Dear Insanity Workout

I've been working out four to five days a week since last September.  Just the same as how I now have to guzzle Sriracha sauce to feel anything approaching love delicious spiciness, my body became resistant to the exercises I was doing.  I maintained weight for the past couple of months, but hadn't lost any.  Changes in diet, trying different exercises, and just lengthening my workouts had no effect.  I've been reluctant in the past to try fad workouts or diets, but Insanity sounded interesting.  By interesting, it mainly looked like if I tried this and it didn't work, I would never be pretty.  So, I borrowed the DVD's from a friend, and decided to give it a try.

The first day of the Insanity workout, you simply take what they call the "fit test".  Best as I can figure, that stands for "future internal torsion".  For thirty minutes, Sean T., the catchphrase spewing fear monger that lecterns the workout, forced me to twist, jump, and stretch into positions that would bring in big money in a circus themed brothel.  After every frenzied burst of activity, he commanded that I write down the number of repetitions I was able to complete, then he and his chiseled minions on the screen would mock my results, and question my belief system.

The second day started worse.  Still sore from the fit test, we went straight into the fastest paced workout I've had since playing baseball thirteen years ago.  I kept trying to "dig deeper" as Sean yelled at me, pushing myself as hard as I could.  I kept telling myself that I would soon look as good as the people in the workout video.  This buoyed me, and I trudged on, at least until the first one went down.  Twenty minutes into the video, a woman who had at least a thirty two pack of abs suddenly fell during globe jumps.  She lay there, and the other continued their workouts, perhaps absorbing her energy as she lay prone.  No one acknowledged that she lay there.  In falling, she had become nothing to them.  The workout was dampened to say the least.

Tentatively, I went into the third day with little hope when I saw the disc was called "Power cardio and resistance".  I was very sore, and vividly aware that I possessed hamstrings, and could not foresee a future where "power cardio" made these things any better.  To my surprise, the stretches we started with soothed my ailing body, and I plowed ahead through the workout.  Things were going so well that I started to get cocky.  I felt like I could do anything the dvd threw at me, no matter how sore or lightheaded I got.  I could do a burpee, no big deal.  Give me something else, Sean T.  Mountain climbers?  I'm like a cot-damn billygoat.  Hurdle jump?  Like an Olympian.  I don't need a water break, Sean.  That's for you sissies.  I drink awesome to quench my thirst.

Sometime around thirty minutes into this delirium, my feet left the floor to do a hurdle jump, and instead of landing on the plywood floor, I found myself riding atop a foul smelling beast I would later identify as a Terror-dactyl.  Somehow, my proper technique and digging deeper had opened a portal to the Netherrealm, where demons screech into existence and only the strong can survive.  I knew all of this instinctively, because the knowledge was given to me through my hustle.  I spent the next forty years in this realm, constantly fighting demons and gaining clues to the whereabouts of Ctl'athlub, the demon who guards the portal back to Earth.  When I finally defeated him after thirty two straight days of battle, I was granted the mystical oboe.  By blowing a very specific tune, which sounded strangely similar to Axel F, I opened the portal and was able to return home.  The wife I had taken in that world cried as I stood on the precipice, but she said my world was too strange for her.  She kissed me goodbye, and I crossed the threshold back to this world.

I awoke on the floor of my workout room, with the DVD still playing, showing that only three minutes had passed in our time. If he knew of my years of battle and the love I had for my Netherworld bride, Sean T. did not let on.  He simply implored me to push harder, and give him thirty more seconds.  I could not focus on the workout any longer, because I was too busy mourning all that I had been through.

Also, someone had wet my pants.