Instructor: Give her the five pound weight; you take the eight pound ones.
Guy, protesting: But she's so much younger than me!
Me: But you're so much tougher than me!
Instructor, definitively, to him: You are much more fit!
Which he totally was, despite being at least twenty years older than me. Sigh. By the end of that set of reps, he was urging me on, and when we were running around track in the interval, and I was walking, he came up and started harassing me (laughing) to actualy run. Which, dutifully, I did. Because when a dreadlocked guy who looks like your grandfather is giving you a hard time for being a lazy bum, what can you do but try to do better?
I really love taking classes at the Y. I can't remember if I said this, but our instructor, Toni, is not a thin woman. She is notably bigger than me in every dimension -- she can also jump rope at high speed for the entire damn class if she feels like it, because she is just in that great shape. She makes me feel like a total wuss. It's very motivating.
I think you already know I love this story 🙂