A friend and I have become exercise groupies.
The woman who leads our YMCA Monday and Wednesday water aerobics group also teaches Boomer Bootcamp, a more active on-land class of aerobics, weights, and balance exercises. Our usual Friday water group has been taken over by water Zumba - exercise and music in the pool, which in past experience was us in the pool doing precious little while an instructor pranced and posed by the side of the pool, very full of her own wonderfulness.
Instead we tried the Friday Bootcamp offered at the same time. We liked it so much that yesterday we followed our Friday instructor to a neighboring town’s senior center where she teaches the same class.
This was a smaller, frailer looking group. To be fair, since this was a senior center, not a Y, the other participants may not have had exercise as their first priority, unlike a member of the Y.
The class was mostly in Capri’s and neatly pressed Ts, as though they’d just stopped off from the grocery store; one woman wandered off midway through, presumably to rejoin the beading class next door. Two other women chatted continuously, only occasionally lifting a weight or doing a half-hearted lunge.
I did find R, a friend from the past, someone who had worked in the same high school I had. She was the exception to the rest of the class, matching the teacher leg lift for leg lift, marching in place at top speed, and swinging 8 pound weights around as though they weighed the same as my puny 3’s.
We got caught up on what our families had been up to in the 25+ years since I’d last seen her. Her second husband had died, but her four children were doing well. I told her about our new granddaughters, and that they’d brought my grandparent bragging rights up to 5.
“You must have scads of your own,” I said.
“Not scads really – I have 12.”
I’d forgotten her skill at one-upsmanship.
During the water break, I was sweating and gulping at my water bottle while R was dabbing lightly at her barely misty brow.
I commented on how little she’d changed since we’d last seen each other.
As we turned to pick up our weights again, she said, “You know, I’m 93.”
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