July 17, 2004

Tomorrow morning, I am teaching my first ever group fitness class at a gym. Wish me luck (ex post facto, if you’re reading this after ten in the morning, Eastern Standard Time).

When the gym’s group fitness manager called me to ask if I wanted to sub for a cardio sculpt class, I was thrilled, because of course what else could students in a “cardio sculpt” class do except perform autothoracotomies, reach into their open chests, pull out their still-beating hearts, and shape them into little animals and flowers and mugs to take home to their families?

Alas, when I attended another instructor’s cardio sculpt class in preparation for my own, I found that, in fact, the answer to the above question is “fifteen minutes of uncomplicated aerobics followed by thirty-five minutes of straightforward weight lifting and five minutes of vaguely dance-like relaxation movement.”

At first I thought the crushing disillusionment I felt at finding out we weren’t going to sculpt our own hearts would be the death of me, spiritually if not physically, but I seem somehow to have endured, bloody but unbowed. And for the last two hours I have been aerobicizing and lifting around my apartment, shrieking things like “Grapevine right! And pivot! Grapeveine left! Single hamstrings! Double!” at the top of my lungs, practicing for the moment less than twelve hours from now in which the people standing in front of me (well, technically, behind me, but I’ll see them in the mirror in front of me) will believe that I have the power to make them hotter.

Maybe instead of the vaguely dance-like relaxation movement I’ll quickly and efficiently instruct students to mold their hearts into ash trays.