Gumby Knees

Yesterday Harper work up early so I was able to make it to the gym at 8am for the first time in a long time. The 8am crowd is probably the youngest and most fit of the groups I've encountered so far at the local rec center, which meant that I was more conscious of my appearance than I am when it's just me and the 70+ crowd. Of course, by the time I'm already at the gym it's too late to do anything about my appearance, so all I can do is put in my earbuds and pretend I don't realize that I look like a dork.

See, I don't shower before going to the gym, and while you may ask, "Who does?!" apparently there is a contingent of women who either do shower or are blessed with hair that looks like they've showered even when they haven't. No one is going to look at me and make that mistake. My hair is really straight, so I don't have bed head in terms of strange tufts sticking out all over the place. What I do have, however, is really straight hair combined with grease, which gives me a slicked back look that after two days camping without a shower has prompted my husband to say, "I'm pretty sure it will bead water."

When I go to the gym, I attempt to get my hair into a ponytail even though it's too short. You'd think the grease would be a plus for this, like an adhesive to help it stay back on its own, but instead it makes it extra slippery, so it falls out of my ponytail in big stringy pieces. To solve this I use about 13 bobbypins, but I can never quite catch all of it, so pieces end up hanging down over my face, drooping over my ears, or lying limply on my neck.

So here I am at the gym, with a ponytail that's about an inch long in the back and falling down in strings all over my face in the front, wearing the workout clothes I bought right after Harper was born. I wrote about these in a previous post, but let me just remind you that they include large, drapey shorts like men's basketball shorts, and old lady tank tops with sleeves that gape under my armpits. I've lost a lot of my pregnancy weight since I bought these clothes, so the shorts are even larger and the gaping holes stick out even further. In short, I look anything but fit and attractive.

Yesterday I was stretching after using the elliptical machine, contemplating which weight machines to use, when I noticed a particularly fit lady with a lovely, fluffy ponytail wearing slim black pants and a hot pink fitted Nike shirt. She was cycling through her weight routine, stopping to use a decline bench with pads to hook her feet around to do sit-ups in between each set. For some reason I'd never noticed this decline bench before, and since I'm always looking for new ways to try to tone my jiggling belly, I thought, "That's exactly what I need!"

I watched her use it several times to make sure I knew how it worked (yes, it's just a stationary bench, but as you will see, even those can be tricky), and then I sauntered over to give it a try myself. With my ponytail, black shorts and pink tank top I was like a shorter, dopey version of the fit lady. I grabbed the handle and swung my legs up to the top, but then I couldn't figure out how to fit my legs and ankles around the pads. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get my knees under the first set of pads and my ankles on top of the second. "How the hell did that lady do this?" I mumbled. "You'd have to have Gumby knees to get them to bend that way."

And as I held my feet in the air, fumbling around for a lever or something to adjust the pads, one of the trainers that wanders around the rec center tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You put your knees OVER it and your feet UNDER these." It was so darn obvious I couldn't even say anything back, so I smiled, gave him a big thumbs up, and did what he said.

My cheeks burned with embarrassment--and then I attempted to do a sit-up. First of all, you shouldn't wear large shorts and gaping tank tops and then lie upside down. There's a reason people wear tight clothes when working out. Secondly, sit ups on a decline bench are really hard. I managed to do one with one hand holding my shorts and the other holding my shirt, and then I grabbed the handle to sit and catch my breath. And that's when I realized the trainer dude had never left. Maybe he was afraid to leave me alone based on my inability to figure out how the thing worked, but suddenly he was next to me, smiling and saying, "There you go!" I smiled and gave him the thumbs up again, and then tortured myself through nine more sit-ups so that I didn't look like a complete moron.

Today my abs ache, and I'm not going to the gym until this afternoon, after I've showered. It might be awhile before I go at 8am again. But I will use that bench again. I didn't go through that initiation for nothing.