Walking begins in seven months! 

Wanting to do this right, I’ve enlisted the help of a personal trainer at Healthworks (my gym in Boston). Tara is brilliant. Painful, but brilliant. 

So far she’s succeeded in two things I never thought possible:

1. Getting me up at 6 am to go to the gym

2. Getting me to do 2 minutes of jumping jacks

This post is all about the jumping jacks.  When I heard 2 minutes, I naively didn’t think twice. Two minutes sounds simple enough.  How cute.

I remember jumping jacks from my days on the black top in school. They were wedged between cherry pickers and shoulder circles in our PE warm-ups. Thinking back now, I vaguely remember counting to 25 or some such (small) number, not 2 minutes!

For better or worse, I didn’t check the clock, so when my trainer Tara announced, “One minute left!” I was amazed. In my enthusiasm, I started a fast little pace, and by then my calves were shrieking out in pain. How could there possibly be a whole minute to go?! More importantly, how could I possibly get through that minute!?! 

I’ll spare you the details of the second minute and me ingloriously hopping up and down like a flailing, sunburned lobster, but I made it! That’s what this walk is all about: pushing oneself to get healthier. It’s not going to be easy (and it may not always be pretty), but in the end, we will be better off than before and hopefully have inspired others in the process.

Goal next week: two and half minutes?