A ghost of workouts past comes back to haunt

I found my first-ever workout mix CD. It's from 2001, the summer after my senior year of high school. This CD was the soundtrack to my first sustained attempt at jogging and my first honest shot at being marginally healthy. If I recall correctly, that campaign lasted for about 3 months, but I lost some weight because of it and my plainly titled "Workout" CD was largely responsible. I see now that, whether consciously or not, I was shrewd in engineering this playlist. Because look at what I put in the top slot:

This song is wildly inappropriate and all kinds of offensive. It's about beating the women (or men, but mostly women) in your life when they're pissing you off. Babymama wiling? Bom ba-ba bom bom Rocky Balboa. That's...abhorrent. Awful. I've got a pretty high threshold for tolerating misogynist rap bombast bullshit, because it's pop art not real life and blah blah blah. But after listening to this song enough times, I decided -- out loud, to myself, while driving to the grocery store -- that I simply couldn't call myself a feminist or even a decent human being while regularly enjoying an ode to domestic violence. And yet...

It works as a workout song. Ugly truth.

Because of my so-serious reversal on "Rocky" tolerance, I put that workout CD away and forgot about it for pretty much a decade, until I unearthed it in an old CD case last week. But listening to it again, I realize that "Rocky" functioned as the heavy against my wimpy, fledgling sense of fitness discipline at that time. Putting it first on the mix was like staffing my brain with an unhinged drill sergeant for the first 5 minutes of my run, there to beat down any attacks to my resolve. During that first attempt at jogging (and the second, and kinda the third), there was always a not-insignificant chance that I'd crap out before getting even a quarter mile under my belt and walk home like a chump. 

"Rocky" pounded into my head a ruthlessly simple message: if a bitch gets outta line, show it Rocky Balboa. I say "it" instead of the verbatim "her" because a) it distances me from the song, which even now I'm self-conscious about praising*, and b) ultimately, to me, the only thing getting beat in that song is a whiny attitude about going for a damn run. That's m'story and I'm sticking to it. 

And! Track #2 is your reward for taking Juvie's abuse and getting through those first five "I DON'T WANNAAAAA" minutes of a run:

Tracy Anderson's no-fun middle school sleepover workout

VIDEO: "Tracy Anderson Beginner Dance Cardio" (Bubi and Babe Exercise Inc., 2010)
STYLE: Dance aerobics
INTENSITY: Moderate
STRUCTURE: Intro; short warm-up; four routines in 10- to 15-minute sections; cool-down
GIST: The routines themselves are pretty good, but they're undermined in so many dazzling ways, from chintzy production values to Tracy's own blandness, that all I can only summarize thusly: It sucks.

Remember in 6th grade, when you and your friends would have sleepovers and eat pizza and bake brownies and watch Romeo + Juliet for the 46th time, and at some point someone would be like, "OMG guys, let's make up a dance and record it like a real music video!" And you'd put on Ace of Base or the Now and Then soundtrack and get maybe 16 counts down before the whole thing dissolved into hastily-flung criticisms, arguments and tears?

Well, if a) y'all had actually finished the video, and b) you'd shot it in a Pilates studio with someone's overconfident boyfriend operating the camera, it would look more or less like "Tracy Anderson Beginner Dance Cardio."

This is for a British version of the U.S. videos, but it's the same footage. 
The fact that this title is currently out of print in the U.S. yet only 2 years old is telling.

This video could have been good, but it's not. As a trainer to GOOPy Gwyneth Paltrow, shimmying Shakira and ever-calcifying Madonna, Tracy Anderson had some serious blonde buzz behind her with  this video. (Both Gwynny and Shakira talk sugar about her on the video jacket.) But apparently that wasn't enough to get Anderson a decent production budget, because it's put together with as much craftsmanship as my Stay Awake-fueled PowerPoint presentations from freshman year of college. Specifically, I'm talkin bout: