Atlanta Mania Recap Part 1

Greetings Dudes and Dudettes,

As I promised, I have my recap of my experience at the Atlanta Mania below. First off, I want to thank my friend Lisa for experiencing this with me. I'm so glad we did this together.

Ok. I'm going to break it down by day.

Wednesday:
I picked Lisa up from her work and we drove over that evening. We stopped for a quick dinner and didn't have too too much traffic or construction. We did arrive fairly late, but that's a time change for you. We checked in to the conference hotel, the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead, and settled in.

Cover of the manual for our certification.

Thursday:
We had both signed up for the Aquatic Barre certification on Thursday. Our instructor had emailed and texted to say she'd had some bad travel luck and our training wouldn't start till 9:30, instead of 9am. Billie Wartenberg was our instructor and she was fabulous. We went over quite a lot of anatomy and posture stuff in the lecture portion of the day. Land barre is very focused on posture and that translates quite well into the water. We had a quick lunch at the coffee bar in the lobby and got back to work in the classroom. We had a group of about 8 participants and they all had inspiring stories. It was really great to be in a fitness atmosphere with a variety of body types and skin tones. Lisa and I both felt like these ladies were familiar. We had a 50 minutes master class at the end of the day to practice and experience the techniques we had covered in the classroom. The pool was not closed to other hotel guests about which I was initially annoyed. On further thought, I realized it simulated our teaching experience at the Rec Center at UA very well. We never have the pool to ourselves so it was instructive to see how to build the atmosphere of a class like Aqua Barre with lots of distractions.

Lisa and I post Aqua Barre.          

Billie Wartenberg and I

   
After class, we changed and headed to our staff assistant training. To get a deeply discounted conference and certification rate, we'd signed up as volunteers. Thursday evening was the staff training and the conference provided dinner. (Just some Dominos pizza and salad, but at least it was something.) Here we received lots of information about who to contact if there is an issue in our assigned areas, what time we needed to be where, and so on. Lisa and I both signed up to work one of the aquatic classrooms on Sunday. (We did this during our initial conference registration.)

The view of hotel pool from our room.

Friday:
The conference officially kicked off Friday. Lisa and I attended an Aqua Pole class during the first session. You'd think pole dancing in the water would be graceful but we were proof that it's a great workout, but not our best look.

Next was a session Lisa was really excited about, Country Fusion. It's a combination of line dancing and fitness. We had such a blast. I had been skeptical because country isn't what I normally listen to these days and I didn't really know anything about the program. However, I LOVE line dancing. I love organized dancing of any kind. So, this was right up my alley. Also, the instructor used songs from my growing up years and some real honkey tonk stompers which just got everybody in the class moving. Lisa was totally right, I was totally wrong.

Lunch happened next. We were so low on energy and hungry that we trudged across the street to Buckhead Pizza Co. and had some pasta. Marginal food. We took our time and didn't really rush back. We savored the opportunity to sit somewhere that wasn't the floor or hotel conference chairs.

We didn't really have much of a plan directly after lunch so I decided to go to a session called Club Vibe and Lisa tagged along. Another dance fitness style, much more hip hop and club like (as you might imagine from the name). The presenters turned off most of the lights and had some colored strobes going which added to the fun, high-energy atmosphere. However, the music and mic were WAY WAY WAY too loud. I wound up directly in front of the speaker and had to leave after two songs. I thought the style was cool and would like another opportunity to experience their choreography, but my ears literally hurt for the rest of the day.

Since we had some unexpected time to ourselves, Lisa and I decided to check out the expo. This is where I felt the conference was a little weak. The major conference sponsors were there, but there were no yoga mat vendors, no activity tracker venders, or vendors that catered to bodies beyond a large or extra large. I thought the expo was rather small and it was annoying to have to walk through it every time to get to some of the largest presentation spaces. I very much dislike sales heckling and it became old very quickly.

Friday night, the conference leadership held a staff appreciation party/get-together in a nice suite. We got to hang out with other volunteers, chat about how we came to be where we were, and eat some pretty good bbq. Sarah Kooperman, the founder of SCW and SCW Mania, spoke and handed out door prizes. I was lucky enough to win a free pair of Ryka shoes (one of the main sponsors of the event).

It was a long day and we were really, quite tired after the full days on Wednesday and Thursday. Lisa and I did our best to make it an earlier night than usual.

I'll review the rest of the weekend in part 2.

Thanks for reading!