The Bluestreak odyssey has begun! I went in for my fitness evaluation last night. They put you through a battery of tests to see what your baseline strength, coordination and stamina are. I did stuff there I haven’t done since grade school PE: standing long jump, timed sprints, seeing how high I could jump. I did pretty okay at this. There was one thing though (I don’t know the technical name for this) where you put your feet into a box and then you have to lean forward, without bending your legs, and move this slider that’s on the box. First time I couldn’t even reach the slider; the second time I moved it just a bit. Clearly I have flexibility issues. The Bluestreak folks say I will do better on that by the time this is over.
In addition to that, we did a lot of good warm up exercises just to get stretched… things like like jumping over little hurdles and doing some criss-cross stuff to get the feet moving (I felt sorta uncoordinated with that). We also did some strength stuff, like seeing how much weight our hips could hold and some flies on a chest machine.
The hockey treadmill is awesome once you get used to it. I have a crazy fear of treadmills and falling off/getting hurt on them, so I was pretty tentative my first two goes on this thing. But I was doing okay by the third time and was willing to let go of the bar. I did some skating on an incline as well, only 5%, but that was pretty crazy having never skated uphill before.
I’m a little sore this morning after that 2 hours, but its a good sore. I look forward to the hard core program starting on Monday.
On the back of the t-shirt I got last night, it says this: “Challenges Cause Some to Break and Others to Break Records.” I’m hoping to be in the later group by the time this six weeks is done.