Laura D Durham

Well, not really. But MAYBE!

For the past couple of weeks Ive been trying to work out regularly. My style of choice right now is Zumba. I have a YouTube playlist filled with Zumba trainers who have wonderfully recorded their classes. I have about an hour-long playlist, but I’m lucky if I get to the 25 minute mark. I would just hit a wall and couldn’t go on. Head pounding, muscles barely responding, I’d drop out and be frustrated that I was so out of shape.

I bought a used heart rate monitor gadget, tried it out today, and it just kept beeping at me. I read the manual, but it wasn’t very forthcoming on what the “training sounds” meant. So I just assumed it meant I was “in the zone” and worked my ass off. In between two songs, as I was contemplating quitting at about 13 minutes in, I fiddled with the monitor and it was quite insistent that I was way past the zone. The little thing had been trilling at me to slow down! Feeling weird, I did slow down and I was able to complete 46 whole minutes of Zumba!

Turns out that it wasn’t that I was doing too little, but I was working too hard and burning myself out. (I do so love to rock the beat.) So, yeah, that little eBay extravagance was totally worth it. Makes me wonder how often that happens to people trying to start exercising and causes them to give up, thinking they are not able to workout “right.”