Not Just Nanas with Noodles

By S'WET™ Instructor Meredith Krejny

When a couple of my friends invited me to go to an aqua fitness class with them at the student rec center, I laughed. I was on our university’s cross country and track teams, and a workout like "aqua aerobics" seemed like a joke to me.

I went with them for a laugh, and as I recall I had fun, but I never considered it a "real" workout for someone like me.

Fast forward about 20 years, and I was training for a marathon. It wasn’t my first one, but I was training to run fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, which is pretty much every non-elite marathoner’s dream race.

About one month before my planned qualifying race, I felt a sharp pain in my ankle after a workout and wasn’t even able to walk without pain. After my doctor confirmed an Achilles tendon injury, all the hard runs I had done that summer, all the early mornings, all the speed sessions, all the long miles felt like they had been wasted. 

I sulked for a bit, but then I remembered reading an article many years ago about how Joan Benoit Samuelson had rehabbed an injury by substituting pool running for running on land before the 1984 Olympic Trials. My injury wasn’t so bad that I was going to need surgery, and maybe if I got in the pool I could try to salvage my season and at least run the race for fun, even if my Boston dream would have to wait.

After college I eventually learned to swim so I could compete in triathlons, so I wasn’t a stranger to the water. And I had even taught aqua fitness classes briefly at a YMCA where I once worked as a lifeguard and got roped into teaching a class for seniors three days a week when they desperately needed an instructor. But I had never taken aqua fitness classes myself (they still seemed "too easy" to me), and I had given up swimming entirely for several months while I focused on my Boston qualifying-time quest.

So I dug out my swimsuit and headed to the pool, bought a monthly membership, and ran in the pool every day. I donned a flotation belt and jogged back and forth between the lane lines, running tiny circuits of the deep end of my lane, or doing high intensity intervals to keep things interesting.

Eventually my physician cleared me to run my goal race and I found myself at the starting line. I hadn’t finished my training schedule, nor had I run even one step on dry land in about a month, and yet I was about to attempt 26.2 miles.

Despite my injury, I crossed the finish line in a time that was nearly 10 minutes faster than my previous personal best, and I had managed to qualify for Boston! It felt like my aqua workouts had not just helped me maintain my fitness, but that they actually helped me to get faster. I was a convert.

After I competed at Boston and needed a new goal to work toward, I decided to change careers. I eventually earned a degree in recreation management and obtained my ACE Group Fitness Instructor certification, not intending to necessarily use it.

But when one of my new employers in the recreation industry was looking for additional aqua fitness instructors at one of their facilities, I told them I could do it. I had a much better knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and exercise programming than the first time I had taught aqua classes a dozen years before.

Now I teach the kind of classes that I myself would want to take. Classes that challenge participants to work hard, push themselves, and most importantly, get results. I still teach a wide variety of students and ability levels, but my high intensity classes are some of the most well-received by participants.

(And they’re the workout notes I take with me when I go to the pool to do my own aqua workouts.)

When I tell people what I do, I still have to deal with occasional smirks or jokes about teaching "little old ladies wearing shower caps." I get it, because I used to think that too. I explain to them how my classes aren’t just "nanas with noodles" and that they should try them sometime.

Because I know the truth: aqua fitness is for everybody.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Meredith Krejny lives in Madison, Wisconsin and is S’WET™ certified, an AEA Aquatic Fitness Pro, ACE Group Fitness Instructor, AEA Arthritis Foundation Aquatic Program Leader, and a lifeguard.

You can also find her facilitating team building and character development programs for youth and adults in southern Wisconsin.

She still runs, but after crossing the finish line at Boston in 2015, she no longer punishes her body with marathons.

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