I must apologise to my blog followers for been so slack in keeping my blog updated lately! My main reason is that I am frantically working against a looming deadline coming up on Monday. So while the rest of South Africa is enjoying a nice long-weekend due to Freedom Day and Workers Day holidays, I am working hard on my assignments.
I am also not hiking this weekend, much to my disappointment. Thomas and Paul who we do the training hikes with are both away, as is Donna and so I’m left on my own with no-one to hike with. I am missing it hugely.
But to make up for my lack of hiking on this long-weekend, where I could have fitted in numerous hikes, I have gotten back into Zumba, which is great cardio training for my hike up Kilimanjaro. I have always loved Zumba, it is a sexy, endorphin-pumping workout ~ how could anybody not enjoy it?!
The first time I got to try Zumba was a few years ago when through the company I work for, myself and fellow colleagues did something called the CANSA “Relay For Life”. It was a relay over 12 hours that had you raising funds for cancer and walking around an athletic track for 12 hours with someone from your team never leaving the track during the relay time. It is done at night and you walk throughout the night. To keep us awake and entertained as we walked throughout the night, the main organisers would have various entertainment going on in and around the track. Three years ago, while walking on the track suddenly the music changed and this high-energy music started blaring around the field we were walking on and a crowd was forming and some girls on a stage with these beautifully sculptured bodies started doing some crazy moves to the music. It was the greatest introduction to Zumba! Of course we had to go and join in and while other team mates walked, I along with my friend who had joined us for the night in walking for cancer, headed up high on a hill behind others who were already cavorting their moves to this wild music that just made you want to move your body! I had no idea what I was doing, neither did my friend, we were doing it on a sandy, quite steep hill – probably looked totally ridiculous but it was the best fun I think we have ever had, laughing the whole way through. That night I became hooked on Zumba!
I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy it. This weekend was my first time back in a while and it took me a little while to master all the steps again – and several moments more to be able to do them at speed! At times I was going left when I should have gone right, twirling clockwise instead of counterclockwise, stepping instead of kicking. Nobody noticed or seemed to care when I made a balls up. Everyone was basically following the steps, but they all added their own flourishes – a hip bump, a sway, a shoulder roll – so it was easy to think of my mistakes as merely style choices! As you might expect it was a mixture of hilarity and fun and had me smiling through the entire sessions. The class flew by, and at the end everyone, including me, was drenched in sweat, laughing, and clapping as if, indeed, we had just been to an awesome dance party.
Zumba really is the ultimate workout and it is going to fit nicely into my fitness programme of getting overall fit and mountain ready for Kilimanjaro. My climb is just over two months away (insert slight panic here) and it is time to set it up a level.
If my Zumba antics didn’t get you smiling, this video surely will! The video is by Ben Aaron and I came across it just as I getting ready to publish this post when it popped up on my Facebook newsfeed and after watching it I had to share it with you. This may just become the world’s newest fitness craze. I couldn’t help but smile watching it and I was dancing in my chair. Can you imagine how happy our world could be if everyone had to do this?
I wonder how this would work on a mountain. Dance hiking…. now there’s an idea!
Walking4Air 