McMuscles and the Groupies

(Today is a long post. But it's worth it, I promise.)

Thursday was a rare day. A holiday fell in the middle of the week, and that meant Tricky Nikki could join me and my insane daily workout routines at the YMCA.

BOTH OF ‘EM.

We started the morning by going to water aerobics. Aqua Jillian was so excited I brought a friend- I felt like I was back in vacation Bible school! It was nice to have somebody to talk too while working out in the water, especially Nikki. We make everything fun. Even exercise. Although water aerobics are pretty deceiving, because you are having so much fun, it doesn’t feel like a work out. It feels like you are a kid in a pool having fun.

Except you are surrounded by Blue Hairs that don’t want to get their hair wet. Which keeps your little kid splash instinct to a minimum.

And of course, I was having I day and a half. Everything that could go wrong was. I didn’t sleep well, I was UBER CRABBY, and then we add the usual “Charlie Fiascos” that seem to happen:

Couldn’t find my swimsuit

Dropped my toothbrush on the floor and it landed on a kid’s pair of dirty underwear

Running late

But I made it regardless of outward circumstances, and there we were, solving the world’s problems and burning calories. We got to the part where we use the aqua dumbbells…

(They feel like nothin’, until you get them under the water, when they become very difficult to work with) and I am all gung ho. Cause my friend is there. I kinda show off a little. And Aqua Jillian keeps a pretty close eye on me. (Can’t say as I blame her…)

So we are working the dumbbells, and low and behold, I got the one dumbbell that is missing an end piece that holds the dumb thing together, and one of the foam circles pops off. Which of course only happens when I am trying to show off how hard I am working. And there it is, floating before me when I’m supposed to be doing bicep curls. Well, Tricky Nikki and I have no choice but to get a severe case of the giggles.

Meanwhile, I keep wrestling my impaired dumbbell up and down. And then the second foam circle pops off. Which does NOTHING to help with the giggles.

Aqua Jillian (her real name is Lorri, but it’s more fun to call her Aqua Jillian) (I like nicknames if you haven’t noticed) AJ is watching all of this going on and hearing the commotion I’m sure we are causing. She keeps plowing through the exercises, while going over to the tub of dumbbells and grabbing another. Which was for me. I’m not ever going to get off easy in her class.

She tosses it to me, and I let the broken one float away.

We resume the workout, and get to underwater chest presses, pushing our pretend weights down into the water. Again, it’s one of those things that sounds easy till you try it. By then, Nik and I have gotten our giggles back under control, and we are working it. It goes back to being all business.

Until the dumbbell AJ gave me pops a foam part, just like the first one. Some days, I think I should take the hint and just go back to bed.

The class ends, we go back to our homes and continue on with our day.

 I am a big believer in sweat pants, but the stupid things never have pockets. And I was sorting my mountain of laundry on the dining room floor, so the pedometer I usually keep on my waistband kept falling off, as I was reaching, bending at the waist, and squatting a lot. It’s a pretty expensive piece of gadgetry, so I try to take good care of it. I decided the best place for it was on my waist band right above my buttcrack. Back where I wouldn’t keep knocking it off.

Which was a great idea.

UNTIL…

(please, you knew there was going to be an unti)

Until I totally forgot it was there while racing into the bathroom to poo. I whipped my pants down, pooed (I’m a power pooper. I wait till the second I think I’ll explode, cause I don’t have time to spend 30 minutes easing into the process), wiped, then whipped the sweat pants back up.

I never realized I begin this pants process before fully standing up.

I DISCOVERED I pull my pants up before fully standing when the outside lip of my toilet seat happened to catch the edge of my pedometer, yanking it from my waistband, and flipped it backwards.

Right back into the toilet I had yet to flush.

The next 20 minutes can best be described with 6 words.

Q-tips. Bleach. Hair dryer. Shoot me.

(Readers cry “What about McMuscles? He’s the star of the title, you know…” OK, moving on!)

So that was the first half of my day. Most girls would tuck it in after a day like that (especially after doing uncountable loads of laundry) but me?

OH HECK NO. I was just getting warmed up.

Thursdays are a standing work out night with McMuscles. The kids have Tae-Kwon-Do at the YMCA, our oldest- Amy- now works on the evil-eptical and little weight machines, so I am free to let McMuscles torture train me. The changes I have seen in my body after just a month have been astounding (I’ll do pics later. Maybe a video if you ask nicely!) so I really enjoy lifting weights with him. And tonight his usual workout partner was down (get better soon Greg!) so it was just he and I.

He taught me a new exercise tonight to workout my back, which is already pretty strong from counterbalancing my front half. I was getting impressive numbers and feeling like a total rock star.

Then Tricky Nikki joined us.

And that’s when things got ugly…

I have mentioned before (both in this post and in others) that I tend to work harder when Nik is there. We never are mean about it, but we love pushing the other person just a tad closer to the edge than we would go if working out alone. We’ve been doing it since we were 19. Heck, we even got accidentally pregnant at the same time! (MINE is older. By 9 days…grin…)

Poor McMuscles was now surrounded by Team Pink. And we don’t screw around when it comes to working out. Sure, we always have fun, but we are both serious about getting our bodies into pre-baby conditions. (For me, though, it’s “never seen before” conditions- Nik has always had a banging body. I’d hate her guts if we weren’t besties.) And the whole mess starts with such an innocent comment.

“How many reps did SHE just do?” I’m not going to say who said it first, because that part doesn’t matter. It was going to be said by one of us eventually!

And McMuscles realized he had a polite “weight-lifting duking match” on his hands. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.

So she and I are determined to out rep the other. Doesn’t really matter what weight it was, just the number of reps. However, we also know that both of us are so A.D.D. and/or sleep deprived that if we start talking while the other person is counting, we can throw them off track.

“How many reps was that?”

“I don’t know! You were breaking my concentration. But probably 8000 or so…”

Yeah, that’s how WE roll.

And there is McMuscles in the middle of it, trying to get his workout in too, and dealing with the cutest cat fight he’s ever seen in his life.

But it’s not so bad for him.

People are starting to know that he is THE McMuscles of Big Butt Bloggy fame. That’s kinda fun. Plus, all the guys that work at the Y are now reading my blog to see what they can read about their buddy McMuscles.

He’s getting to be a kind of a big deal.

Nik and I were attacking those dumbbells like they were the last cashmere sweater at Macys on December 24^th, and even though we were both DYING from achiness, we kept curling those girlie dumbbells like there was no tomorrow. Almost to the point of sheer stupidity. Nik started giggling and said “These remind me of you this morning. You going to pop the end of this one too?”

Oh well, we work our abs when we laugh, so it's all in the name of exercise.

Finally we admitted defeat (or perhaps it was world dumbbell domination?)  and went for a drink. My niece Gabbi was working out with my Amy, and they were talking and yacking like their mamas do. And as we walked by them while going to the water fountain, Gabbi said she had enough room in her shorts waistband to tuck her water bottle in there.

As Nik and I were waiting for our turn at the water fountain (some guy was getting a drink) I said “I’d love to have enough room in my shorts to keep a water bottle.”

Nik goes “Is that a water bottle in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”

And that was pretty much the beginning of the end of us. Mostly because we could hear the guy getting a drink start choking on his water and laughing. And then going back into the workout room, a college age guy had on a shirt that said “I swear it’s THIS big.” And we threw all sense of propriety RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW.

From that point on, it was one comment after the other, with McMuscles’ girls barely giving him a chance to jump in. (Although he DID make a comment to me about “I don’t know if you can lift that, but Nikki sure did.” GAME ON, BUDDY.)

Pretty soon I asked him “I don’t know, are you SURE you can handle BOTH of us at the same time?” In hindsight, that’s a pretty awkward question to ask a guy. I meant it completely innocently, but it just sounds wrong.

His reply?

“I want to answer that, but I’m pretty sure whatever I say will end up on your blog.”

I guess he has a point there.

Today, I can’t move. At all. I haven’t checked in with Tricky Nikki yet, but I bet she’s gonna be sore too. The GOOD NEWS is that she wants to get in on the weight lifting now.

So McMuscles- it’s official.

You now have GROUPIES.

Congrats man. You’ve come a long way!