The New Recruit

On The Sergeant's Boot Camp website, it claims that "whether you run 60 miles a week or gasp for breath walking up a flight of stairs, your Sarge will challenge you." I read this in the middle of the night one night last week when I couldn't sleep and decided that this is exactly what I need. So, I signed up right then and there.

I started this Thursday, the morning after I received my certificate by email to attend the class. Class starts at 5:50 am. Surprisingly, the sun is already coming up at this time. I had no idea! I arrive at 5:45 since I'm supposed to arrive 10 minutes early to warm up. I start running around the track and I'm already tired.

Training begins promptly at 5:50, and our Sergeant is a woman named Vivian who is about my height. And she is tough. After the warm up, we grab our 5 pound weights and run the track several times. The group is about 15 people, and 14 are all clustered together running in a synchronous group. I am by myself about 500 meters behind them. Then we move on to pull-ups, and I can't even budge my body as I try to lift it with my arms. Vivian is encouraging and comes over and tells me to just lift one leg while tugging on the bar. This looks incredibly silly, and yet, I'm still finding it difficult.

Thank god Elizabeth asks to be my partner. We have to hold each other's ankles while we "wheelbarrow," which means walking with all of your weight on your arms across the trackfield. Again, I don't budge. I try to lift my arm from the ground and it won't lift up. Vivian again comes over and tells me it's okay to just stay in place (if you can't envision it, it is basically like a push up with your legs off the ground), and again, I find this incredibly difficult.

Somehow I show up today and am heaving around the track and skipping across the field rather than hopping like I'm supposed to because the hopping is killing me, and Brent looks to me and says "you've been doing this a while, right?" And I'm like, "um, definitely not. This is my second day." All of a sudden I make a bunch of friends. Mike walks over and encourages me with this statement "I was sore for the first three weeks, but you'll really notice a difference by the end of the month." Wow, THREE WEEKS OF THIS LEVEL OF SORENESS? I'm trying to avoid humor today because it hurts my belly just to sit still, much less laugh. For the record, I did 150 sit ups today. Did you hear that? IN ONE DAY! 1-5-0! I went from not doing ANY sit ups for over a year to 150 in one morning. It was KILLER.

I'm sticking with it because I paid for it, and I like to get my money's worth out of things. And honestly, after waking up and writing my thesis around the same time every morning, this feels like a surprisingly refreshing change. By 7 am, I've already done some kick ass work. We'll see how I fare by the end of the third week.