Advanced Leap Frog

Today was my second day of training capoeira in Maputo. Finding the group wasn’t easy – I ended up doing a small tour of all of the places in my ‘neighborhood’ where there are capoeira classes (of which there are 3 – that I know of so far) because I had the wrong information about which group trained on which days. But the third try was the charm, and an hour and a half after my ‘tour’ (which ended up involving a lot of sitting around waiting for someone who never showed up) began, I was getting ready to train.

Now, tonight training experience was much different than the one I had last week. Last week the class wasn’t terribly rigorous, it was fairly small (about 8 people), and most of the students were much younger than me (early teens). Tonight’s class was a whole different story. There were 16 people in the class – 15 of whom were ripped (and I mean ripped.....12 packs....every single one of them) Mozambican guys (late teens and twenties). And one of whom was a blonde white girl. It must have been quite a sight for anyone who was lucky enough to observe us :)

In case the 12-pack comment didn’t make things clear enough.....a quick run-down of our warm-up should give you all an idea of the kind of guys I was training with. We were in a fairly large gym (with a cement floor), and we started by jogging in a single file line around a big rectangle that is painted on the ground.....except that their jog felt more like a sprint to me. But I managed to keep up, so all was okay. This ‘jog’ was followed by a seemingly never-ending game of leap frog....same single file line.....if you do the math you will quickly figure out that we were leap frogging over 15 people at a time (because we didn’t just do it once, we kept going around and around the big rectangle). And mind you, these guys were not crouching down – they were just kind of leaning over, with their legs perfectly straight. Again, I managed to keep up (relatively well), although I was definitely pushing on their backs much more than they were pushing on mine (I think most of them just kind of brushed my back with their fingertips on their way over).

Then came the one exercise that I could not do. I’ll call it Advanced Leap Frog. It also involves jumping over people, but it’s a little more complicated than the elementary school version. What happens is this....rather than leap frogging over a line of people who are bending over, you alternate between jumping over someone who is down on the ground in a child’s pose like position (no hands involved in this one), and leap frogging over someone who is standing up (pushing off of their shoulders). Around and around the rectangle they went....while I stood off to the side and stretched....and watched them sail effortlessly over each other’s heads with – I’m sure – my mouth agape.

We did several different kinds of push ups (yeah....I was doing a modified version with my knees on the ground), some sit ups (although the ‘abdominais’ session was nothing compared to a good Saturday class with Elastico!), and then we got down to training. I think these guys were pretty skeptical of me at first, but they quickly realized that I knew what I was doing when I was able to do all of the movements they were training. The class was great, and I am definitely going to their roda on Thursday!