Fitness profiles: the community within the community

When people ask me where I teach and I answer “the town’s Bayfront Park Recreation Center,” the most frequent responses are — take your choice — “What is that?” or “Where is that?” Clearly one of Longboat Key’s best-kept secrets, it is an older elevated building in a spectacular location on the bayfront at 4052 Gulf of Mexico Drive, immediately north of Ace Hardware.

Now that you can find it, I invite you to arrive at 9 or 10:15 a.m., or any time a class is ending. What you will find is a group of people — mostly women with an occasional man or two — who are chatting merrily and obviously happy. Some were friends before they came here, but most have built relationships with people they met here.

Their common ground is exercise classes. The Rec Center offers a nice variety, some seasonal, some year-round (see the current schedule at longboatkey.org; search “schedule of activities”). For the purposes of this column, I will focus on students of Barbara Anderson, who has been teaching here for 13 years on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. Her classes combine strength training with cardiovascular conditioning.

Meet Helene Tucker, 70, a seasonal resident from Washington, DC. She and her husband, Phil, have wintered here for 11 years and now stay five months. They came here because Phil Tucker was a runner; they were looking for a cultural destination and met folks from Wilmington, Del., who knew the Key. They looked at four places and bought at Grand Bay within 48 hours.

Tucker says, “I was a Southern flower from Birmingham, Ala., where the idea of perspiring was frowned upon. One day, when I came home sweaty from a run, my mother said, ‘Do you have to do that? You did that yesterday.’”

Phil Tucker got his wife started when she was around 35, and their kids, who grew up in a fitness family, are now adult exercisers with kids of their own.

When she is up North, Tucker does not exercise. Here, she takes classes five days a week, including three with Anderson. She likes the fact that the class “has an energy to it. I could go next door and do the elliptical for 40 minutes, but I would take it easier. Having a class on the schedule inspires me to get up and go exercise. It makes me feel good, and I leave class just feeling full of energy.” She had a recent bike fall and attributes her fast recovery to her good condition — an exercise benefit that goes unappreciated until it is needed.

Meet Lynne Ginsburg, 73. South African by birth, she has long resided in Kingston, Ontario. Now fully retired from her past life as a psychiatrist, she and her husband, David, have been coming to Longboat Key for 12 years. They spend about three months at Sea Gate Club. Their original Florida destination was Gasparilla, until their son and his wife, who visited her parents here, persuaded them it would be easier if both sets of parents lived in the same place.

In Kingston, Ginsburg belongs to a YMCA and exercises “five days a week, one or two classes a day with a group of wonderful women who go to coffee afterward.” She says she “really does enjoy exercise but diet, on the other hand, is difficult.” Her children all work out; a son persuaded her to do a triathlon, and she has done several.

Ginsburg’s motivation for working out is basic: to remain functional.

“We travel a lot, and if nobody is there to carry my bag, I want to be able to carry it myself,” she said.

Her wish is that the town would “add a little coffee shop or juice bar at the Rec Center; my experience at the Y at home is so completed by the women gathering and relaxing after we work out.”

Tucker and Ginsburg represent both the diversity and commonality of the people who exercise at Bayfront Park. Vastly different in geography and life experience, they enthuse about Anderson as a teacher.

“She has so much energy, watches closely to assure students have proper form and is constantly calling,

‘Suck in your gut! Tighten your glutes!’” Tucker says.

Ginsburg, too, describes her as “vigorous and energetic.”

Anderson says about her approach to teaching: “Inspiring and motivating my students while helping them develop a consistent healthy lifestyle is my ultimate goal. I feel it’s imperative that each of my students and clients not only feels a sense of accomplishment but also has fun so that they look forward to exercising. I believe that keeping fit, healthy and active gives me a positive outlook that I strive to share with my students.”

If that sounds like a community you’d like to be part of, you will find it a porous and welcoming one.

Molly Schechter is an ACE-certified personal trainer with a specialty in older-adult fitness plus YogaFit Instructor Training, SCF Yoga Fundamentals I and II and Power Pilates™ Mat Certifications. She teaches classes at the Bayfront Park Recreation Center and the Longboat Key Club. Email her at [email protected].