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The Work Out

This year, for my birthday, the Mild Fiancée got me an honest-to-God CrossFit class at a local gym. For all that I've done CrossFit-like work outs all these years, I've never actually made it out to one of the local boxes. And since the Mild Fiancée knows that I enjoy this activity, she worked it out so that I could give it a shot. That's when the fun began.

First of all, it was supposed to be a surprise. Remember, I have friends who own a CrossFit gym, so this seemed like a pretty good way to make this happen. She emailed back and forth with them secretly, so as to surprise me. However, an unrelated scheduling quirk inadvertently tipped me off. We needed to reschedule a dance class, and the lady offered up a Saturday morning. I checked our calendar and noted that we didn't have anything planned at that time, but the Mild Fiancée immediately replied that we couldn't make that morning. Apparently she noticed the actual arching of my eye brows at that point. When we had to rework our schedule a second time, she fessed up. At that point, it was too hard to keep the secret without confusing the heck out of me.

With the cat out of the bag, I was excited about this work out. Like I said, I'd never been there before, and I wanted to give it a shot. However, it was not to be. The night before I was supposed to go to the gym, I started feeling not-good. It was just one of those general feelings of malaise, and I needed the extra rest. It just wasn't going to work very well. So, I canceled with the intent to reschedule for a following Saturday.

That's when life conspired to get in the way. The Mild Fiancée and I somehow ended up with something to do pretty much every weekend after that for roughly 6 weeks. It's not even like we were trying to go out to live it up, we just had plans and appointments that we needed to handle. So, the work out kept getting postponed.

Eventually, though, over a month after my birthday, I managed to get myself to the gym. And it sucked. I saw what the difference was between the normal exercise I do and the gym version of it, and I quickly realized where I had weaknesses. The really awesome thing, though, was that people made a point of helping me out. One guy coached me through the last few rounds, and everyone was friendly. For all that the exercise itself was no fun, the experience was great.

Of course, now that means that I'm going to try to do this more regularly. All in all, it was one heck of a birthday present.

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