Skadoosh!

I come from a family of exercisers.  We go on vacation and still show up at the gym at 8:00 am, on a late day.  We walk everywhere, due to my mom’s insistence, as she thinks any two points connected by land are within walking distance.  This morning, I accompanied my mom to her Sunday spin class.  I don’t know if any of you have ever taken spin, but it is DEATH. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great workout and I love doing it, but while you are on that bike you want nothing more than to curl up in a ball on the floor and pass out. 

This was not my first spin class.  That was on vacation and we thought it would be fun to take a class in the workout facility one afternoon.  We were not aware, though, that we would be the only ones to sign up for spin.  So there we were.  Just the four of us with an instructor who didn’t speak English and spent the whole class barking, “Andale!” at us.  Fifteen minutes in and we were all panting like diseased animals and sloppily wiping the sweat from our foreheads with our towels.  All of us except for my mother. Against all laws of nature, my mom does not sweat.  She occasionally gets a faint glow, but never a droplet. 

My mom loved it,  and started going regularly at the gym near our house.  She was so excited the first time she took it.  She came home and said, “It was so hard it even made my elbows sweat!” which, for my mom, is a huge deal.  So she has been attending religiously since, and we even bought her special spin shoes for her birthday.  So intense.  I didn’t take spin again for a year and a half, until my mom coaxed me into a 90-minute torture session on Thanksgiving last year.  Sure I felt better afterwards, and it COMPLETELY justified Thanksgiving dinner, but still. It hurt.

If we are going to talk about the family workout plan, I have to tell you about Don.  Don is a weight instructor and my parents have worked out with him for years.  Jake decided last summer that it was time to get buff, so he started working out with him too.  That just left me as the family weakling, until this summer when I, too, began to work out with Don.  Now, Don has become a household legend. He only cares about the Chicago Bears, and eats meat and tuna fish for breakfast.  He can bench hundreds of pounds but has four little min-pins for pets.  So I was eager to meet him.  And when I did, he already knew 90% of my life from what the rest of my family had told him.  But that’s not the best part.  My mom and Don have come up with nicknames for everyone in the family, and they are all pretty good.  My mom is Walking Lady, or WL for short, due to her obscene amount of walking.  My dad is Scotch Man, SM, because he once thought he had a better workout because he had a bit of scotch the night before.  Jake is Late Kid, LK, due to his sleeping schedule keeping him from early morning sessions.  My nickname was a bit harder to come up with, but my mom had an epiphany and it stuck: Casper.  I am so pale that I joke about being translucent. Once I walked in to Don’s a few days after getting a manicure and he said, “Wow, it’s good that you got a dark color on your nails because now I can tell that you have hands!”  Yup.  So that’s me, Casper the friendly ghost. 

 The latest addition to the Silverman workout tradition, however, is nothing more than a word: Skadoosh.  Jake came home from school saying it, and nobody has any idea what it means.  But it is the one word that encompasses all of the magic of a great workout.  It says, “Yeah, I might be sweating like a pig, but I still look good because I am a beast.”

So we all know that working out requires many supplies.  Water, shoes, towels (well, except for my mom).  And you can’t carry all of that stuff by hand.  So when you are looking for the perfect workout bag, you know where to find one.  Buy a tote bag, take it to the gym, and you’re set.  Skadoosh!

-Emma