If you were planning on joining today’s Cardio Sweat Zumba class at the LA Fitness on First street, turn around now, because there’s a situation unfolding you do NOT want to get in the middle of: This woman who’s doing all the steps wrong at Zumba class is really getting in the way but she’s too elderly for the teacher to do anything about it.
Ugh. No offense, lady, but senior water aerobics at the Y might be more your speed.
About five minutes before class began, an extremely old woman named Carol toddled into the group fitness room smiling so pleasantly that everyone immediately made room for her right in front. But now, 15 minutes in, everyone’s patience is growing thin as she’s absolutely botching each and every step and really throwing off the groove of the entire class. To be fair, chances are she probably has bad knees or hips or bones, and she’s doing about as well as you could reasonably expect for someone born before WWII, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when she keeps slowly crossing to the left just as the whole room moves to the right, inciting a domino effect of jumbled limbs and awkward side-steps as everyone struggles to adjust to her constant fuck-ups. Worse, she keeps stopping in the middle of songs to either take off or put on her jacket, which the whole class clearly finds annoying, but nobody is really brave enough to say anything out of fear of looking like a total asshole.
It’d be nice if the teacher would pull her aside and kindly recommend that she try something that’s more suited to her abilities—this is an intermediate-level class, after all—but instead she just keeps shouting, “Keep it up, Carol, you got this!” which, okay, we get that her job is to encourage people, but honestly, Carol doesn’t need to be anymore emboldened than she already is. Carol has not gotten one single move right since the class started, including the very beginning of warm-ups where you are just turning your head different ways and doing the easiest possible movements, so it’s not clear what she is even getting out of this—except for maybe the opportunity to clap at the end of every song, which, to be fair, she really knocks out of the park. Other than that, though, Carol is mostly just bending her knees up and down and staggering around off-rhythm to “Despacito.”
It’s fucking maddening.
No judgement or shame here, as everyone has the right to try to better themselves and get in shape, but this old woman seriously needs to leave Zumba and never come back. It’s admirable what she’s trying to do and everything, but in a way, it’s also super disrespectful to everyone in the class who wants to scream at her but can’t. This class isn’t cheap, after all, and she’s pretty much ruining it for the 20 other paying attendees. Of course, literally nobody will say a word to her about this because they’re not monsters, but rest assured, they all want to on the inside.
