The Secret Life of Narps

The themes of week 2 were immobility, Chinese food and a foreign concept of exercise known colloquially as “squatting.” If those descriptions didn’t make it clear, we’ll spell it out for you: this week was a struggle. Due to severe muscle fatigue, neither of us could physically get out of bed. To give you a mental picture, comforting encouragements via Facetime were needed in order to help each other muster the strength to slither out of bed each morning. If you find yourself perplexed as to why we were so crippled, remember we are NARPs and also had our first trip to the weight room with senior swimmer, Goran Simic ’14, as our trainer.

With clammy hands and quick breathing (never underestimate the strenuous walk from Battell to the gym), we arrived at the fitness center at 8 p.m. sharp on Tuesday. You might wonder why 8 p.m. was our prime time: naturally, we didn’t want to intimidate the football and lax bros with our bulging muscles during typical peak hours, so we chose to share the room with the men’s golf team instead. As we entered the athletic center, we received a text from Goran. “If you’re already there, warm up – we’re doing squats today.” Three mirror pep talks later, we ventured into the unknown.

After an all-business greeting from Goran, we deemed two-toe touches adequate stretching and began a movement known as “air squats.” Goran only needed to see one to realize how little we knew about proper technique. After many adjustments, it finally clicked: all we had to do was pretend like we were dropping it low at an Atwater party.

But our trainer was less than impressed with our inefficient performance. Maddie made the mistake of asking to consolidate her reps of squats in order to increase time for girl talk. We’re sorry, but determining which Biggest Loser coach Goran most closely represented was a time-sensitive and important discussion. (For the record, we concluded he was most like Bob Harper – not because they are both very attractive but because we hadn’t witnessed a particularly sympathetic side to our coach.) Disappointed in our use of time, Goran promptly demanded Maddie add more weights to her squatting bar. Our inability to stop gossiping about all of the athletes around us came to a climax as Goran resorted to setting a timer between our reps so we would stop relaxing on the various padded weight benches that doubled as lounge chairs.

75 pounds on the squat bar later, we were finally set free. The cherry on top to escaping NARP hell, was the following text: “Nice job! I hope you exceeded your personal expectations in terms of how much you can lift!” Heartwarming. Maybe he’s a Jillian after all.

Although we left the training session feeling positive, the second week of training took a turn for the worse on Thursday. The first-year dinner at Atwater ran out of macaroni and cheese, our all-time favorite food. For the record, we have never missed a macaroni and cheese day all year. We have language tables, but there’s macaroni at Proctor? No problem! We’ll ask for a to-go box and bring our precious delicacy along. We are that serious about our macaroni. As you can imagine, our morale after this disastrous event was low, very low. So low that we skipped our first day of training. To all of our fans out there, mom and dad, we are so sorry we failed you. Rather than hitting the gym, we promptly left Atwater, ordered Magic Wok to be delivered to Battell, and watched Grey’s Anatomy. As we slurped our chicken lo-mein with teary eyes, we discussed our failure in between episodes.

We both agreed that we felt like we let ourselves down by skipping a day of training. After a few moments of commiseration, Izzy brought up the wise words of Courtney Martin, the author who had spoken the night before in McCollough Social Space. She told us, “Move in ways that make you feel happy...Our body is giving us impulse about what it needs and wants.” The rest of her talk was devoted to defining a successful girl as one who focuses on well being rather than simply doing it all. Reward yourself with a much-needed nap or, in our case, Chinese food and binge watching trash TV. With another 10 weeks of training ahead of us, we would be naïve to expect no bumps on the road along the way.