Erik Schlimmer tells the story of how he learned to fastpack the Adirondacks, a grueling 110 miles and 19,000 vertical feet of climbing, in five days with only 11 pounds on his back.
When this issue hits the gyms and stores, the story that inspired this column will be old news, but I’m writing about it anyway because I think it raises some really important issues in the active community.
I missed out on gymnastics
as a kid. Well, to be honest I never felt like I missed anything. The sport
never really appealed to me—or so I thought. But when I walked into the giant
gymnastics facility at Chelsea Piers to do the Gymtensity class and saw an
adult gymnastics class in full swing, I may as well have been 10 years old
again.
I was really excited about flipping and swinging and bouncing around on the springy platforms and cushy mats.
My class started out with a jog warm-up around a springy platform (nice on the knees) followed by a pretty intense set of squats and burpees, which helped get the heart going and, so they said, allowed the instructors to get a sense of what each participant’s limits were. We then worked our way through a circuit of exercises that included leg swings on the parallel bars, variants of pull-ups and push-ups using gymnastic equipment, and (my personal favorite) whatever you could manage to do on the pommel horse, which for me meant barely holding my body up, but for others meant side-to-side leg swings on par with what you see in the Olympics. (OK, only the instructors were that good, but some people were pretty close.) We did more leg swings on the rings (see picture above) which was fun, of course, but nothing topped the crawl through the pit. Remember how exhausted you would get after playing in those plastic-ball pits as a kid? Well now imagine giant foam cubes filling the pit and trying to crawl the length of it as fast as you can. It’s hard. Really hard. My arms and my abs hurt so good for a week. Sadly, I was unable to climb the rope at the end of class, but everyone else managed just fine.
Chelsea Piers Gymtensity class is offered
Saturdays, April 26 to June 28 from 6-7 p.m. Saturday Gymtensity is drop-in
like all of CP’s gymnastics classes. A single class is $27 or $190 for a
10-class card. A full schedule of adult gymnastics classes is available online
at www.chelseapiers.com as well as more details about Gymtensity. If you’re
itching to challenge yourself and mix up your cross training this class is
definitely worth a go.
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