Skipping for Dummies

Back in the day- and I mean way back in the day of growing up in small-town K-ville, in my neighbourhood every house had a front porch, kids would all just play around the in the street, and everyone had to be home when the first street light comes on.

ok time out here- I'm watching American Idol right now, and the first guy was pretending to be a panther. Actually he thought he was a panther. That was crazy. Guy number two looks like Barry White who thinks Julio Iglesias is king.

Back to what I was blogging about. Ok, one of the fun things I remember doing growing up was skipping. Skipping was to girls like what playing with GI Joe was for the boys. I'd make up skipping routines, force my parents to drop what they were doing and come watch the 5 minute routine that I just created (let's face it, it was probably 45 seconds long). It seems as though skipping would take hours out of my day- and I'm not talking the "skip-it" although that was fun too.

For the last year and a bit, I've been boxing once a week. For fitness, for confidence, for fun. No, not boxercise, not kickboxing, not boxing aerobics. BOXING. At a boxing school. It's circuit training - generally in 2 or 3 minute intervals, 30 seconds off between and a killer punchout at the end of the workout. We train with heavy bags, speed bags, shadow boxing, and the dreaded skipping.

Yep the DREADED skipping. Oh the skipping. Now we're not talking skipping for fun. We're talking single-skipping, cross-overs, double-skips, single-foot, high-knees, and all sorts of other stuff like that.

This session we've been doing 4 rounds of skipping. At tonight's practice, it was WBK's 2-4. As the name alludes to, we had 24 2-minute rounds of "joy". That means we had 8 turns at the skipping. 16 minutes of skipping hell. To add insult to injury (seriously, the whip marks you get from a skipping rope are insane), when you skip backwards like we had to tonight, the rope was now hitting un-whipped skin- when you think about it, the rope is now going in the opposite direction than it's been used to for the last year, my hamstrings, and forearms were used to the skipping whips. The bicep, the forehead, the knuckles all fresh wounds. Yes I have a bruised knuckle not from hitting the punching bag, but from skipping! Are you kidding? (That makes me as proud as my bruise I got from skiing. That is the one bruise I got from the 6 times I fell during going down one run at Tremblant. One weekend of skiing in my world relates to going down the hill once, falling 6 times and having one helluva sexy bruise.)

I mean really who decided to take the fun out skipping?