This surprising fact from the same folks who discovered that college students without Friday classes are more likely to get blotto on Thursday night than those who have to get up the next morning.
Ingenious.
Still, standing would be one way to jumpstart a fitness regimen for many in a nation where triple X was once primarily a movie rating and now is fast becoming a common shirt size.
Another approach might be to get up at dawn just so a tiny woman in combat boots can scream at you while you sweat buckets.
So happens, this occurs three days a week in otherwise tranquil Loose Park. The woman wearing those boots is Donna Bachler of Lansing. She claims it’s an honor to get up early each Monday, Wednesday and Friday and drive 45 minutes in the dark so she can make other women beg for mercy.
“They have heart,” Bachler said. “They are the Rocky Balboas of their time.”
Or they just might be crazy.
But there they were Friday around 6:30, a dozen of them lying on their backs in the wet grass, crunching forward until their bellies ached.
Sprinting from the back of the pack to the front as the others in line jogged around the courtyard, over and over and over.
Jumping their jacks.
“Come on,” Bachler hollered. “Keep pushing, keep pushing.”
They pushed. They lunged, stretched and squatted until their heinies touched their ankles. All the while, they heard barks of encouragement from a 27-year-old woman in long camo pants wearing an Army T-shirt and an Operation Iraqi Freedom cap that she earned from going over there while on active duty. She’s now in the Reserves and working on a nursing degree.
“If you want to go to touchy-feely boot camp,” she bellowed, “it meets over there at 6:45 and you can join them.”
The “touchy-feely” class she referred to was 50 yards away, under a tree, and was considerably more laid back. Plus, I gathered, no one there was ever at risk of being called “maggot.”
Actually, Bachler’s drill instructor routine (she was a DI for a time) isn’t that abusive. She smiles. She offers encouragement.
But it’s no Easter parade. Her women’s boot camp would kick my ample behind and, probably, yours.
Even those of us who do work out are apt to carry around some flab. And fitness boot camp?
“It’s intense,” said Amy Logan, 37, of Roeland Park, who was finishing up her sixth week on Friday. “I didn’t run before this.”
For 45 minutes, she and the others went flat out, running and working through a series of calisthenics that brought aches to every one of my muscle groups, and I sat through the whole thing taking notes.
“If we don’t count real loud … ,” Bachler shouted as her squad did its 14th ski jumper and breathlessly shouted back the digits one and four.
“Then I can’t tell when you’re tired.”
One-five.
“If I can’t hear you …
One-six.
“Then I’ll just have to assume you’re not tired.”
One-seven.
“Now, relax,” she said, and in unison they said, “Never!” just as they responded, “Too easy, drill instructor, too easy,” whenever she suggested that a routine could have been more demanding.
This is the only boot-camp fitness class I’ve ever been to, so I couldn’t tell you how Bachler’s differs from the rest.
But for a woman named Ann (no last name because doesn’t want her ex stalking her), it’s the best thing that’s happened to her in a long time, and not just because she’s getting fitter.
“We are a team,” she volunteered in an e-mail. “We encourage each other. … Many of my friends don’t understand why I do this boot camp. I tell them about doing flutter kicks in the mud after a rainy night, and they think I am crazy.”
Not crazy. Crazy is ordering the large fries and double cheeseburger from the seat of your car in the drive-up lane.
Or as the women at boot camp like to say, “Hooah!”
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