Apparently I can only take pictures with my thumbs up.

Today's workout:

Power Training (read: Body Pump on crack)

a lot of calories/a very painful hour

I woke up this morning with the intention of going to the rec center with my mom to take a class called Body Fit, which was described as follows on the website: "Define tone and strengthen your muscles with various resistance movements and low impact aerobics, all fitness levels welcome."  Since my problem with my current schedule is lack of strength training (sorry, Chalene, but Sculpt 30 and Tone 30 aren't cutting it for a strength junkie), I thought this would be a great class to check out.  So we went.  And as we waited outside the door of the room, other people started showing up... most in their 60s and 70s.  Suddenly, it looked like "all fitness levels welcome" meant "Jessica will cry as she uses 2 pound weights for squats."  Luckily, my mom is incredibly understanding, and suggested that I try another class that was going on at the same time.  I thought the class was Muscle Plus, which is described as such: " A pound of muscle can burn 30 - 50 extra calories a day, so build up your fat burner! Some light aerobics, but mostly we’ll be stoking your furnace and sleeking up your muscles!"  I like sleeking muscles.  This sounded good to me.

But I was wrong.  I instead walked into Power Training.  " This high intensity, weight lifting based class will help sculpt your entire body.  Adjustable bar bell sets, hand weights, balls, gliders and resistance bands will be used.  Increase balance, core and muscle strength/endurance.  This is not your ordinary class."  I'm not kidding - Body Pump on crack.  It was all of the difficult aspects of Body Pump (high repetitions, 3-5 minutes spent on a single muscle group, 8000 squats) plus other scary things.  Like holding a small squishy ball between your thighs while you do those 8000 squats.  And lunges on slippery discs that some fool called "gliders" to make them sound nicer.

You know what are evil?  Gliders.  Seriously, these things are Satanic.  There I am, in the middle of what I think will be a traditional strength training workout, lying on the floor on my stomach and doing the breaststroke on the floor with my hands on these little purple discs, pretending that I'm Michael Phelps.  Or was I lying on the floor on my stomach imaging Michael Phelps stroking me?  Either way, it hurt.

There... that hurts less.

Shockingly, I skipped my Turbo Fire workout for the day.  Which is a little sad because it was my favorite workout today (Fire 45 EZ).  But I'm starting to worry a little bit about doing intense cardio exercise all the time... so I took a breather.  Hopefully that means I can get a great run in tomorrow morning and do another HIIT workout afterwards.  Good old HIIT.  I hope they're not lying to me, and that HIIT really does torch calories.  Because I'm not a huge fan.

You know what I am a huge fan of though?  Having my thumbs up in pictures and making ridiculous faces.  I know I do it a lot on pictures for this blog, but I didn't quite realize that it's the only thing I actually do in pictures until the photos from the Liberty Run came in...

Jessica at the start of the race.

Jessica at the end of the race.  Notice any similarities?  Maybe for my next race I'll try just smiling like a normal person.  Maybe.