??? Weeks Out

??? Weeks Out

What an interesting and humbling week.

I left for camp Friday morning. I had my 6 pack bag all ready with food for the entire 3 days and a carry on bag with my workout clothes. We got up at 230 am and Brian drove me to Allentown airport for a 630 am departure. I arrived in Daytona Beach at 1030. Grabbed a rental car,  stopped off at the grocery store for a few gallons of water and headed to camp.

The first day our session started right after I arrived at 12 and ran until 430. We had a lecture by Shannon Dey about the Bombshell background and how it has grown and what it represents. How our coaches are there to help us and we need to reach out to them for all things. Weekly progress pictures, questions, accomplishments, bad days,  etc. After the lecture we did what was called 'A tour of Daytona' with my coach,  Coach Vanessa. After the tour of Daytona we did a leg workout. I learned real,  real,  quickly that the workouts used a whole lot less weight than I was using and were a lot faster paced.

There were 10 of us at camp and 9 of us were staying at the bombshell house. 9 girls aged 18 to 36 (36 being me),  3 bedrooms with 3 beds each, 2 bathrooms,  and 1 kitchen.

The first night was rough for me. I am an extremely light sleeper I ended up on the sofa. I think my emotions were crazy because of exhaustion but I was annoyed and I missed my family like crazy. I ended up crying myself to sleep.

Camp day 2 was much better. We started at 8 am. First we had posing practice,  Which I am absolutely horrible at. I don't have an ounce of confidence when it comes to the posing,  I am going to have to practice several times a week,  then we had killer cardio,  then we had a food prep lecture with Coach Gen.  Last, we ran the Daytona Bridge...twice!  This was tough.  I was apprehensive about it all weekend,  but I did it,  and I did it well. I was proud of myself. After camp we went back to the house and relaxed a little until it was time to go to Shannon's house for our cheat meal.  We got 2 pieces of pizza. With all the workouts I honestly felt like I could eat an entire pizza.

The last day was rough. I have positive and negative feelings about it. We had a booty workout,  then an upper body blast workout,  and last a mock show. The mock show is what I dreaded all along.  Almost all the girls had competed at least once before, so they had already had some posing experience.  I had NONE, nor did I have the confidence to do it.  We got in line by height and the judges (Coach Vanessa,  Coach Elliott,  Coach Asia,  and Shannon) called us out 1 by 1. After we all went Shannon pulled us all together and told us we looked horrible. She told us to pull the emotion out  of it,  be confident,  and strut our stuff.  This was much easier said than done; especially for me.  The girls that previously competed moved so smooth and fluently.  I felt unsure and herky jerky.  I seriously felt like I had braces on my legs that made me walk stiff as a board!

I left camp thinking; what the hell was I thinking.  There is no way I can walk out on stage all 'sexy like' like that.  Ironically enough while waiting at the airport to board my plane this woman approached me.  She said she saw me at the 'rookie' camp and that she is a 'veteran' Bombshell.  I knew she was older than me, so I immediately told her how I was feeling.  Turns out she is 42 years old and does competitions.  She was laughing and telling me how she had no business doing her first show and that her posing was awful.  Said she came in dead last!  She has since done other shows and has improved in everyone.

So, as I rode home I thought to myself, the coaches told me I had a great shape, I know I have the dedication and the discipline to the food and workouts, so I AM going to follow through with this, but I think I am going to choose some smaller local shows instead of chomping off New York City right off the bat.  I have to wait for the website to be updated with the small shows and then I will choose.  Once I choose a show my ??? will change to how many weeks out I am.