Amazon Total Body Workout - Pain is temporary Pride is Forever
-
Completed Events:
 
AMAZON BOOTCAMP 2010
 BY CAROLINE TOVEY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There’s always something a bit disconcerting about going through your own photographs and noticing that most people are giving you daggers.  There I was giving up my Sunday to photograph Soeli’s Amazon Church of Pain, only to get filthy looks from pretty much everyone in attendance.
I probably wasn’t that appreciative of my own relative comfort as I stood in the potential rain.  Hanging around clutching a camera whilst wrapped in Goretex is hardly most people’s idea of luxury, but compared to the pain endured by Soeli’s 2010 Bootcamp team, it probably was.
 
Last year I felt a great deal of envy and disappointment at not being able to do the bootcamp.  This year, I just felt like I was recognising my limitations.  Soeli was pushing protein drinks and flapjacks from the outset, to my mind that could only spell out annihilation.
 
This year, Mr Whistle was joined by a megaphone.  I don’t think many people realised how frightening this could be, especially when Soeli delegated Mr Whistle to her son, who took to it with alarming ease, allowing mum to exercise greater tyranny with the megaphone.  “Pain is temporary, pride is forever” is the Amazon slogan.  The pain looked pretty permanent from where I was standing, especially for the first part of the class.
 
Yet again, everyone stuck with it though, despite two ‘pitch invasions’ by dogs of varying excitement and velocity.  After the beginning elongated Amazon session, the group were split in two as Jake and Kevin took their turns at pummelling them.  Kevin’s session involved pad work and despite some initial reservations, most people got in touch with their angry sides with very little encouragement.  As it happened, they got lots of encouragement from Kevin and Soeli.
 
Meanwhile, Jake took his group through a series of divisive, humiliating and painful looking exercises and circuits.  Well, he seemed to have fun anyway.  I’m sure he shouted “It’s all about how you use your bum” as a motivating call at one point.  No one ran away, in fact they soldered on with inspiring determination. 
When I left for work (it was my excuse and I was sticking to it!) at just gone one, everyone was still alive (just) and most people were smiling (or grimacing really hard) and, if anyone had been sick, they’d hid it well. 
Maybe pride is forever after all.
 
I got back to the car with my cheeks burning with that windswept glow and wondered just what everyone else would feel like in the morning, when I was already aching for them at that moment.   Yet again I promised myself that one day, one day, I will be brave enough to try it.  If I start on the protein shakes now, I might be ready by next year.  I may have to; Soeli’s son has discovered his vocation in life is photography and he took to this with the same passion and relentlessness showed by his mother.   They won’t need me to take the photos when he’s doubled in height and has his own Nikon. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 
 
AMAZON BOOTCAMP 2009
BY CAROLINE TOVEY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Six in the morning is an inhuman hour to be getting up on a Saturday.  However, as I had already bottled out of participating in Soeli’s bootcamp to fend off my pending cold/swine/woman flu, I figured I still had to stay faithful to the photographic cause.   So I packed my camera and set off.
I had already weighed up the options of catching the bus or walking to Horfield Sports Centre, factoring in breakfast to make life worth living and deciding that walking was the least stressful approach.  Do you know how many drunken people stagger home like something from a zombie film at quarter to six on a Saturday morning?  Trust me, it’s a lot. 
 
I arrived as Soeli was signing everybody in, whilst Jake (her partner) and Kevin O Hagan (his self defence guru Dad) busied themselves with setting up. True to the name of the event, they were in combat gear. Everyone was marked with camouflage face paint, including me, for a second I felt like Don McCullum, until I remembered that I didn’t have the balls to run up and down a field, let alone dodge bullets in Nam.
A photographer arrived from the Evening Post and thoughtfully set up some group shots for me to pilfer. (Note: any budding photographers, this works at weddings too.  Some photographers will even set up the lighting for you!) 
After his hasty retreat, Soeli, Jake and Kevin took everyone through a short warm up and Soeli told everyone she wanted them to “push yourselves until you feel a little bit sick”, a process that she started with ‘a bit of a run’, which consisted of three laps of the field.  Soeli introduced everybody to her new best friend, Mr Whistle.  The sound of the whistle was a signal for everyone to do ten mountain climbers.  I looked on with pity for the group as she demonstrated, correctly suspecting that we were going to hear the whistle quite a lot.  However ominous the whistle must have been for the bootcampers, it appeared to scare off the thunderous looking clouds hanging overhead, as the day turned into a bright but refreshingly cool one. 
I sprinted around trying to photograph everybody and was quickly exhausted, so I really felt for the group. They were all still smiling at the end of the run, but not for long.  The next hour was a series of grueling exercises, during which people grimaced, whelped and got lost in their shell-shocked daze, but fair play to them, they stuck with it.  Soeli, Kevin and Jake clubbed together to torture and inspire the group into giving it all they had. I found myself torn between empathic exhaustion and pure envy. 
 
It was worth keeping with the program, because next up was Kevin and Jake’s Self Defence session.  I’ve seen Kevin demonstrate a lot of this before with Bristol School of Self Defence, but it never ceases to entertain me.  Somehow Soeli managed to land a stray kick to Kev’s mouth: she’s a braver woman than I am
(and far harder too).
 
Next up was Kirsten Rees with her Pilates demonstration.  Have you ever dismissed Pilates as a workout for girls?  Well, no one on the boot camp will make that mistake again.  It might be a workout for girls, but in this case, ones with good posture and well developed core muscles.  By this point, Soeli had told me to join in and I realised (yet again) just how badly I treat my body.  I really respected Kirsten, mostly because she said the word “wee” a lot.  She said that you shouldn’t hold your wee after you have done it once to remind yourself where your pelvic floor muscles are.  Being hungry, needing to wee and going round supermarkets are the three things in life that turn me evil.  So anyone who doesn’t endorse “holding it” has got to be sensible. 
The session wound down with a series of stretches demonstrated by Soeli, most of which I was too un-supple to take very far, but this applies to me and most stretches, so don’t be put off.  This was followed by a light meditation. At this point I had to sit up and take some more photographs because the temptation to forget my second photographic assignation and just lie there, regardless of the clouds (which had snuck back), was just too strong.   Besides, it looked like Soeli had annihilated the entire class and I had to capture that image. 
 
Everyone survived the bootcamp and displayed the kind of satisfaction that you can only get by being completely physically shattered.  I ran off towards Windmill Hill City Farm with my camera weighing heavy as the satisfied and hungry group behind me headed towards their greatly deserved picnic. 
 
 
 
 
9-