Our First Day at Boot Camp (aka the Day I Almost Died)

My friend Dred and I bought this S$19 groupon for four sessions of 60 minute functional training boot camp sessions from Infinite Fitness and showed up for our first session last Saturday morning.

Now the session started at 9am which seems late by other people’s standards, but my work starts at 11 am so that’s early by mine, especially on a weekend plus I’m a night owl so I find it REALLY hard to get up early in the morning. And oh yeah, the location was in Botanic Gardens which is far from where I live, so I had to be extra early.

Still, I managed to drag myself out of bed when my alarm went off… then I fell asleep on the couch for a few more minutes before I woke up again and finally dragged myself to the shower and out the door with yoga mat, water bottle, and towel.

And then when we got to Botanic Gardens, we had a hard time finding the exact location of the session based on some pictures on their website. We knew the place looked familiar because we had been there before, almost two years ago, but where was that exactly??? We finally lucked out and found it after I spotted a woman carrying a yoga mat headed over there and then Dred saw a very buff guy who could only have been our instructor. Great detective work, Sherlock and John! 😀

They uploaded this pic on their Facebook page

But that wasn’t even the hard part because it was just about to start. The aforementioned uber buff instructor gathered us and then started us off on a warm up jog, heading the pack on a brisk clip. I hadn’t been exercising for months, so I fell waaaay behind. How embarrassing. Luckily when he jogged back to find us he didn’t say anything derogatory and even said “you’re doing a good job!” even though I was so totally NOT.

Then he asked who the beginners were and said we would start off easy, away from the rest of the pack, which I was extremely grateful for. There were 8 of us, so he said he would create 8 “stations” which we all had to stop and do different kinds of exercises at for 45 seconds before we stopped and moved on to the next. The exercises were varied – lunges, crunches, running, push ups, stretching an elastic band, etc. He demonstrated how each was supposed to be done and helped us out while we were doing it, to make sure we were doing it correctly.

Now 45 seconds seem like an awfully short amount of time by other people’s standards, but not by mine. I am in the worst shape of my life like OMG. We did three rounds of the 8 stations and it really tired me out big time.

After that, we were then asked to join the others in the core exercises, so we rolled out our yoga mats and followed the other instructor as he instructed us to do some yoga poses which I recognized from back when I was still doing yoga which I now really miss. sobs

Then we were done, and everybody had a group picture. Cheese!

The “Show how you rate your instructors!” pose.

I was so tired, so we rested by the swan lake (separate blog post to follow) for a bit before having lunch in Bishan, then I went home and got showered and dressed for high tea with other friends. I fell asleep on the MRT going home and was dead to the world when I got home before 9 pm.

The next day, everything hurt.

I can’t believe I have 3 more Saturdays of this.

But actually, it is a fun way to get fit – outdoors in a beautiful park with a bunch of friendly people. I just hope I survive!