER. SHE HAS A SPECTACULAR CENTER!” And he would kind of roll his r’s in that way that I cannot (even though most German words require it so I sort of end up spitting at people a lot when speaking that language). Regardless, I was elated! Yay! My center was spectacular! And so far, my lungs were staying inflated.

My client’s lungs? Well, not so much. She reported later that most of the class was a blur since the only oxygen getting to her brain was coming in through her ears. The hour was much of a red haze except when she would inadvertently smack her hand into someone’s face and turn to apologize, only to realize that she had run into the wall, unclear as to how she had traveled so completely across the room. She had started standing the class standing next to me, but by class’s end I had to make my way through the crowd to find her where she was bracing herself up against a Fichus tree, trying to find her dignity, which had fallen out some 45 minutes back during a rather complicated box-step.

The instructor came in for a meaningful high-five and rolled his r’s through some sentences about how great it was to have us at Zumba! and how he was so impressed that someone who had never taken dance classes had such hip control. This, I assume, was aimed at me since my friend had turned grey and was holding a heated and one-sided conversation with the Fichus that went something like, “FUCK CARDIO, FUCK CARDIO, FUCK CARDIO.” She then turned to me and said, “Do you think they have a bar here?” This was our cue to leave.

We were talking about this while I had her on the reformer the other day. It had been over two weeks since she had shared the meaningful high-five with the hot Zumba! instructor. She informed me in no uncertain terms that there was no way she was going to set foot inside of that building again despite their granite counters and saunas. She was afraid for her health. “Shit, I thought I was going to throw up half way through! I probably would have lost some weight THAT way, at least.” I reminded her that THAT kind of solution is called bulimia.

"So you’re never going back, even though this was your idea in the first place?" I continued, starting her in on some abdominal work.

"No. Unless they play The Real Housewives on the big TV’s and allow napping on the mats and I can make fun of you and your magic hips during class, I’m out. And just so you know, you’re an ass for holding out on me. I didn’t know you were all HEALED and could bounce around like that for an hour without exploding. You need to be hobbled.”

That's what she gets for bringing me with the sole intention of having me look like a bigger moron so her moron'ness would be hidden. The healing part of science rules. Suck on THAT.