Lethbridge Fit Body Bootcamp ready for Femsport
obstacle course and jumping up and down off a 45-centimetre high box up to 50 times. Pushing a truck solo is also part of the event.
“It's all ages and all abilities,” said Sherri Otis, one of the coaches of Lethbridge Fit Body Bootcamp along with Christy Heigh. “There are women that have never done a fitness competition before and their goal is to just try and complete every event. There are super fit people that come in. Their goal is to medal and place, everybody is welcome.”
The local contingent has two teams in the novice division, two in the masters division and one in the open, consisting of returning competitors who have participated before, in addition to a few athletes competing as individuals.
“We started training back in March,” said Otis. “We do two extra training sessions a week, lots of the women are members here, so they're coming five days a week and doing these two extra sessions on top of that for an hour. We started building up our strength first and then we started to learn the moves that we needed to do and towards the end we’re practising the events themselves and hammer down the times and get a little bit faster.”
Joining Otis and Johnson in Calgary this weekend is Kirsten Cleland, a multisport athlete with a background in dance, skiing, competitive swimming, baseball, volleyball and a few spartan runs as well.
“For me, it's completely for the experience of challenging myself,” said Cleland. “I'm over 40 and it's just something new to try out. This is my first one and we've been training hard.”
Cleland started coming to Fit Body last year.
“There was a group of women from here that went to Femsport and it seems like a lot of fun and a great way to challenge yourself,” she said. “You get to have a goal in mind and push yourself toward and see what you can do.”
At Otis’ suggestion, Johnson signed up for Femsport.
“We asked what that was about and she told us and we thought it would be a good way to stay fit and then we got more invested in it and we decided it was something we were really interested in,” she said.
For the past three months, Johnson, Cleland and the rest of the local contingent threw themselves into the six events they’ll face this weekend.
“I actually thought at first the tire flips were going to be incredibly hard,” said Johnson. “But the more you work at it it’s not as hard as you think. It's more just about getting the body positioning correct and doing it properly.”
Cleland said the box jumps presented the biggest challenge for her.
“You jump continuously up and down 50 times and you can't stop for more than 10 seconds at a time,” she said. “Your legs are just rubber. It's a good challenge."
Otis said there was an intimidation factor at the start when facing the six events.
“Even the idea of flipping a tire once was kind of daunting,” she said. “So we built up strength by not doing tire flips. So by the time we actually got to doing a tire flip they were so much stronger than they thought they were and that tire just flipped over. Once they’ve done it and once they’ve got that confidence they can do it again and again.”
That should transition nicely into Saturday’s competition.
“Now we’ve gotten to the point where they can do 100 box jumps in practice instead of 50,” said Otis. “So the idea of going in on the day of the competition is not as scary.”
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