Graceful, I am not. Not even close. In fact, anything that requires more than a minimal amount of coordination is totally beyond my abilities, like, say, walking and chewing gum, or talking and working out.
After watching me try (and fail) for the umpteenth time to complete an exercise as she had demonstrated it, my trainer asked me if I would ever consider being on Dancing With The Stars . (If I were a celebrity, a quasi-celebrity, or someone who had more than five hits on You Tube.)
I started to answer, then realized what she had really meant was: Would you do it, knowing that you would be voted off before the first episode even aired?
For three years, Jess has come twice a week to torture, er, I mean train me, and I still can't follow basic moves.
"Okay, you're going to take a weight in each hand, stand like this and move your arms like this," she will demonstrate, raising her arms up from the side above her head, rotating her wrists and bringing her arms down in front of her, as I mimic her in the mirror sans weights.
"Got it," I always claim, taking the weights from her, both of us knowing full well that it will take at least fifty or sixty reps before I can do anything even close to what she did.
"Okay," she'll stop me, "you're inventing a new exercise again that is working out your toenails, and we were going after shoulders and arms. Watch." And she will repeat the exercise.
"Wasn't I doing that?" I'll ask, and sadly I am not faking it in order to get out of doing all fifty thousand reps she has decided is necessary to suck the joy out of my life.
"No, you were doing this," and she'll flail her arms around in a move that is a cross between the chicken dance and that bird pose the Karate Kid did.
"Oh. There's a difference?"
Heaven forbid, she tries to give me a multi-step routine.
"First," she'll say, "you're going to do forward lunges, holding weights, then backward lunges, then jump squats with a push-up in between, and finally side lunges with a squat."
"Huh? Wait. What came after you said first?"
And if something interesting comes on the TV or I decide to try and talk at the same time I'm doing a crunch while holding a medicine ball (well, okay, I am always talking)? Pffft. I might as well be trying to calculate the amount of thrust needed to lift Shamu into outer space using a hand-held fan and a go-cart engine. I mean, c'mon. I'm supposed to remember whether or not to raise bent knees or keep them straight as I simultaneously hoist the equivalent of a small child over my head and sit up while keeping up to date on Lindsay Lohan? Never gonna happen.
None of this is new to Jess. She knows that I will forget to bend my back knee in a lunge, lose count of the reps by the time I hit five and confuse a squat thrust with a push-up jump-out thingy. After all, we've only done them five million times.
The dog trainer is learning all of this the hard way. Come to think of it, so is the dog. She had gotten pretty agile from dodging my two left feet.
"Get her in front of you, then step back with your left foot while bringing your left arm back, then forward, so Chloe follows the treat and 'heels'," the trainer showed me the routine...sixteen times.
"That was a good try," she encouraged me, while at the same time keeping the poor dog from being garroted by the leash.
"Watch again," and she performed the maneuver flawlessly.
Little did she realize that she could do it four thousand more times and I would still believe that I was matching her moves exactly instead of looking like I was reeling in a 200 pound fish who wasn't going down without a fight.
"You're actually pulling her around," she gently took the lead away from me after several more failed attempts, when the dog gave her a look that said,"Help me!" "Maybe you should practice without the lead."
Maybe she should realize that moving my leg and arm at the same time while guiding the dog and offering a treat was beyond my capabilities.
"Let's go out in the other room, I'll bring in my dog and you can 1. let Chloe greet her, 2. call Chloe away, 3. back up towards the door, 4. get her in front of you and 5. make her heel."
Sure. No problem. And then I'll perform Swan Lake. Did you miss the part where I got tangled in the lead taking one step back?
"Oh, and remember to use your voice to indicate good from bad actions on her part."
Really? You're going to add yet another thing? Even the dog looked at her skeptically.
Eventually, she, like Jess, ended up rolling her eyes and accepting the fact that not only am I in no danger of ever winning America's Got Talent I am in no danger of being able to walk down the street without tripping over my own feet.
Now all I have to do is wait for them to stop trying to change that, and let me go back to being clumsy and lazy.
No comments:
Post a Comment