Katie vs The Elliptical Machines

When I was a little girl my mom enrolled me into Ballet lessons.  I know it's rather cliche', but what are you going to do?

So there I was, leotard and all (thank goodness there was no tutu!) with all these other little girls.  I have never been the most coordinated person in the world and amongst all of those graceful little girls, I felt like a sumo wrestler in a leotard and ballet shoes!

Needless to say, my career as a Prima Ballerina was quite short lived.  When it became obvious that I was never destined for toe shoes, my parents allowed me to take tumbling, tap, and jazz instead.  I was much more suited to make lots of noise with the tap shoes and the tumbling taught little accident prone me the proper way to fall, so not all of the lessons were a waste of time and money.

I have not thought about the ballet experience for quite awhile until today.  Today, I came face to face with a new enemy:  the Elliptical Machine!  Talk about humiliation!

The trainer at the gym suggested that instead of using the stationary bike, he wanted me to use the Elliptical machines.  Okay, I can do that.  I'm all for working my arms and upper body at the same time as my legs.

Well, it was okay until I came face to face with the evil beast of a machine!  I walked into the exercise room and there were about 12 people working on Elliptical Machines.  Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time and it looked really easy.  Boy was I wrong!

I quickly discovered that I am in no way coordinated enough to use one of these machines.  For the life of me I could not figure out the rhythm of the one I was on.  If I finally got the legs going, the arms were off, even smacking me in the head when I was attempting to get my legs going.  It was so embarrassing!

I quickly saw the humor in my predicament and began to laugh.  When I started laughing so did all the graceful, coordinated people on some of the other machines.  Quite a few of them tried to give me suggestions on how to get going, but the more things I tried, the worse I got.

At length, one of the Trainers came over and was trying to help me.  He ended up laughing so hard he had to sit down on the machine next to mine to catch his breath.  He tried to apologize for laughing, but I told him it was okay, as I was finding the entire fiasco hysterically funny!  

I finally got to a point where I thought I could bail and jumped off the silly machine.  I wanted to kick it in the worst way, but I refrained (wanting to keep a shred of dignity) and skulked off to my bike.

There are just some things, I am never meant to do; and elliptical machines have joined ballet at the top of the list!