Wrong.

Headwinds can swing my mood in about 5 seconds from, “this is going to be great” to “what in the heck was I thinking.”

I wasn’t about to turn around and get in my car, but I really really wanted to.

I had a mantra in my head:  Push, push, push, push, my legs are burning, push, push, my legs are burning, push…

I look up and see a someone doing wall jumps like box jumps we do at OYM.  The mantra stops for a seconds and I think, “Fist pump to you, my friend.  That is awesome.”

Push, push, legs are burning, push, push…

A couple minutes further down the path and I see a girl doing step-ups into plyo push-ups on the step next to the path.  Fist pump. Fist pump!  You inspire me, badass.

Push, push, legs are burning, stupid headwinds, push, push, push…

I make it. I sit down to take off my roller blades and I give myself a big ol’ fist pump.  That’s right, it is all right to fist pump yourself.

Fist pumps are not reserved for the finish line of an Ironman, a stage win in the Tour de France or when you are out dancing to AC/DC.  They are for everyday accomplishments by everyday people.

When your child is up all night and your babysitter shows up just in enough time for you to get to your class without a wink of sleep.  FIST PUMP!

When you have absolutely no time to get your run in and you still make it happen.  FIST PUMP!

When your legs are burning, the wind is slapping you in the face and you didn’t go home to get your car.  FIST PUMP! FIST PUMP! FIST PUMP!

So fist pump yourself.  Pat yourself on the back and throw in an “I’m awesome” once in a while.

Because you are.

About the blogger:

Annette Fiscelli has spent the last 20 years honing a style of training that focuses on movement patterns and biomechanics. Her love of fitness training borders dangerously on obsession, which is what makes her one of the best trainers out there. It’s not unusual to find instructors from other gyms in her classes, as well as a few professional athletes. What is unusual is finding someone in her class that isn’t sweaty and out of breath.

Not wanting to eavesdrop completely, I hustled through changing from my shoes to my boots, winding my scarf, raking through my bag to find my gloves.

Annette’s client had kept a food diary for three days, something that I’ve never done. The first entry was breakfast: hardboiled eggs and an avocado. I was impressed. I was also hungry. For breakfast I’d had a gummy bear. Literally, that’s what I ate for breakfast. We’d been using gummy bears to potty train our daughter. Well, specifically as a reward for using the potty, and they looked kind of delicious just sitting there, you know?

So. Here is my food journal for that weekend.

Friday:

1 Gummy bear

1 Turkey meatball from Whole Foods

2 Devilled eggs, also from Whole Foods

The rest of a jar of cashews

Another meatball

The tops off of two pieces of pizza during a meeting

Black bean chili with cheese and sour cream

Pinot Noir in an unspecified quantity

Saturday:

2 Devilled eggs

Half a piece of bacon

1 Salad that was mostly bacon bits and ranch dressing

15 tortilla chips

One piece of Vosages chocolate, the kind with sea salt and bacon

1 Turkey meatball

Sushi from Bob San (Hamachi, two hand rolls and an uni shooter)

Unspecified quantity of red wine and champagne at a surprise party

Sunday:

2 Advil

1 Turkey meatball

1 Bloody mary (as of this writing)

Quantity of chips with guacamole

Shrimp wrapped in bacon and dipped in butter from Uncle Julio’s.

I ate that last dish in front of Annette one time. I unwrapped the bacon from the shrimp, and dunked it in the melted butter and shoved the whole thing in my mouth before I gave one thought to who was watching me do that.

“I totally just dipped bacon in butter and ate it,” I said, my mouth full.

“I saw,” she said. “I can’t believe you did that.”

The sad part of this is that this is actually how I eat—just a steady stream of Diet Coke and turkey meatballs. My green vegetables include the slices of green pepper that were on pizza and the seaweed the sushi was wrapped in. I should try to do better in that department.

I do generally avoid carbs—corn, rice, wheat. I can’t remember the last time I had spaghetti or a sandwich. I cheated on that this weekend going into a two-week no-alcohol-no-more-gummy-bears cleanse of sorts. I even avoided the cupcakes at the birthday party I went to on Saturday night, though whatever calories I saved by not eating them, I more than made up for in free champagne.

My point in telling you all this is that it’s hard to be “good” all the time. If it were, a lot of us wouldn’t even know what a TABATA is. Instead, we put “eat right” on the list of things we’ll do one day, like “clean out the junk drawer” and “floss regularly.” It’s not because we’re bad people, but because that’s life. Some days I run around so much that the only thing I can do is pull a piece of bacon out of the refrigerator before I take a kid to the doctor or high tail it to a meeting. Plus, I don’t like kale as much as I like bacon. Maybe if the kale had bacon on it.

I don’t know. Maybe this is the year I clean out my junk drawer.

OYM instructors Brittaney McGary and Sarah Chang are giving a nutrition workshop in March, delivering helpful hints and tasty recipes. I think I’ll go. I hope to see you there.

When: Saturday, March 2 1-2 pm

Where: Nike Training Club 833 W. Armitage, Chicago, IL 60614

Sign up on line here.

About the blogger: Megan Judy is 7 feet tall and has written a novel about low-level corporate espionage. She has 53 cats.

Sometimes, when I meet people and they find out what I do, they mumble guiltily about how they know they should do yoga. Or that they’ve always wanted to try Bikram. Some tell me they do pilates instead. Some people tell me that they flat out hate it, and then think to add “no offense,” though I’m never offended.

When I’m teaching, I know where you struggle. I can see you. I know what your hips will and won’t do. I know when your wrists start to hurt and how flexible your shoulders are and if you’re breathing or not. I know if you can’t just lie still for a few minutes in savasana.

And I know why some people don’t like yoga.

Yoga teachers say crunchy, cringe-inducing things like, “Give the bones of your leg a hug with your muscles.” We make you take your shoes off. And your socks, too. We ask you to move in ways that are uncomfortable, and then tell you to do the impossible: relax and breathe.

To me, yoga is about making space—literal space, creating more room in your body, and figurative space, creating more room between you and the things in life that you struggle with.

Perspective, you might call it.

Do you find perspective on the mat your first day? Maybe, maybe not.

Will your shoulders be sore? Definitely.

I am not a naturally flexible person. I’ve never been able to do the splits, for example. I can’t put my chest on the floor in a wide-leg forward fold, and therefore would never ask you to do that, either.

A lot of people think they can’t do yoga because they’re “not flexible,” but the truth is that the less flexible you are, the more you’ll get out of it. Think about it—if you could just flop into a pose, why even bother? Someone who lacks flexibility in their hips or shoulders, however, is able to push right up against their edge, and, a millimeter at a time, that edge begins to move.

A lot of people think yoga isn’t exercise in the same way that, say, Cycle X is exercise. But the truth is that it takes a lot of strength to do yoga—to support your entire body with your triceps, for example, or to do a handstand, or just to stand and balance on one leg. A fellow OYMer once told me that she wanted my arms. I got them on the yoga mat.

A lot of people feel like they have too much going on inside their heads to concentrate on yoga, and if you’re one of those, you need yoga more than anyone else in the world.

But hey. Don’t take my word for it. Come to class and see for yourself. You don’t have to chant. I won’t burn incense. I don’t say a lot of new-agey things or try to get you to be a vegetarian. I’ll just take you through 45 minutes of sweaty vinyasa and then you’re out the door.

And don’t worry if you hate it at first. The official story is that I hate Cycle, but I’m mad as hell when class is full and I can’t get in. I don’t know when hate turned to love, but that’s some kind of advanced yoga right there, people.

See you in class.

OYMMMM Wednesdays at 10:30 at Bucktown

About the blogger: Megan Judy is a yoga teacher and and OYMer. She’s known Annette and Emily for like a hundred years. Megan exercises because she likes bacon and wine. She hates jumping lunges and being on the waitlist for Cycle X.

My five-year-old son and I lost for sure, even allowing for cheating, including not taking one step back after every toss and using more than one water balloon.

It didn’t matter.

If there was a contest to see who could eat the most cupcakes, we won hands down.

And that was pretty much the point.

The On Your Mark Olympics were held in Skinner Park on Saturday, a showdown between Bucktown and West Loop. Each team was given a t-shirt, either red or yellow, that had been purchased at a thrift store, but was crisp and clean, having been laundered and ironed by a woman who deserves her own medal for ironing t-shirts (!) OMG Mrs. Fiscelli, my husband wishes I was you. Or you were me. Whatever. There’s envy there.

My son representing Bucktown

Cheering for the bat race

I didn’t go to the park with the idea that I would do much competing in the games, but I ended up competing in most of them, the tug-of-war (I’m still shaking), the sack race (my son yelling, “Go, Mommy!” from the sidelines will get me through many a dark parenting hour), and the pickle race.

Interestingly, I was really terrible at the pickle race. In this event, contestants ran to a bucket full of pickle spears and brine. Then, fighting the urge to throw up, they were to pick up a pickle with their twos and hop/walk/waddle back to the starting line.

I would like to submit exhibit A as my reason for my singular inability to pick up a pickle with my feet:

Seriously. How am I going to pick up a pickle with those toes?

After the games were over, I scooped up my children and headed for the nearby playground. My heart was still pounding. The kids had frosting mustaches and I was grinning ear to ear. That was so much fun.

Like old school, being a kid fun.

A lot of us compete—in triathlons and marathons and other various thons.

How often is it fun? Like laugh-out-loud-for-three-hours fun? Cheer-at-the-top-of-your-lungs fun?

Later that night, after the kids had had a bath, my son ran off, dripping and naked. I tossed his pajamas up the stairs to my husband.

“Wow,” my husband called. “Nice throw.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Where’d they land?”

“You should come see,” he said.

And it was indeed an awesome toss, up the stairs at an angle and folded neatly across a kitchen chair.

I had the idea that the upstairs pajama toss would make a nice event at a future OYM Olympics, and couldn’t resist a fist pump and a woo hoo.

My feet smelled like pickles. There wss dirt under my toenails.

I sure as hell don’t feel forty.

I’ve always loved to fight, really. I like to take self-defense classes. For a while I was taking Krav Maga until my husband became concerned that people would think he was responsible for the bruises and I thought it prudent to stop. There’s something about fighting that’s very empowering, although it’s not necessarily the hitting.

What am I saying? It’s totally the hitting.

But it’s also the idea of standing up and fighting and not backing down, something that we, as human beings have to do a thousand times a day.

We resist the urge to say something snarky when someone cuts ahead of us in line. We accept criticism from our bosses or our spouses. We compromise, we navigate, we accommodate, we sigh and put the dishes in the dishwasher even though someone else could have done it rather than just putting them in the sink because the dishwasher is right there. It’s right there.

Jab, cross, smack, thud.

The dishwasher (smack, thud) is right (smack) there (thud).

And when it is over, we take gloves off with shaking arms, and we are damp and pink and sweet as newborn kittens.

With a mean uppercut.

Check out the Cardio Boxing program at On Your Mark

Monday
Bucktown 9:30 with Annette

Wednesdays
West Loop 9:30 with Annette
Bucktown 11:30 with Brittany

Thursdays
West Loop 6:30 with Danielle

Fridays
Bucktown 10:30 with Annette
(Combine with F-Train or Ass & Abs or a real um, ass-kicking)

Saturdays
Bucktown 9:00 with Christina

I hate Cycle, I’m not going to lie to you. It has nothing to do with the instructor or laziness on my part or even chafing ladyparts being uncomfortable on the bike.

It’s the searing pain in my legs, fighting for breath. It’s the idea that it’s my responsibility to chase that feeling. I have to turn the knob, I have to keep my cadence up, even when I don’t want to, even when it’s already so heavy I can’t move, even when every muscle fiber in my body is asking me to stop. I refuse to stop.

And that’s the problem right there.

I just keep going even though it sucks so very, very, very, very much.

Things I Would Rather Do than Cycle:

1.) My taxes

2.) Sleep in a haunted house

3.) Have dinner with Mel Gibson

4.) Have that dream where I want to run really fast but all I can do is crawl

5.) Get a pap smear

Things that I Hate More:

1.) Centipedes

What I Like About Cycle:

1.) Being done

2.) Burning calories

3.) Building muscle

4.) Eating bacon fat popcorn with shaved parmesan cheese and not worrying about it

5.) Winning the battle between the part of me that wants to stop and the part of me that has to keep going

6.) Did I mention the bacon fat popcorn? OMG it was so good! Plus I had crispy, deep-fried sage leaves on top. And big chunks of thick-cut bacon.

And that’s really the heart of making healthy choices, right? Not the bacon, but the battle between what you want to do and what you know you should do. You want to stop, but you keep going. You want the 8s, but you pick up the 12s. You want the pancakes, you get an egg white omelette.

So I go to Cycle. I find that speed, I turn the stupid knob, my thighs burn and my heart pounds and I am gasping for breath.

And my jeans fit.

So I go back.

Can you spot anyone you know? Hope you enjoy it!

This about covers the dozens of White Sox hats and shirts we have! Thanks, and we hope to see you soon.