I got a free passport, and I can’t remember how. It seems like a strange thing to forget, but
to be honest I have over 15,000 unread emails in my inbox, and it isn’t
because I’m popular. I click the
“subscribe” button on every website, and I’m hooked up with daily content from
everywhere. I get breaking news, job
postings, shoe sales, vodka launches. I
forget what I’ve signed up for and who’s sold my address, so I don’t know how I
got a Classtivity passport.
This is Classtivity, as I understand it: you pay $49 and you
get to take ten different fitness classes at various locations. SICK DEAL.
This is Classtivity, as I lived it: I paid nothing and got to take one
class, for no reason. EVEN SICKER. (Also I was supposed to get a free T-shirt that
never materialized, but I can only take so much umbrage at the lack of free
T-shirts in my life, seriously. I’m
going to go ahead and come down on the side of Classtivity, T-shirt or no.)
So I signed up for an Advanced Bodyweight Workout class with
Melissa Paris Fitness. I’ll be honest; this choice had much more to
do with my schedule and the proximity to my office than my personal fitness
goals. While “advanced” bodyweight
seemed like perhaps a bit of a stretch for me (my body weight is more like “a
little too moderate”) I liked the idea of trying something new. So I booked it and I stamped my passport
(virtually) and I didn’t get a T-shirt, which I am totally cool with, and then
I headed off to class.
I entered the class with one major misconception: I believed
that I was in decent shape. This notion
was challenged immediately upon meeting Melissa Paris herself,
a diminutive blonde with a rock-solid physique, wide-eyed and earnestly
friendly but so fit that she was actually intimidating. Melissa was clearly in charge. Of the class, of the room, of the world. I understood right away that I would do
whatever she told me to do, be it squats or lunges or leaping from the
sixteenth-story window. Even smiling, she
had that kind of command.
From her Facebook. Admit it. She's the boss of you.
She turned on the music, a cacophonic mix of pop and hip hop
tracks that overlapped each other like waves at high tide. The resulting sound was chaotic and frenetic,
with energy levels so high that they banged on the ceiling. After some perfunctory warm-up exercises,
Melissa sent us off in a circle of intense repetitions, cycling through leg
lifts and pushups and jumping jacks.
We’d burn through sixty seconds of one movement before rotating to the
next, and it was during this rotation that my overestimation of my own fitness
level was made clear. I’ve taken boot
camp classes before, at times in my life when my own gym attendance was
significantly lower than it is today.
Always these classes have been a challenge, and always I’ve been joined
in my struggle by other attendees, who’ve groaned and grunted alongside me in a
kind of twisted camaraderie.
Not so with Advanced Bodyweight. There were only about eight of us, and two
were rather chiseled men. The other
women were thin and strong and swanlike, gorgeous and poised as they rotated
through the series. I felt like a
blobfish in a sea of starfish, watching my reflection in the mirrored wall as I
bumbled through each new trick. I leapt and lunged and squatted, looking for
all the world like Hannah Horvath trying to convince her boyfriend she’s immune
to endorphins.
Me doing lunges.
You never want to be Hannah Horvath in an exercise
class. The person you want to be is
Melissa Paris, whose eye makeup doesn’t run and whose sneakers don’t scuff, who
remembers your name as she hands you a jump rope and does not mock you when she
sees you try, and fail, to use it. I
struggled through each cycle, sweating fervently in my place in
the rotation between two beautiful girls.
The class was an hour long, and at the 54:59 mark Melissa brought us in
and led us through our cool down, spreading our towels out across our backs one
by one, pressing our muscles to deepen each person’s stretch. Just to solidify my position as the class
dingus, I had taken the instruction to “bring a towel” extremely
literally—instead of carrying with me a small white exercise towel, like the
rest of the class/universe, I’d hauled in a giant purple bath towel. Melissa was cool about this and did not point
and laugh at me at all. And just to
clear up any sort of confusion about this, she had absolutely nothing to do
with the presence or absence of free T-shirts.
My intention, after class, was to go home and write about
the experience while it was still fresh in my mind. But this plan was thwarted by the sense of
flat-out exhaustion that hung across my shoulders and weighted my every
move. I went to bed early and slept the
sleep of the dead, and in the morning when I woke I had a personal email from
Melissa Paris, asking me how I liked the class and encouraging me to give her
feedback. It was like getting a text
from Madonna asking if I had enjoyed the show.
The show was a banger, the workout was a killer, and the
blobfish, though sore, rolled through an unexpectedly stressful workday with a
clear head and quite a bit of energy. My
muscles eased back into place over the course of the day, so what had begun as
a limp evolved into an outright hobble as they tightened and ached. It felt fantastic, and ultimately, when I got
home and collapsed onto my sofa, it was with a giant grin and a sense of
satisfaction. My halflistic journey had
kicked off.
Important Edit 11/29/13:
Friends, I’ve been remiss in not reporting about a wild, left-field plot twist that dropped into my mailbox over a week ago. I received a package at work, and I was delighted to open it and find that at long last, my free T-shirt had finally arrived in the mail! Electric blue and artfully branded, this T-shirt simply screamed success. I knew immediately that going forward, I would wear it every single day.
Important Edit 11/29/13:
Friends, I’ve been remiss in not reporting about a wild, left-field plot twist that dropped into my mailbox over a week ago. I received a package at work, and I was delighted to open it and find that at long last, my free T-shirt had finally arrived in the mail! Electric blue and artfully branded, this T-shirt simply screamed success. I knew immediately that going forward, I would wear it every single day.
In this picture I am naked from the waist up.
So there it is, my contract with Classtivity completed by all parties (though may I remind everyone that I did literally nothing to earn any of this), the muscles firmed, the T-shirt received, the universe in balance once again. This blogging stuff is some kinda gig.
