I did what is affectionately called a “Pink” Firm workout this AM. Pink because the hand weights that came with the deluxe workout package I got from an infomercial, have pink handles. The Firm, for those who don’t know, are a group of lovely southern belles from South Carolina who exhort you to shape and sculpt your muscles using a series of gimmicky props such as the “fanny lifter” and the “sculpting stick”. There still is a workout studio called The Firm in Charleston I think but I don’t think any of the ladies in the videos actually teach there anymore. Sadly, the founder of The Firm, Anna Benson, died a few days ago of stomach cancer.

The workout I chose was the Total Body Time Crunch workout led by Rebekah and joined by fellow Firm master instructors X, Y, Z and Emily. “If you’re new to the Firm, follow Emily…” I know this shit by heart because I’ve been doing Firm workouts in various incarnations for almost ten years now, and I’m not even a die-hard Firmie. For 45 minutes, Rebekah led me through a series of cardio and sculpting routines using the pink weights (that smell kind of funny).

Before I got a nasty cold back in August, I rarely did pink Firms because I thought they were a bit too easy and that I was sandbagging. Since my illness and slow recovery that was further hampered by the distraction called NaNoWriMo, my fitness level has dropped like a stone from the Empire State Building. I hate this because it’s going to take me FOREVER to recover my pre-illness fitness level. You just don’t bounce back from this stuff when you get older as I’ve learned. I about died doing my usual Thanksgiving workout of Cathe Friedrich’s Rhythmic Step. I’ve done this workout every Thanksgiving morning while the turkey cooks for the past five or six years. Talk about needing a nap after the meal. Hoo-boy was I out.

The scariest thing though is wondering, “what if I never get back to where I was?” What if my maximum potential today is less than my achieved potential a few months ago. When will I have to start doing chair-based workouts? shudder How far am I from the day when walking to the mailbox will be my daily workout? When will I have to sell my house because it has too many steps?

I hate these thoughts and I know I need to just slap some sense back into my head. The worse thing I could do would be to give up gaining a foothold on the slippery slope and just glide the rest of the way down and crash to the ground at the bottom. I’m not THAT old after all. I’m still in my forties…for 352 more days.