Sexy and I Know It

When I come through the small metal door that leads into Elie’s host family’s living room, I always have to stop a moment, allowing my eyes adjust to the dim lighting of the cave-like room. It has a low ceiling, small windows, and walls paneled in dark wood. Elie is sitting at the computer just inside the door, but I’m on a mission and head straight for the bathroom at the back of the house (Elie’s host family’s house has two bathrooms. If you will recall, my first host family didn’t even have one).

When I come back, Elie is sitting with one side of his host family’s overlarge headphones pulled behind his ear as he watches a video on the computer. On the screen, a young man in a sleeveless t-shirt is lifting a cement block over his head and placing it back on the ground over and over again.

“I’m gonna start working out with cinder blocks,” He says with an excited smile, “it’s happening.”

Georgians do not put a lot of stock into being physically fit. Or perhaps it’s that Americans are over fixated with their fitness and physical abilities; I couldn’t say. All I know is that, in this country, they eat a lot of cheese bread and they don’t get a lot of exercise. There aren’t even really any sports you can play. The schools don’t offer any and, though I have heard of a few local teams, I have only once seen any actual evidence that they exist, when I walked by the Zugdidi football (soccer) stadium during a game (said stadium has since been torn down).

When I first began running down the one road through my village, in the fall, I was besieged with open mouth stares and shouts of “Ra saketeb, Hannah!” (“What are you doing!”).

To which I always wanted to reply, “What the hell does it look I’m doing?”

The point being, almost all of the food I eat here is drenched in oil, filled with cheese, or dripping with butter. Combine a fatty, salty diet with the lethargy of the locals and you have a dangerous recipe for muffin-top (and the waist lines of every Georgian man over 30 stand as testament to this). The situation is further exacerbated by their embarrassing fascination with me when I do work out. “I don’t want any Khachupuri while I’m doing crunches, and unless you are a lot faster than you look, I can’t have a conversation with you while I’m running.” I want to tell them.

So, how then, one may wonder, have I managed to go from a 29’ to 27’ waist since I arrived in January? Well, I work out, and I have achieved the promise of every weight loss infomercial in a country were the two primary food groups are milk fat and refined starch.

The most crucial step was finding a reliable exercise routine. This step was actually completed for me by Elie. When, walking back from town one afternoon he said, “Hey if I broke one of the cinder blocks in half, would you want to work out with me?” I was surprised but intrigued. A few days later I have my hands tucked under my armpits and the hood of my sweatshirt pulled low to keep the wind and rain blowing under the awning of the long porch in the back of the house out of my face. Elie has two cinder blocks stacked on top of one another and is jumping from foot to foot on top of them; we call these Step-Ups.

The work out is made up of 15 exercises that we do for a minute or a minute and a half. I’m a big fan of Brick Swings, where we lift the bricks over our heads and then bring them back down in front of our bodies. We both dread Mountain Climbers - where we stretch into a plank position with our hands propped on a pair of cinder blocks and bring our knees up to our chests repeatedly - and the Brick Walk, which requires us to walk from one end of the porch to the other with a block in each hand. The goal of almost every exercise is to complete as many reps as possible in the allotted time.

We call it “Blocking Out.” Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after my 2pm Georgian lunch I walk the one and half miles to Elie’s house in rain, sun, or snow (mostly rain and snow) to build muscle and burn calories using some of the rawest methods I can imagine. Need to get in shape? Haul some cement around for forty minutes a day.

After the first two sessions we start recording the number of repetitions we complete of each exercise and are excited, and somewhat surprised, to watch how quickly the numbers jump. Eventually, we add an additional routine on Thursdays, which we dub “Abstravaganza:” an intense round of crunches, leg lifts, sit-ups, and squat-lunges.

My second secrete to success is…well actually it’s Elie again. That is, I would not have been nearly as diligent or perseverant without my workout buddy. Doing push-ups on wet cement in the snow is a lot less miserable when you’re not doing it alone. Furthermore, the stares and accusative remarks of the Georgians do not cut nearly as deep when you’ve got back up. In fact, the look on Elie’s host grandmother’s, Baba Zina’s, face when she catches us in the act has become one of my favorite things about the workout. However, the icing on the cake is my workout buddy’s habit of dancing around his room to LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” as he gets ready.

Finally, I have to attribute some of my new heightened level of fitness to the amount of walking I do. Between school, visiting friends, and occasionally making my way into town, I walk an average of over 30 miles a week. Though it may sound a little third world, I enjoy my walks a great deal. When I’m not teaching, working out, or reading there isn’t a lot to do, and walking is a relatively peaceful way to spend the day. 

While I’m a little concerned about how I’m going to dress myself if things keep going the way they are, it is incredibly exciting to watch the changes that my workouts are effecting on my body. I look and feel stronger. Actually I feel great. It’s been nice to be able to do something for myself while I’m here. I also think that the number of workouts we have come up with using old cement bricks, a stick, and a piece of rope is pretty impressive, especially considering the amount of money spent on the weight-loss and fitness industry in the states. No gym memberships, nutritional specialists, or thigh-blasters here. We’ve got cement, wood, and a much more intimate, albeit strange, appreciation for making the best out of what we are given.

 The Goergian gym.

 The all-important workout buddy.