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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 3, 2005 - Auburn, Alabama

Helga was heading off to her health club after breakfast and Monika and I decided to join her for the morning. I started off with an hour and a half on the track above the gym while they spent the time in a water aerobics class. Then we all joined up for a Pilates class, which Monika and I were taking partly to satisfy our curiosity about exactly what "Pilates" was. It turned out to involve a lot of squirming around on a foam mat, wriggling various pieces of our anatomy in the air.

The strangest part was rolling other pieces of our anatomy around on a big rubber ball-I almost fell off several times-and the part I really could not at first bring myself to do was when the instructor asked us to "hug the ball". I looked up to make certain I had not misheard her, but there she was hugging her ball like it was the last life preserver on the Titanic. I believe she said it was to curve the spine in a particular way, but I just had a basic problem with hugging a big inflated rubber ball that I had only recently met. I'm an old-fashioned male, and although I hug my wife a lot and my kids frequently, I hug members of my extended family only occasionally, acquaintances only if the situation demands it (situations of extreme condolences or congratulations-weddings and funerals, for example), but strangers I hug not at all. This ball was not only a stranger, it was also non-human, so that the thought of hugging it was distinctly weird. At the instructor's continued prompting I finally gave it a distinctly half-hearted embrace, hoping my spine would forgive the lack of enthusiasm caused by my brain.

On the whole, however, I will say that the whole set of Pilates exercises was a surprisingly good workout with relatively low impact on my joints. Right after the Pilates class we joined a low impact aerobics class. It was advertised as "low-impact", but in actuality turned out to be at least "medium" impact according to Helga, whom I believe because she spends the mornings there 5 days a week and has participated in lots of these classes over the years. Due in part, no doubt, to this constant conditioning, Helga has even been recognized as the second most fit female at the club! In any case I enjoyed trying out the step platforms and other movements in the session.

The basic movements of the aerobics were simple stepping and arm swinging, and in some sense any nincompoop should have been able to do it. The only problem was that the instructor played music and expected us to move in rhythm to the music. That didn't seem to be any problem for all the women there, but it reminded me very much of dancing, which I am extremely bad at. I got just as foot-tied in some of those exercise steps as I had been in ballroom dances. (Foot-tied is just like tongue-tied, but a lot more dangerous to your partner on the dance floor!). It got to the point where I almost fell over my own feet a couple of times.

The good news about the similarity between step aerobics and dancing is that I figured if I could ever learn to do either one of them, then, I could probably do the other one without much difficulty. Speaking as a trained psychologist (don't try this at home!) I was counting on positive transfer between the two tasks to facilitate performance, and believe me, for me dancing is definitely a task.

The bad news was that if I had something basically wrong with my genetics such as a missing "rhythm" gene, I could never learn to do either step aerobics or dancing. Taking the more optimistic view that the basic problem was a lack of a learnable skill, the issue was whether I should try to learn dancing or step aerobics first. After some thought, concluded that learning step aerobics would be less dangerous for Monika (although more dangerous for the step!), so that would be the preferable option.

I was so wiped out after three solid hours of different kinds of exercises that I kind of fell into a coma after lunch and took a 3 hour nap, awakening just in time for dinner-after all, I try not to miss a meal! We took in the Sugar Bowl game between Auburn and Virginia Tech that evening, and much to our chagrin, but our host's delight, the Auburn team won.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 05
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February 2005
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