Fitness Course Is Anything but Basic
Some of their fathers may have considered going to Canada to avoid it. Or going AWOL to end it.
We’re talking Army-style basic training here.
Where else but Los Angeles would you see people pay a screaming drill sergeant to order them to low-crawl under camouflage netting before dropping to the ground to give him 15?
That’s the way it is three mornings a week at Venice Beach when raw recruits grunt and groan their way through a military-style obstacle course.
But these are Westside professionals seeking the ultimate workout, not Army privates being initiated into the ranks. They’ve come in SUVs and sports cars, not troop carriers or Humvees. They are not preparing for battle, unless you count the battle of the bulge.
It’s a boot camp for the bourgeoisie, run by a tough ex-Marine wearing fatigues and a stern look.
He and three other uniformed drill instructors are barking out orders and two dozen men and women obediently comply. They struggle through jumping jacks, sit-ups and a three-mile run down the beach before starting the obstacle course.
“Keep moving!” yells Raphael Verela, whose six years as a Marine Corps reconnaissance specialist included Desert Storm duty in 1991. “KEEP MOVING!!”
Verela, 31, of Venice, started offering military-style fitness training four years ago in Pasadena. When the concept caught on, he set up his Optimum Boot Camp shop at the beach in 1998. These days he also operates another one at Malibu’s Surfrider Beach.
Participants pay $75 a week to sample what millions of GIs have experienced for free: a down-and-dirty workout that is a far cry from the Stairmaster-and-sauna ambience of a fitness club.
Verela and his instructors contend the oceanside setting is perfect for exercise sessions. Unlike crowded indoor gyms, the deserted beach has unlimited elbow room when the 90-minute workouts begin at 6 a.m.
Boot camp members do regular health club exercises, such as kick boxing, strength training and stretching, and are encouraged to take part in a nutrition program. But the long-distance beach run and the obstacle course work up the sweat and set this apart from conventional fitness regimens.
Along with the wall-climbing and low-crawling, the course requires hurdling, rope-climbing, pull-ups, tire-running drills and straddle bar climbing--things that participants say combine aerobic and anaerobic exercise in one exhausting sweep.
Twenty-seven-year-old Rachel Jagoda, a graduate history student at UCLA, has sweat pouring down her face and sand clinging to her hair as she climbs over an obstacle wall while instructor Renee Patten stands ready to catch her in case she falls. She doesn’t.
“I did it by myself!” she exclaims to Patten, of Santa Monica.
Jagoda gasps for breath as she explains why she enlisted in the two-month-long boot camp. “I thought this kind of discipline would resonate well in other areas of my life,” she says.
Marina del Rey advertising salesman Alan Ross, 55, is the oldest in the group. He calculates he has been through the obstacle course 62 times--although he almost quit after his first week last fall.
“I’m glad I didn’t wimp out. I needed to get into shape. It was getting to the point I was fading every day at 4 o’clock. I was turning into a couch potato,” he says.
During a break to drink water before double-timing it over to the pull-up bars, others try to explain the lure of a forced workout that sometimes resembles a forced march.
Olga Castro, a 28-year-old Wilshire District hairdresser, is training for the Los Angeles Marathon. Television producer Tom Kelly, 33, of Culver City is strengthening his endurance for snowboarding and mountain biking. Lawyer Alex Cohen, 29, of Beverly Hills wants an antidote to his desk job.
Student Ruben Leivas, 27, of Venice is there to help prepare for his March 18 enlistment in the Navy. National Guard member Robert Parry, a writer from West Covina who is also 27, is toning up for an Army air-assault school course he will take next month.
Santa Monica public relations executive Joanna Brody, 36, is looking for a change of pace. “I’d taken aerobics classes, spin classes, kick-boxing classes. I was bored,” she says. “Here there’s no TV or music when you work out. That’s an appealing factor.”
Group members say that friends often can’t believe that they’ve signed up for boot camp. Some of those who watch the drill instructors boss the group around can scarcely believe it.
“It’s hilarious,” says surfer Eugene Lee, 21, of Venice. “I laughed my head off when I first saw them.”
Another surfer, 23-year-old Marc Kessler, praises the boot campers for getting up early. “They’re here before we are,” he admits.
“But look at their rides over in the parking lot. This is a bunch of rich people who pay other people to yell at them.”
Boot camp staff members arrive as early as 4:30 a.m. to set up the 12-station obstacle course, said drill instructors Miguel Cruz of Northridge and Joe Zeichick of Simi Valley. They haul the equipment away in trucks and trailers afterward.
Verela says the boot camp pays fees totaling about $60,000 a year to Los Angeles County for use of the beach. The permit requires drill instructors to exercise restraint when using their whistles and chanting cadence while running.
“Some of the people living in apartments got a little teed off with us at first,” he says.
Nearby resident Bill Gallagher says people are no longer disturbed by the boot camp. But they are amused.
“I come from Reno,” Gallagher says. “You don’t see things like this in Nevada.”
