Will I be back???

Today was our first training with The Terminator (aka Stephanie to her friends if any of them survive an hour with her.) We're lucky enough to have an onsite gym at CLIF Bar including personal training which is a great luxury for our training.

So like complete gluttons for punishment, we signed up for an hour a week with The Terminator in preparation for climbing. She's trained a lot of the other climbers at CLIF and Abbs has trained with her as well. But (don't tell her) I've always been terrified. I've seen first hand people limping, heaving and red-faced as they leave the gym after being under her watch. And I'm not an athlete, right?

But commitment has to come from many angles to climb this mountain so I signed up. In future, it's every Monday at 2, but because we were out for MLK day this past Monday, Abbs thought we should reschedule it to Friday. Yeah...great thinking Abbs.

We started with some step work, pushups and heaving around some medicine balls. OK...I'm breathing heavy, but I can do this. Then we did about 1/2 hour on the spin bikes (which I have discussed with one of my other trainers, Derike about how the saddles are not so great for tender female parts.) As red as a lobster and sweating buckets, I still soldiered on.

Then we hit the weights. By the first set of leg presses, my quads were screaming. My mouth soon followed and I was finding it hard to "push through" as Steph said. I really preferred to get off the machine and push her. Onto tricep dips and pulls, 10 minutes of ridiculously hard core work, some crazy medicine ball balancing and donkey kick-like thing and about 15 seconds of yoga's child pose and we were done.

I took a shower immediately after and crumpled my soaking, stinking clothes into my gym bag -- but you would never have known I'd attempted to clean myself up. I was red-faced and sweaty for the next 1 1/2 hours. And I admit to being too prideful to post a picture of myself in this state.

But I will tell you there was a smile on my face that kept coming back throughout the day (and even now as a type this.) At the end of the grueling 65 minutes (yes, Steph went over the time limit much to our dismay,) Steph looked at us and said "Good work today. And I'll tell you that if you wanted to, you guys could go up there today and do this. I'm not worried about you at all."

Yes...I'll be back. - W