Pilates "Scene"

I've fallen in love with Pilates recently. I enjoy it even more than yoga - it's more active, more difficult, and provides more of a challenge. But my last class took that to a new level.

Midway through class, we settled on the floor to do a "side-series" - this is usually a series of leg lifts that leave the class pretty well exhausted. But for this class, the teacher had even more devilish plans.

She announced that we were doing "hundreds" - sets of one hundred small movements. All I could think of was Craig's favored "hundreds scene"...and as we worked through the first series, I knew the experience was going to be similar. When Craig does a hundreds scene, the first hundred is always the most difficult. Because as the pain really builds up in the first spot he's smacking, I know it's going to start again on the other side. Just the same, the first hundred circles with the right leg had me dreading the next hundred circles with the left leg.

When we finally finished the awful "hundreds," the teacher said we were going to do a different sort of leg lift. We laid on our sides with our knees bent. First we did a normal leg lift, with the knee still bent. With the leg in the air, we rotated our leg so the foot was higher than the knee. Maintaining this position, we did another set of leg lifts. There is a muscle down the side of the buttock...oh my goodness. But to make this even better, another girl in my class started smacking her own butt as we did this (if you've ever seen runners smack their legs, I can only imagine she was trying to do something similar). Whatever the reason, though, this girl was giving herself a spanking in my Pilates class.

After stretching that leg (because this was a seriously painful move for everyone in the class), we rolled over to the other side. As the teacher was directing us into position again, a man in my class shouted, "You really are a masochist, aren't you!?!"

Yes, my teacher is a masochist. I think that's why I love her class so much.