My Birthday: Marking the Beginning of the Holiday Season Since 1982

My birthday was a quiet but lovely Tuesday, capped off with sushi (and cake!) for dinner and a Vemma meeting.

We debated for a long while about how to do Thanksgiving: invite people and cook, go have turkey dinner at one of any number of bars that were offering it, or what. We finally decided on the bar meal, which was surprisingly not too bad. Our friends from upstairs joined us, and it was a really great time -- just ended too soon since Melanie had to get to an appointment.

Birthday trip!

On Friday, I kept threatening to go to the grocery store and couldn't understand why Brent didn't want me to. He eventually spilled that it was because we were going out of town the next day -- my surprise birthday trip!

We've taken a little trip every year for my birthday, though I truly wasn't expecting it this year because we've been so busy getting settled here. But, on Saturday, off we went to nearby Guatapé, a town we had both been hearing a lot about.

It was a gorgeous two-hour bus ride up, up, up the mountains. We arrived and were delighted by a quaint little town on the lake.

We were hungry, so we dropped in to the first hostel we saw. They had a room -- a painfully small room, but hey, we just needed a place to sleep that night and store our stuff. And it was ridiculously inexpensive. We didn't realize it was on top of a discoteca the jammed until about 1:30 the next morning, nor that it was half a block from the church, whose bells pealed around 7;00. Over and over.

Anyway, we had a nice lunch, walked around town, and took a short tuk-tuk ride up to La Piedra, a huge rock that overlooks the lake.  The views from up there were absolutely incredible.

We walked back in to Guatapé, cruised around the market a little more, and stopped for dinner at a restaurant that served Indian, Italian, Colombian, and Mexican cuisine. We were concerned that a restaurant that does everything couldn't possibly do any of it right, but we were wrong -- I had an excellent veggie quesadilla and Brent had some awesome red curry.

We got up the next day (after that rough sleep), strolled around once more, and headed back to Medellín.

This is a must-see kind of place, and we look forward to going back there -- especially with some of you people who might come to visit. We'll pick a different hotel next time.

Home sweet gym.

The salsa class a couple of weeks ago was fantastic, and I was definitely interested in returning for more and more. But, they are private classes, and the price adds up, so I decided to keep exploring my options before committing.

We stopped by the gorgeous gym next door, where it took the saleswoman 30 minutes to explain the many enrollment options and the many, many benefits of being a member. It was an awesome place, but the only way to get it under $100 per month was to pay the whole year up front. Since we'll be moving in another month or two and we don't yet know where to, I didn't want to do that.

Up the hill there's a kid's dance studio which, to my great sadness, does not offer adult ballet classes. They do, however, have an adult rumba class every morning. First one's free, so I dropped by last week. It's a sort of mix of steps from a variety of dance styles, and as we got started I wondered if it was going to manage to be a big enough cardio challenge for me.

Uh, yes.

There were only two times when the steps tripped me up, and the instructor was quick to give me a little one-on-one attention until I was up to speed. Aside from that, they were big, fast movements that wore me out.

It was awesome. So I told the teacher I'd be back on a Tues/Thurs schedule.

Also last week, we met a guy in our building (from Colorado!) who does Crossfit. I've been wanting to try this for ages, and he said I should come along sometime. First class is, after all, free. So I did that today.

I had no illusions that this would be too easy. In fact, I was almost scared. I've been keeping in shape with yoga, pilates, running, and some cardio kickboxing, but I haven't done a workout with weights in over a year, let alone one as challenging as I've always heard Crossfit to be.

If you're not familiar, Crossfit workouts vary but they're always intense. Today's warmup was some walking lunges and wall sits while holding a 10-pound medicine ball at shoulder level. This was followed by a 12-minute segment. To start, we had one minute to do 12 squats (with weight). If you finish early, which you do, you rest until the second minute starts, at which time we did an overhead press with dumbbells. The third minute was 15 dynamic planks (hands to elbows and back). We repeated those three exercises four times.

Then came the WOD, or Workout of the Day: 300 jump ropes, 45 PULL-UPS (deargoddeargoddeargod), 45 thrusters (a squat into an overhead press with the bar), and another 300 jumping jacks. As fast as you can, with a limit of 15 minutes.

The pull-ups were every bit as difficult as I expected, if not moreso. I can do pull-ups, but I've never made them a part of my workout aside from proving to myself that I'm capable of them, so I've only ever done a couple at a time. Never 45. I did get to use an elastic band that helped a little bit, but not enough to enable me to go to sleep tonight believing I'll be able to move my arms tomorrow.

After that, the thrusters were tough, but I broke them into sets of 15, 15, 10, and 5. I finished the whole workout with about 30 seconds to spare, which was pretty much on par with the rest of the class.

Tired, but successful. And I really liked it. That free class. Always gets you.

The best part for my ego was, as I was thanking the instructor, I learned that he hadn't realized that was my first time in class. WIN.

Not such a win: tomorrow I'm going back to rumba, and I'm going to feeeeeeeeeeeeeeel it.