Fitness

It is springtime, which means that it is finally time to get outside, get some exercise, and work off all of those wonderful winter fondues. The last couple of weeks have been beautiful here (high 50s!), so it has not been hard to motivate myself to get outside and go running. Further, I am motivated by the fact that on the 24th of April, I will again be competing in the 20km de Lausanne. Now, given that I would like to do much better this year than last year, I have come up with a two-part strategy for success.

1. Crosstrain!
2. Do not have fondue (and wine) with Serge in Geneva the night before the race.

With this plan, I cannot go wrong. Undoubtedly, some of you out there are asking, how do you intend to crosstrain? The answer is, of course, step aerobics.

A few weeks ago, Jens, my officemate, and I went down to the Centre Sportif to sign up for gym passes for the semester. Now, the EPFL/UNIL gym is not particularly impressive -- even though there are ten times as many students, it's not much bigger than the Harvey Mudd gym -- but I figured that if I signed up for a pass, maybe I would find the time to drag myself down to play some pickup basketball. Unfortunately, there really is no translation in French for "pickup basketball" and when I tried to ask about it, I was not able to get any real solid information. Sure, there are times where the gym is reserved for basketball, but these are for basketball classes which have organized games. If I wanted to play in those, I would have to sign up for a course and attend every week. As far as I could tell, after asking a few people who worked at the gym, there were no unorganized hours for basketball so my dream of whooping some Swiss butt at pickup ball was not to be. So, what could I do with my gym membership? I was on the point of despair when I saw this schedule up on the wall:

Fig. 1: Aerobics at EPFL. Sorry about the quality of the pic (I took it with my cellphone), but unfortunately this schedule is not available anywhere online. Seriously, it's like 1995 here sometimes. Coming soon to the Swiss Internet: Hamster Dance!

Pictured above is the Discofit schedule for the spring semester. If you are like me, your attention was immediately drawn to the two little step icons on Mardi (Tuesday) and Jeudi (Thursday) at 12:15. As anyone who is anyone knows, Step aerobics is where it's at.

I should take a moment to explain here. I started doing Step aerobics back at Stanford and since I've been in Switzerland I have been looking high and low for classes so that I could keep up the habit. I started taking classes at Stanford sort of on a dare and when I realized how much fun and how good exercise they were, I was hooked. In fact, for those of you lucky enough to be at Stanford, you should immediately go to the Stanford Aerobics and Yoga webpage and get your butt to the next possible class. Especially if it is taught by Bridgette, you will not be disappointed.

Now that I have been to three classes, I think I can make some general statements about differences between American and Swiss Step aerobics. First, French is not an ideal language for aerobics. As the instructor must be almost continuously calling out the next moves to be done, it helps if the names and words are short. French, never a language for brevity, does not do well in this regard. For example, the verb to kick in French is donner un coup de pied. As you can imagine, this multi-syllabic monstrosity is generally avoided in Step aerobics, and the instructor just says kick instead. So, the commands tend to have an awful lot of English mixed in, which on the one hand makes things easier, but can occasionally be quite confusing. The simplest action that one can take in Step is called a basic step. For a while, I was confused because I kept thinking that the instructor was saying vas-y -- which means "go!" -- for a basic step, but actually she was just saying bazeeec with a really frenchy accent. I was similarly confused by the veuh-step (actually a V-step) and the bébémombo (actually a baby or six-step mambo). After the first week, though, I pretty much had the lingo figured out.

Second, I have to say that the overall difficulty level here just isn't that high. For starters, the choreography is not tapless. For those of you not familiar with the minutiae of Step aerobics choreography, tapless step is a faster pace version wherein there are no pauses or "taps" in between different moves. In order to work, the choreography must be well planned and the end result is fast-paced and exciting as you are constantly moving. Opinions differ on the physiological merits of tapless versus tap step (see Gin Miller, the inventor of Step aerobics, on this top here), but as far as enjoyment goes, tapless step is oodles more fun and challenging. That question aside, I think so far the choreography has been pretty darn simple and I am hoping that it will increase in difficulty as the semester goes on.

All in all, though, it has been a pretty good experience and I think my Step training will give me that extra edge I'll need for the 20km. Now, if only I had started training more than a month in advance ...