Zumba! & Front Row Divas

Two weeks ago, I went to my first Zumba class. My friend Jeanette teaches Zumba, so I asked her which class I should take. She recommended a class with Daren at Community Fitness on Roosevelt. She said he is upbeat yet his classes are relatively low impact, which is exactly what I wanted for my first class after recovering from my ACL tear and surgery last year.

Aerobic classes used to be my main form of exercise before I had kids. After Claire Adele was born, I took an aerobics class three times a week. Once the Boy was born, I had a hard time squeezing in classes so I would ride my bike instead. Once in a while, I'd take a ballet or tap class, but those only lasted for a few weeks.

Since I've torn my ACL, I've wanted to take an aerobics class. I was worried that I wouldn't be agile enough. A few months ago, Jason gave me some agility exercises, and I felt great. I was slow, the exercises loosened up my knee.

The challenge of an exercise class is that there are other people in it. With all of my cardio machine exercises, I could go at my own pace and stop when I wanted to. I could do that in a group class, but that is not the point of a group exercise class. The point of a group exercise class is peer pressure: everyone keeps going even though they are tired and sweaty. Everyone else is doing it! You can do it, too!

My knee was still kind of stiff and I didn't want to be the one person two steps behind for the whole class. Again, peer pressure. I didn't want to be the one person off from the rest of the group. The steps are relatively simple and repeated often. Most people should be able to keep up. If not, go back to the cardio room where you can watch television while you exercise!

But hey ho! I did it! I took Daren's class and it was great. (I took two classes a week apart just to make sure the first one wasn't a fluke.) Zumba is just like old-fashioned aerobics from the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, but they changed the music to Latin Dance, added a few hip and shoulder shakes, and gave it a new name.

The women in the class seemed to welcome all types and abilities. There was a wide range of ages, from mid-thirties to a woman who had to be at least seventy. None of the women in the class were worried about my performance. They were either too tired and sweaty to notice, or they were too busy trying to keep up with steps. Or, if they were like me, they were having a Walter Mitty hour of pretending they were in a nightclub in a tropical city dancing the night away, not in the middle of soggy Seattle before lunch. How come we all showed up wearing exercise clothes and not slinky dresses and heels? Why teach the class at noon and not ten at night? Where was the bar? Shouldn't we be tossing back sangria and not Nuun water? Seriously, someone needs to rethink this. Regardless of my new ideas of how to exercise, I checked off another goal for my ACL recovery: dancing. Yay! It took longer than I would have liked, but I made it.

After the first class, Jeannette and I talked with a few other women after the first class and I heard a term I never heard before: front row divas. Those are the women who know all the moves, know how to dance, and show off by staying in the front row. How come I've never heard this term before when I've taken a million aerobics classes before? Front row divas can't be exclusive to Zumba, can they?

I didn't stand in the front row for the first or second classes. I stood in the second row. I had always thought the I liked to stay near the front so I could see the instructor better, right? There was no way I was going to stand in the back row. There was no point in that. Then it occurred to me: I had been a front row diva in my former lives, back at Lakeshore Athletic Club, at the YMCA in St. Louis. I wasn't intentionally a diva but I stood in the front so I wouldn't be distracted by people who were two steps behind, who couldn't keep up with the simple choreography. I wanted a clear shot of myself in the mirror so I could see if I was doing the steps right. Did that make me a diva? Yes, yes it did.

I am not a diva in other areas of my life, at least I don't think so. Yet, my dancing "divaness" prevented me from going to the class earlier, until I knew I had a 98% chance of keeping up. I needed to stand that in the middle of class, hold my own and not hold anyone back. Would it have been better if my ego didn't get in the way, if I didn't care if I was two steps behind or moved like Frankenstein? Probably. But then I wouldn't be a diva.