The ADAPT main training area. You can see the main floor to the left, the two sets of stairs, and some of the bars, platforms, and equipment in the foreground and in front of the stairs. From the ADAPT Training facebook page.
My daughter will be two in April, and I am still 20 pounds over what I weighed at my first doctor’s appointment. Time to quit making excuses and get back to my fighting weight!
So, I jumped right into the deep end and signed up for a four-days-a-week, four-week-long camp at ADAPT Training in Beaverton. I picked them for the following reasons:
- They got their start by offering fitness and strength training to spinal-cord injured athletes, and that attitude that “Anyone can” is extremely supportive to me
- There are only two mirrors in the entire gym because it’s not about how you look, it’s how you feel
- The few times I’ve been there before, the classes are full of “normal” people and the trainers are also “normal” … extremely fit, but still just really nice people
- It’s the start/finish location for the Joe Dudman 5.0k Birthday Run on June 21
- It’s close to my house, which is great because I make it home in time to give my little one a good night kiss
I signed up for the class online – I needed a class that was in the evening, after my husband would be home from work; mornings were out of the question due to his marathon training. Within a few hours of signing up, I got an email inviting me to come in for a pre-class consultation since I was new to the gym. Setting it up was easy – they are there late and very flexible.
A few days later, I went to met Kam, our trainer for the class. He’s exactly what you expect in a good personal trainer/coach: he asked questions about my current training and my goals, listened, and encouraged me that I’d be able to get through the class. My main complaint was tightness in my right hip; my goals were to lose 5 pounds (over four weeks) and to cut back on empty calories, mainly from beverages. You know, the delicious kind you can have when the kids go to bed. Kam, an ADAPT Certified Trainer, had me do a few exercises, testing my strength and flexibility, and walked me through some of the equipment they have. That was the whole consultation, and I left, excited and a little nervous about the following Monday.
Monday, February 10, was the first class. There were nine people in the class. I was not the oldest or the youngest; the group was made up of four men and five women. The first night, I learned people’s names but it was still that “new kid” feeling, especially since a few people in the class already knew each other.
At the very beginning of the class, Kam handed out a packet to each athlete. It included notes on nutrition, hydration, and about 12 pages of exercises, broken out into groups of 8-12 exercises each. He explained that each day, we’d have “homework” – a set of movements to do outside of class designed to help our bodies recover and rebuild properly.
After our warm-up, Kam announced we were going to do a test. I immediately got nervous and started questioning what I was doing there; after which I scolded myself for being a baby. The test was this: Five burpees, up and down both sets of two-story steps (which are not normal height steps, I can promise you), lateral shuffle down and back the length of the gym, and then a sprint down the floor, crawling under a weight bench on the way. While holding a medicine ball.
I opted to go 2nd and get it out of the way. My time was 1:36:09, and it was hard. Nothing I couldn’t do … what made it hard was trying to do it fast. And it’s possible that I was a little scared of going down those steps. Maybe.
But once I was done, I joined in with the rest of the athletes and cheered on whomever was running their test. One by one we finished up, did a cool down, and were reminded of our “homework,” with a promise that the following night would be tougher.
Find out more about how it went in Part Two, coming soon!
