Gym bunny

All these years I was labouring under the misapprehension that I hated exercise.
Turns out what I really hated was exercising in ugly places.

So I joined a gym. It’s not my first gym. I joined a gym just down the road from work a while back. I think my attendance there could be described as sporadic at best. I did try to go once a week. But the thing is…. I had off-peak membership because it was so far from home there was no way I’d ever go at the weekends, so I could only go during my lunch-break, and since I got promoted I have loads of meetings, and I can’t turn up to afternoon meetings all pink and tired out, and even if I rushed there and back I could only really do 20 minutes, and – and – and….

The whole business model of gyms is based on memberships like mine was at this place. I signed up for a direct debit, and like a fool I kept paying it for at least six months after it became obvious to everyone, apart from me, that it was basically a charitable donation rather than anything useful.

And I kept thinking that I would do other forms of exercise. ‘I’ll do lots of walking! Free! Easy to integrate into my normal routine! It can’t fail! Right?’
Wrong.
‘I’ll go running! The fresh air! The ‘quick fix’ of cardiovascular exercise! The weight will drop off me! It can’t fail! Right?’
Wrong.
‘I’ll go swimming! I’ll find a local pool, and I’ll… er…. hang on. The only pool near me is not AT ALL convenient for my journey to or from work. But I’ll still go there! Several times a week! Right?’
Wrong.

One can’t help but be touched by my continual optimism. But it wasn’t getting me anywhere. And I realised that it’s all very well fretting about not being pregnant, but perhaps the best thing for me to do was to get on with becoming a bit more healthy.

Hence how I ended up sitting rather self-consciously in the reception of Swanky Gym, signing up for membership. Susie, my ‘fitness consultant’, was talking me through the sign-up form.
"So what are your aims?" she asked, brightly.
"Well. In one year and ten months I will be thirty. And I don’t want to end up as a fat, diabetic, arthritic old woman. And so I need to do something about that now."
Susie looked a little alarmed. "Right. And what would you say has prevented you from meeting your fitness goals in the past?"
The most obvious answer here was that I have never had any fitness goals in the past. I decided Susie wasn’t ready for this, and answered quickly, "Oh, just abject laziness, really."
Susie laughed in a very gratifying way, "You’re so funny!"
"No, I am being completely honest. I am completely focussed and goal-driven in all other areas of my life. I’m just exceptionally lazy when it comes to physical exercise."
Now Susie just looked shocked. But she was polite enough to hide it, and so she finished filling in the form, and did my induction.

I am a bit embarrassed by joining this gym. It’s so beautiful I feel quite out of place. It’s so expensive that today, when my grandfather asked me how much I was paying for it, I said,
"I am too ashamed to tell you." and refused to divulge any more.

It has a beautiful pool (see? value for money… or something). It has lovely pools which it calls ‘hydro-therapy pools’ to make them sound sensible, but which are basically lovely bubbly warm pools where you can lie after exercise and reflect on the fact that, really, your membership fees are a drop in the ocean compared to the immeasurable Wellbeing Benefits that you are accruing by lying in said bubbly pool. There are great piles of fluffy towels and bathrobes. And I have often commented (often) that a Very Inconvenient thing about gyms is having a huge, heavy, damp towel in your gym bag. Hence, it strikes me that lovely, geometrically folded, heaps of freshly laundered towels are in fact not incredibly unenvironmental, but yet another way of tempting me back to the gym more often. The machines in the gym have television screens on them to distract you from the pain and boredom of the cross-trainer.  (I can’t find my headphones at the moment, so had to watch TV today with no sound. If you’re only watching ‘You’ve been framed’ then I can exclusively reveal that you don’t really miss that much without the sound…) There are GHD straighteners in the changing rooms, for crying out loud. There is Molton Brown shampoo and conditioner in the showers.  When I staggered into the showers for the first time, wrapped in my fluffy white bath-robe, and saw the ‘Cool Menthe’ shampoo… AND a bottle of conditioner (often ignored by the probably short-haired and male people who evidently do the ‘free toiletries’ buying for most of the hotels I stay in)… well, I don’t think it’s exaggerating too much to say that I nearly wept.

The first time I went, I nearly couldn’t walk back downstairs afterwards. The first time I used the resistance machines, I ached for two solid days afterwards. But (and I know this isn’t news to anyone except me) it really is getting much easier. And I’m almost… whisper it…almost enjoying it.

Obviously ask me again in six months time when I have been for five months, and am frantically trying not to add up all the money that I’ve spent subsidising someone else’s time in the jacuzzi. But for the moment, ladies and gentlemen, I appear to have turned into someone who goes to the gym. The spectre of the arthritic, mordibly obese, early-Alzheimers, diabetic woman who needs to be craned out of the house has at least receded slightly. For now.

with love,
therumtumtugger
xx

Other things:
1. I have been lured onto http://www.facebook.com Any pretence that I might have a life outside my study and my broadband connection is now officially over.
2. I realised recently that for a while now, whenever I read an article about a woman in a newspaper which contains information like, ‘Laura, 42, a solicitor from Richmond, has two daughters, aged 12 and 9’ I mentally subtract the eldest child’s age from the woman’s age ("30! Yesss!")  I realised I have been doing this for months without even realising it. I think we can conclude that this is definitely A Bad Sign.