Fitness in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 1)
Me wearing my weighted vest after a workout in April 2020. Couldn’t have been too hard since I’m smiling.
I was cruising along with my workouts and playing ultimate. I had joined Gold’s Gym in 2017 and was really enjoying the Gold’s Fit classes. I played a fun tournament in Sarasota in the fall of 2019, and was gearing up for another year with my GM team GrandMaster Flash, and a local Open team in the Triad called Piedmont United. Just another year, and then the pandemic hit.
When everything got shut down in March, it was a little surreal at first. I took my final class at Gold’s and then knew I wouldn’t be back there until I felt safe. I started working out at home, but had no gear.
Fortunately Lorraine was paying better attention to what was happening and took me to a sports store to get some workout gear. The place was gutted. I was able to find one 65lb kettlebell and that was it. At Gold’s I had been routinely using two 70lb bells for most exercises and had worked my snatches up to 55lb. So a single 65 was OK but not ideal.
I started crafting HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts on my own and doing them several times a week. I looked up workout videos on Youtube. I would run with a weighted vest. I was doing my best to stay in shape.
Early on I was just trying to maintain my fitness level. I wasn’t sure how long the shutdown would last, so wanted to be ready to hit the ground running when we could play ultimate again. But as things progressed and ultimate was shut down locally, regionally and nationally, I realized it was going to be a while before I’d be playing. So then I was working out intensely because that’s how I had been doing it for years.
Early on I decided it might be fun for people to watch me do a workout called “Death By Burpees”. It’s pretty simple, you start with 1 burpee and then every minute you add one. So by minute five you are doing 5 burpees. It gets to be quite a slog after minute 8 or so. My goal was to get to 15, but I didn’t quite make it.
But, yes, I announced that I’d be doing it live and then my sister and brother-in-law said they’d join. And then my mom joined them. So we all virtually did the workout on Monday, April 20. A couple dozen people watched the live stream, and there were lots of comments. It was fun, and so we decided to make it a weekly thing. Since then, every Monday evening we do a live streamed workout. Other people have joined, and we’ve connected via Facebook Rooms to workout “together”.
This Monday workout has been the constant for me since March. Even if no one watches or comments, the motivation of putting it out there that I would be doing this keeps me going. And it helps that there’s now a small group of us. Not everyone makes it every week, but I know that simply knowing there are others joining goes a long way to keeping us all motivated.
Overall, though, my workouts have evolved. I’ve tried different systems, learned new techniques and improved on some I’ve needed to work on. And I’ve lowered the intensity of my workouts. More on that next time.
