San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Workouts online, but the sweat is real
Jack Holleman is running through the streets of his hometown of Richmond, giving the few pedestrians he sees a wide berth as a light rain falls. Running along with him on the videoconferencing app Zoom are about 20 people who have participated in the bootcamp fitness classes he’s been offering at various East Bay YMCAs since 1999.
The former Marine, UC Berkeley football player and director of athletics at the Oakland Y eggs his participants on through a succession of uphill and downhill jogs punctuated by burpees, bulldogs, planks and dips.
“Running backwards uphill … feels good … I always say burpees anytime anywhere … if you see stairs or a hill, take them … woooo yeah … 30 seconds more, you can do anything for 30 seconds … bus driver’s got a mask on, makes sense … yeah, sun’s coming out, enjoying it, yeah.”
Meanwhile, also shown on the Zoom grid, is his young coinstructor, who is moving gazellelike through the residential streets near Oakland’s Piedmont Avenue. An executive at a company that uses tech tools to help kids learn to read, Juliana Germak is giving Holleman the sort of playful teasing that participants in their Y classes have come to expect. When she mockcomplains over the length of time he’s having them do jumping jacks, he’s having none of it: “We used to do them for as long as it took our drill sergeant to have a cup of coffee.”
Coordinating the tech side of the class from her home office in Albany is Kym Sterner, another of Holleman’s longtime coinstructors. She comments on aspects of Germak’s form as Germak demonstrates exercises for the other participants, all of them sweating away in their own parts of the Bay Area, some showing their workouts on camera, others not.
Sterner alerts the techchallenged Holleman when he’s inadvertently muted himself. When Germak’s phone dies, Sterner gets a class participant who’s been running near Germak to film her as she does pushups in a puddle. “Look at her plank,” Sterner coos. Sterner knows a good plank when she sees one, having recently won a Bay Areawide competition for fitness fanatics.
When the shelterinplace order
Resources
Offerings from shuttered gyms and yoga studios, housebound personal trainers and fitness boot camp leaders range from hardcore workouts to guided meditations, from gentle movement classes to active play to tire out the kids.
a consortium of fitness instructors, offers Pilates, Zumba, yoga (for kids and adults), qigong and UrbanKick, as well as assorted cardio and core-training workouts. Some free, some for a fee. For the workout calendar, go to https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=sweatinplace@gmail.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles
is leading children (via Zoom) in such activities as hopscotch, laundry-hamper basketball and qigong. www.funderblast.com/online.html
is the Lake Merritt-area studio of personal trainer Julie Sinner, who has gathered videos on YouTube. www.youtube.com/channel/UCHgUzEUauGjeQS1OqgC_ziQ
is the brainchild of Dennis Dumas Jr., who decided to lead free online workouts from his garage. www. facebook.com/ofcliv
a national chain, is offering a range of online workout sessions, including yoga, core training, calisthenics and high-intensity interval training. https://info.planetgranite.com/live-stream
Joubert Caston is offering two weekly workouts, via Zoom, Monday and Wednesday evenings. https://sausalitofitnessclub.com
will continue to offer yoga and meditation, via Facebook Live, by instructors who work out of the Santa Rosa and Sausalito branches. www.soulsticemindbodyspa.com/livestream
has, for 13 years, offered tailored, tech-augmented workouts of high intensity to its clients. The online full-body workouts are led by one instructor, with another giving feedback to participants. www.urbanfitness oakland.com
the San Francisco meditation studio, offers reasonably priced classes for beginners and those who’ve already made a meditation practice part of their lives. www.withinmeditation.com/classes
has posted online classes to help homebound seniors stay active, including tai chi and a set of strength-building exercises. www.ymcasv.org/virtual-resource-center/virtual-workouts#aoa
Sweat in Place,
Camp Funderblast
Julie’s Garage Gym
Omni Fight Club
Planet Granite,
Sausalito Fitness Club
Soulstice Mind & Body Spa
Urban Fitness Oakland
Within,
YMCA of Silicon Valley
came down in midMarch, Sterner led the effort to get some guided workouts online for the closeknit group that does boot camp through the East Bay YMCAs. Sterner had studied engineering at Stanford, but the technology was new to her, the learning curve as steep as some of the hills the participants in Holleman’s class run up.
“Working on it helped to alleviate my anxiety in this time,” Sterner says. There are still kinks — they haven’t yet found a way to share the music that helps pump up participants at the IRL classes, and some say they’re missing Holleman’s oldschool playlists.
Sterner, in addition to offering online versions of the bootcampstyle classes that she, Holleman and Germak run, has set up a portal through which instructors can, via Zoom, put their housebound students through their paces. Branded as Sweat in Place, these online offerings include Pilates, Zumba, yoga (for kids and adults), qigong and UrbanKick, as well as assorted cardio and coretraining workouts.
“Some of the classes, like ours, are free,” Sterner says. “But some instructors have lost their income overnight, so they’re charging. But for all the classes, for people in financial hardship, there’s no charge.”
I join a virtual class that Sterner and Germak coteach, one that goes at apathetic glutes, the dreaded “dead butt,” as Sterner calls it. There’s a nice mix of ages in the class, split about evenly between genders, the workout outfits embodying the Y’s comeasyouare ethos.
I set up a mat in our relatively spacious kitchen and mimic the onscreen action, feeling proud that I’m keeping up. But not proud enough to turn on my camera — which is just as well, as it turns out. Germak’s dog lies next to her as she gets on one knee, extends a leg elegantly behind her, puts a hand on her hip and begins to move her extended leg in circles — and whoops, I tip over, my face planted in a bowl of our cat’s food.
On the screen, longtime boot camp regular Daniel Vasquez is doing better. The executive director of a nonprofit supporting boys and young men of color, Brothers on the Rise, and a former emcee of Concord’s Pride festival, Vasquez moved to Oakland from Napa six years ago. “I didn’t know anyone in Oakland, and people told me, as they do, to join the Y — and I found this great group.”
The “bootcampers,” as they call themselves, don’t just sweat together, they gather for postworkout drinks and coffee and a big annual holiday party at Holleman’s house. They sometimes even travel together — twice to Mexico in recent years, working out throughout the trip. There have been marriages among its members, kids born, and, during this freighted time, former regulars have logged in to their online workouts.
“We’ve had people from London, Brooklyn, Ecuador working out with us again,” Sterner says. Her coinstructor Germak counts off a few more: “Arizona, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Minnesota.”
When the shelterinplace orders came out, Vasquez worried a little about losing his hardearned form, but he worried more about not seeing his people — his tribe.
“When they closed the Y’s, so many of us were in mourning for the loss of the boot camp community,” says Vasquez, who’s become the group’s unofficial social convenor. At a virtual dinner, attended by more than 100 regulars, they shared their hopes and fears for this time. “There were tears.”
Near the end of our interview, Sterner says, simply: “I don’t know how to live without the joy this gives me.”
Alec Scott is an Oakland freelance writer. Email culture@sfchronicle.com
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