It’s the Y gym, 7 a.m.
“One more!” exhorts Barry,
the aerobics instructor, over the driving music.
It was “one more” for me at
the downtown Taggart Family YMCA/YWCA
gym once again a few years ago.
And the amazing thing about
coming back was that it was as if I’d never left. The instructor, and most of
the people in the class, were the same as when I first joined the downtown Y
when I moved from the suburbs in the late 1990s.
They didn’t look any older.
Even their “dress-down” faded t-shirts for obscure events or Y promotions hadn’t
changed.
“These
folk have been coming to the Y for decades and taking part in the early morning
class for just as long,” says Jill Pomeroy, regional director of the Taggart
Family Y. “Bill Dawson comes to mind as one of the oldest and likely most spry
for his age,” she said. “He is 91 years old and continues to take part in the 7
a.m. class. My sense is that a big part of why these members come is to
be with friends they have made over the years.”
“People continue with a healthy
lifestyle when a bond is formed with that lifestyle, just like a relationship
between people,” says Cheryl Mason, volunteer class leader of the 7 a.m.
Thursday class at the Y. “That is why social is an element of healthy lifestyle
at all ages. Social is just as important as physical activity and movement and nutrition
when establishing healthy habits in your weekly routine.”
Barry Davis, another of the
volunteer instructors, has been teaching at the Y for 25 years. “I started
taking noon hour classes 27 years ago,” he says, “because although I was biking
to work, I wanted something to balance out the biking.”
He says the biggest factor
for sticking with exercise is motivation - “so teaching the class, I had to be
here.”
After a year or two of the
noon class, he switched to the morning class. “Some of those participants are
still around,” he says, “like Bill Dawson and his wife Marita, and Barry Blair
and his wife Nicole Diotte.”
Blair, 83, and Diotte, 67,
drive in every morning from Orleans. “We’ve been coming here for at least 14
years,” he says. “I got in the habit in 1984 working downtown and kept it up.
It’s the socialization. It would have been a lot handier to go to the Orleans Y
but it’s the social aspect here.”
Another longtimer, Renaud
Prefontaine, 80, started doing the morning training when he left the Air Force.
“I needed something to go to. I met Bill Dawson and we went to the Holiday Inn
and it became like a social club. I’m not disciplined to do exercises on my
own; I didn’t like it. With the Y, if you don’t show up one morning, the next
day they say ‘where were you?’”
When the hotel closed, “the
refugees from the Holiday Inn” joined Barry’s exercise class at the Y.
Volunteer Andre Rancourt, a
chartered accountant, has been leading classes at the Y for 35 years, teaching
Mondays for 25 years and then switching to Fridays. “The participants are very
supportive,” he says. “I think of retiring but they say they still enjoy the
class so I keep on doing it.”
He says “we’re a supportive
group as well.” “When I notice some of the old folks haven’t shown up for
awhile, I make a point to call and see how they’re doing.”
The group celebrates
birthdays and weddings, and holds potlucks. They raised $9,500 for treatment
for an instructor with MS. “It’s such a diversified group,” says Rancourt. “We
have engineers, accountants, psychiatrists, ex-military, physicians...the
common denominator is the fitness class.”
A highlight of the 7 a.m.
year is the pre-Christmas Master Class when instructors from Monday Boot Camp,
Tuesday Core Conditioning, Wednesday Step, Thursday Group Strength and Friday
Cardio Combo each take a turn leading part of the class.
“I forced myself to get up in the impossible dawn hours and began
the 7 a.m. class 10 years ago, and have never stopped,” says participant Marie
Gibson. “It has become extremely important to me. The men and women
who come regularly to the class are an inspiration. The class gives me more
than exercise. It gives me social connections that are invaluable,
physical, mental and emotional satisfaction, and my life is immeasurably
enriched because of it.”
