January 25, 2011--Pilates

This will be brief. After yesterday's 2,500 worder about Clever Hans and Rona's goldfish and an exhausting Pilates session, I can barely hold my hands up to the keyboard. So this will be just a few hunt-and-peck sentences.

Since I brought up Pilates, I should say a word about it.

Seven or eight years ago, Rona began a series of New Year's resolutions about getting herself into better shape through healthier eating and some consistent form of exercise. She knew herself well enough to sense that aerobics or spinning classes at a health club would not be her thing. Seeing her procrastinate year after year, and knowing from my own out-of-shapeness and inability to stick with an exercise routine, for Valentine's Day I bought her 10 sessions with a local Pilates instructor. Thinking, if she realized that not going would be a waste of quite a bit of money and that the sessions would take place literally around the corner from where we live in New York, this might get her jump-started.

It in fact wonderfully did. She has been doing Pilates now for more than five years and is daily in better and better shape.

Witnessing this, and ashamed of my own lethargy and the widening gap between us when it comes to fitness, I tentatively got started and have more or less kept it going now for more than four years. And since I am confessing, listening to Rona remind me that there is quite a wide gap in our ages, and that if I didn't do a better job of taking care of myself, I would turn her prematurely into a widow, this shocking reminder did wonders in getting me up off my back and onto my back on a Pilates mat, where I do my routine 3 to 4 times a week. Side-by-side with Rona, who has become a version of my trainer.

Yesterday afternoon as I lay on the floor getting ready for Rona to start the music that accompanies our routine (ritualistically, Lhasa Da Sela's The Living Road), Rona, as she routinely does (note how so much of this is about routine), unceremoniously stepped over me as she headed toward her own mat.

Pausing while straddling me, she looked down and said, "Look at those abs."

Puffing myself up, proudly I said, "Just like a six-pack, no?"

"Not exactly," she said.

"What then?" I asked allowing myself to deflate.

"Actually, you're right. Like a six pack. But of toilet paper!" She roared with laughter at her own joke.

Noticing how deflated I in fact looked, she bent down to stroke and kiss me and affectionally said, "You know me," indeed I do I thought, "Sometimes I have a sharp tongue," indeed I know that, "I was just making a little joke. To motivate you." Indeed she did.

Perhaps that supplied some extra motivation because for the first time ever yesterday I managed to do six pull ups, for me the most difficult part of the routine. I had never been able to do more that four.

"You see," Rona said, noticing what I had accomplished. "If I was being mean to you, I would have compared your abs to a six-pack of soft toilet paper. Charmin, or Cottonelle."

"I noticed that," I lied.

And so you see, charley-horsed as I am today, why I can't do any more typing for the day.