One Hour, $500

In just one hour, you could make $500 for your favorite charity.

Tomor­row is our Try Us Out Day — a free work­out to any­one inter­ested in try­ing boot camp. To make it inter­est­ing, we will be giv­ing $500 to the char­ity that brings out the most peo­ple to Try Us Out.

Atten­dees need to be there by 5:45a and the work­out will be over before 7:00a. We meet in the park­ing lot behind Willy’s at Pied­mont Park. You don’t need to sign up for the day, you just need to come ready to work out.

If there is a tie, the win­ning char­ity will be decided by who has the most votes in the poll.

Please help us get the word out and good luck! Remem­ber vot­ing closes at 5p ET 2/21.

A Little Sweat Goes a Long Way

To date, Boot Camp 4a Cause has donated $48,000 to local causes — $25,000 of which has gone to the Pied­mont Park Con­ser­vancy. BC4C’s dona­tion to the PPC has pro­vided the equiv­a­lent of:

• 119 weeks of sum­mer camp scholarships
• 50 envi­ron­men­tal field trips for camp children
• 714 Bales of pine straw for landscaping
• 72 Pieces of land­scap­ing equip­ment, includ­ing pitchforks
• Aer­a­tion of 25 acres of turf
• 250 week sup­plies of dog­gie bags
• Plant­ing of 20 hard­wood trees
• Cre­ation of 5 Bird habi­tats and nest­ing boxes for the wet­land area
• Pur­chase of 2,083 energy effi­cient light­bulbs for park facilities
• Two season’s worth of flow­ers for the entire park

We need your help select­ing our remain­ing 2012 causes!

Pied­mont Park Con­ser­vancy receives 50% of BC4C’s pro­ceeds each month and Kate’s Club has been our fea­tured cause for the first quar­ter of 2012; but we want you, our boot campers and the gen­eral pub­lic, to choose our addi­tional 2012 causes. We will sup­port three addi­tional causes — one for each of the remain­ing quar­ters of the year.

First lady targets world record for jumping jacks

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama wants to jump into the Guin­ness World Records book next week by help­ing break the title for the most peo­ple doing jump­ing jacks in a 24-hour period.

The first lady will lead hun­dreds of local chil­dren in doing one minute of jump­ing jacks on the South Lawn on Tuesday.

The event will be reviewed by an offi­cial from Guin­ness World Records and will sig­nal the begin­ning of a 24-hour challenge.

To break the record, more than 20,000 peo­ple around the world will need to do jump­ing jacks for a minute.

National Geo­graphic Kids is lead­ing the effort to break the record.

Let’s do a minute of jump­ing jacks dur­ing boot camp on Tues­day in honor of this goal!

Source: MSNBC

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find Out What it Means to Us… Now.

By Train­ers for the Day: Julie, Kate, Jeff

I think it’s fair to say that Jeff, Kate and I all had a healthy amount of respect for the train­ers prior to our expe­ri­ence as ‘Train­ers for the Day’ Fri­day, Nov. 11. It would be hard to come out to Pied­mont Park rain or shine, bit­ter cold or swel­ter­ing heat, in the pre-dawn hours, 4–5 days a week if this weren’t the case. All that said, I believe I can speak for the three of us (which I will in this entire post, because I vol­un­teered to write it) in say­ing THAT respect has sig­nif­i­cantly increased after our expe­ri­ence last week.

Even with respect for the train­ers, we each entered into this oppor­tu­nity with one sim­ple thing in mind: pay­back. We wanted revenge, pun­ish­ment, jus­tice — it all came down to hav­ing the win­ning bid so we could enjoy watch­ing the train­ers endure what­ever form of tor­ture we could come up with in our sick, wicked lit­tle minds. We wanted them to gasp in fear when they heard their fate, to fall to their knees as bro­ken human beings when they real­ized the just couldn’t go on, to beg us to make it stop and see in their eyes the mis­er­able mir­ror of our own worst day at boot camp. We envi­sioned stand­ing above the train­ers, as they hud­dled together in tears, and laugh with gusto as our fel­low boot campers car­ried us off into the sun­rise on their shoul­ders shout­ing, ‘Viva La Revolution!’

In the end, we openly admit there’s no doubt what the train­ers do is NOT easy. The time and effort needed to develop a work­out includ­ing a proper warm up and cool down to pre­vent injury, a pre­cisely timed and well orga­nized ‘main event’ to be sure to bring value to all who rose so early to join us, yet still be unique and fun (espe­cially for the train­ers). With full time jobs, fluc­tu­a­tion in our sched­ules mak­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion tough, busi­ness travel or per­sonal com­mit­ments that sapped the energy and focus we had as the week pro­gressed — it def­i­nitely came down to the wire to get it all done.

On behalf of Jeff, Kate and myself, I want to say thank you to all of the train­ers, but it hardly seems like enough. You do this for free, you do this for char­ity, you do this with fel­low train­ers you call friends, and you do this for 30+ strangers any given month with the kind of self­less­ness I, per­son­ally, have seen very few peo­ple exhibit so freely. For your unend­ing well of encour­age­ment, for the push we often need but don’t always appre­ci­ate, for your time and energy, the smiles, the laughs, and, if we’re lucky, the build­ing friend­ships based on a mutual desire for health and well­ness, thank you is hol­low but all I can find that even comes close.

Check out all the pho­tos from Friday’s workout! →

Look What You Did!

Con­grat­u­la­tions on com­plet­ing this month of boot camp.

Think about what you accom­plished this month (these num­bers are approximates):

• 2000 push-ups
• 700 burpees
• 1000 sit-ups
• 800 dips
• 1500 squats
• $1000 donated to Pied­mont Park Conservancy
• $1000 donated to PATH Foundation
• Ran close to 20 miles (maybe more with front to backs)

Not too bad for the month of August.

All that hard work has cer­tainly paid off with the great times we were hear­ing this morn­ing. Please post your improve­ments so every­one can share in them.

To those not return­ing next month please come out to our Try Us Out days, we’d love to see you.

To those of you com­ing back for more fun in Sep­tem­ber, we can’t wait to see your smil­ing faces on Wednes­day, Sep­tem­ber 7th.

From all of us, thanks for a great month!
The BC4C Trainers