Free Fitness Week: 'Wake Up!'

Tobe awake and functional,7:30 a.m.is an impossibly early time. Fortunately for me, though, living right next to a dining hall means that every morning at6:37, delivery trucks jolt me into consciousness, leaving no choice in the matter.This Tuesday, it also happened to be raining, and I had left the windows open, so nature seemed really resistant to the idea of my sleeping in. Thankfully, it’s Campus Rec’s free fitness week at Dillon Gymnasium, and they had the perfect class for me — Wake Up! everyTuesdayand Thursday at 7:30 a.m. with Coe.

Given the time, the class wasn’t exactly crowded. About 15 people eventually shuffled in, most arriving a few minutes late — three extremely buff middle-aged women, a few older female townies, a couple of other students and exactly one dude.

We started off the class without weights, reaching for the ceiling as ‘90s rap blasted in the background. This dancing went on for a while, which felt, quite honestly, a bit ridiculous, but I suppose the moves got our heart rate up or something. Nothing quite like the Black Eyed Peas’ greatest hits at7:45 a.m.to wake you up.

Eventually we incorporated weights into our routine. “Cardio, resistance, cardio, resistance,” Coe explained of her fitness mentality. We started off small, just lifting them in various directions to work out different parts of our arms. We alternated between our pseudo line dancing and moving around with weights, occasionally throwing in some lunges and squats to mix it up. I suppose staying moving helped wake us up, though that may have had more to do with the fluorescent lights in the Group Fitness Room.

Halfway through, we were all slightly out of breath, but not debilitatingly so, which is to say those who hadn’t brought water bottles didn’t rush to the water fountain. We continued the same cardio-resistance pattern for 35 of the total 50 minutes of the class.

We then attempted some core workouts involving various complicated variations on a crunch, but I spent so much energy trying to understand where my legs and arms and elbows were supposed to go that I don’t think I exercised any part of my body other than my neck, craning to see how Coe had positioned her body. As is expected of fitness classes, we stretched for so long — ten minutes past the end of class — that we basically started our own rubber band factory.?