Feb 1, 2016 3 min read

Now that soccer is over for my oldest girl – until she plays this fall in college, that is – she has shifted gears to her other sport of choice: track.

During her sophomore year, she ran a few middle distance events, but an injury kept her off the track her junior year. This year, she has shifted her focus to sprints.

In preparation for the season, some of the kids are staying after school a couple times a week for conditioning. One of the workouts they do is called “Deck of Cards.”

In case you’re not familiar, this workout assigns a particular exercise to each suit of the deck, and whatever number is on the face of the card is how many repetitions to complete. For example, if spades equals pushups, the seven of spades would equal seven pushups. Face cards equal 10, and, just for fun, all aces mean 10 burpees.

Perhaps, she has complained about the rigors of her workouts too often, making me calloused to her definition of how hard something is to complete. Or perhaps, I have an overly inflated self-image despite my actual age and actual weight, but any way you deal it, I doubted this workout was as challenging as she claimed it to be.

Sunday afternoon, in place of my walk, she dared her siblings and I to complete this workout with her. We had to make some modifications to the track workout, as working out in my house isn’t conducive to running laps, and there isn’t space enough in my living room for four people to simultaneously do burpees, but we established exercises for our suits and began.

Pull a card, complete an exercise. Check. Another card, another exercise. OK, I’ve got this.

About the time I was beginning to feel confident, someone pulled three pushup cards in a row. My arms turned to jelly about halfway through the second card, and I had to switch to modified pushups. During the third card, I heard a strange noise and realized that it was coming from me. Near the top of each pushup, I had apparently begun making a half-grunting and half-exhaling noise that was reminiscent of what my mom used to call “spitting raspberries.”

Then, after about half the deck was completed, I became unable to do any more situps. I began to fear seeing any hearts, knowing I would have to modify those too. And clubs? Who wants to do planks immediately after doing situps or pushups? Not this girl! In fact, I began to look forward to diamonds being pulled because I could handle the squats. And really, who in their right mind looks forward to doing squats?

No one seemed to struggle as hard as me. In fact, the oldest girl’s only trouble came from trying to complete a properly executed exercise while laughing so hard at me.

Lesson learned. I certainly won’t laugh the next time she says how hard they trained at practice.

I’ll take her word for how challenging it was. In fact, I’ll be remembering this workout for quite some time.

At least as long as it takes me to quit shuffling around in soreness.