Excuses won’t fly for ‘BEE Fit’
Photo by Katherine Rountree
Written by Savannah Rake
The fitness gods and goddesses of Club SCAD have now descended upon us average human beings with the “BEE Fit” Challenge, and they will take no excuses.
“It’s so early.”
That was me. This morning. My alarm chirped like a little annoying devil — or maybe an angel — beside my left ear at 8 a.m.
“But it’s cold.”
January in Savannah makes it so much harder to get out of a warm, cozy bed. The four covers I piled on top of my body in the middle of the night hugged me just right, and returning to that comatose state sounded oh, so good.
“There’s never any parking unless you get to the gym super early.”
Which brings us back to square one…
The concept of the challenge is close to that of NBC’s Award-winning television contest, “The Biggest Loser,” in that each team is assigned a color, separate coaches and will compete against the other teams to lose the most body mass percentage. The idea is to make fitness more fun through friendly competition. When the applications opened last fall, I was among the first to turn mine in.
Over winter break, when SCAD became something like a distant dream in the back of my head, I thought about my upcoming participation only occasionally when I opened and devoured bags of barbeque kettle chips, or lay around in my bed until mid-afternoon. “Well,” I thought, “I guess I have to be lazy while I still can.”
That ended today.
Jamie Ives, Fitness Coordinator of Club SCAD, welcomed me and the other 35 contestants with a speech and a megaphone and explained the way the challenge works. Slowly, the palpable nervous excitement of the group turned into excitement.
Jamie and his right hand man, Activity Events Coordinator Assistant at Club SCAD Fabio Bonacquisto, assembled a team of impressively fit student coaches that loudly encouraged each of us as we hurdled through three different obstacle courses and multiple rounds of tug-of-war. One of the obstacle courses was a series of agility training and hurdles, ending in a basketball lay-up drill. I finally found out what the ladder that lays on the floor of Club SCAD is used for.
The shouting and blaring music filled the dingy walls of St. Paul’s Athletic Center, and the group atmosphere pushed each of us to go, to work that much harder. I felt anything but lazy.
By the end of the two hours I was left with rubbery limbs, a packet filled with nutritional information and printed logs to keep track of the food that I eat and the exercise I complete throughout the next week.
In the words of my coach, Ali Bassir, “This is only the beginning.”
