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Tighten your core? Oh. Okay. Tighten rectus abdominis and quadratus lumborum. Glutes. Quads.Now you’re speaking my language.Constance gritted her teeth and rappelled her way to the floor. Zoe helped guide her until she was flat on her back.
“Yep,” Zoe said. “Nice. Now pull back up.”
Constance sucked in her breath and hauled her way back to her feet. Her biceps, triceps and delts screamed. Functional fitness, Zoe had said. Everything about Semper Fit was supposed to be functional—fitness you could translate to real life.When the hell am I ever going to need to climb a rope?A middle-aged woman, off in the corner, was doing the same scaling option with the rope. She slipped and struggled, too. Feeling a little less helpless, Constance started in on the next movement on the list: lunges.
By the time she was done with the lunges and started in on two more rope climbs, sweat was dripping down her face.
“You can do it,” Zoe said, smiling big and baring her dimples.
Constance took a deep breath, now completely unable to dwell on why she’d left her warm bed this morning. Why she’d bothered to dare dump trucks in the first place. All that mattered was getting through this. She lowered herself to the ground, much more gracefully this time, then braced to pull back up. The guy next to her—Rhett—caught her eye. He jumped on his rope, stuck out his legs and, without even using his feet, ascended to a piece of blue duct tape, which he tapped before he sailed down the rope, quicker than he’d climbed it. Without pause, he jumped and did a second rope climb, zipped down and picked up his kettlebell and began swinging it from between his legs to overhead.
Just like that.
Zoe, who’d moved off to help others, reappeared and loomed above her. “C’mon, Constance. You’re doing great! Let’s go!” She waved a hand in Rhett’s direction. “Don’t worry about him. C’mon!”
Constance watched Rhett a second longer. A powerhouse of energy, his traps and pecs bumped out beneath a T-shirt that read Westside Barbell. Each kettlebell swing was so controlled and well executed he made it look easy. And he was using a bigger kettlebell than the other men.
Maybe it was easy—at least for him. Constance grabbed the baby kettlebell at her feet, the smallest one in the gym.
“Pop the hips,” Zoe said, pantomiming the practice they’d had with the bell before the workout began.
Constance’s heart pounded in her throat. All her nerve endings were on fire and her lungs were tight, her throat dry. But she saw Rhett, from the corner of her eye, doing one swing after another, without pause. There were supposed to be twenty-five in a row, according to that whiteboard. Holy mother, Constance thought as she attempted to swing the bell over her head. It flashed up near her brow, then swung back down, pulling her forward and making her stumble.
“Keep tight,” Zoe said. “And use those hips to get it up there.” She lifted an unmanned kettlebell, much larger than what Constance was using, and held it between her thighs. She pushed her butt back, kept her back flat, then popped her hips forward as she swung. The bell rose without much visible effort. “Keep it right here,” Zoe said as the bell rose to about eye level. “I want you to do Russian swings. When you come down, use the momentum to swing it up again.”
Constance sucked in her breath and gave it another go. The bell swung a little smoother, a little higher. She felt a surge of accomplishment creep inside the bundle of screaming nerves and rivulets of sweat trickling down her back, chest, face and stomach.
“Ten,” Zoe said, holding both hands open. “Not twenty-five. We’re scaling your load. Just do ten. You’re doing great!”
Time was a blur. The seconds and minutes crushed in on themselves and became nothing but sweat and heartbeats, fear and excitement. Once Constance completed everything on the whiteboard, she fell flat on her back and stared at the ceiling, the rope dangling between her legs as she sucked wind.
Physically, she was in just as bad shape as when she started. Something was different, though. Constance gasped for air and tried to make sense of her scrambled brain.
“Good job.” Zoe beamed above her, her hand outstretched for a high five.
Constance smacked it, but laughed at herself. Zoe was a good coach, acting like Constance had done something awesome, even though she was the very last person to finish, despite all her scaling, and was now lying there, unable to move.
She figured she’d stay there, until everybody left, unwilling to face the aftermath—the giggling and the chatter and the discourse on the evils of bacon. But then another person showed up, the other lady who’d scaled her rope climbs, and she, too, gave Constance a high five. One after another, it seemed like the entire class was there, smiling down on her, slapping her palm, giving her praise.
What the hell?
Constance returned all the high fives, incapable of fleeing, even if she wanted to. The timer on the wall, with its bright red numbers, caught her eye. The clock had stopped at just after fifteen minutes, which would’ve been close to Constance’s time. Just fifteen short minutes. A fraction of the time she used to spend training for marathons. Half of your standard sitcom on TV. The amount of time you give someone when you just need a few moments to get your shit together.
Yet, those were some of the longest fifteen minutes of Constance’s life.
“Nice work, My Pretty Pony.”
Constance blinked the sweat—tears?—from her eyes and looked up. A man loomed above her, hand outstretched. He was mostly a blur. Sweat dripped from his forehead, landing on Constance’s chest. She went to give him the high five that apparently was expected, but he clasped her fingers and hauled her to her feet.
Rhett, she realized, once her vision cleared. The guy who had climbed that rope like he could fly. “Thanks.” Constance hoped he’d been too focused on his own workout to see any of hers. Then again, he’d finished way ahead of her. In fact, Constance was pretty sure he’d finished before everybody.
“First time?” He glanced at her shirt. His eyes had a bit of a sparkle to them. Amusement, maybe.
“Yeah.” Constance remembered what she was wearing. Her cheeks burned. Then she realized she still clasped his fingertips. She released him, her cheeks burning hotter.
“Nice.”
“Thanks.”
