I doubt that anything can be as daunting as a first gym session except, that is, a first gym session after a two-year absence. You know exactly what you're in for: how stiflingly hot it will be, how spectacularly boring..... and what a wreck you'll be the day after. But, given the right dose of desperate determination, you'd be surprised what human beings let themselves in for.
So there I was bending, stretching, pushing and pulling until finally I had my old gym clothes on. Bought five years ago, when I had perfect aerodynamics, these clothes are strategic to my plan. Firstly they are unforgivingly skin tight: every ounce of fat screams blue murder in them. Secondly they are my gauge: when I can wear them without feeling the urge to pull my tummy in whenever I pass a mirror I will allow myself to start eating like a pig again.
On arriving at the gym, I am greeted with an array of bouncing bums. The management has a sense of humour and their steppers are lined with their backs to the main door. Now if it were Demi Moore and Cameron Diaz on those steppers the scene would be yummy, but... …well... it is never Demi Moore and Cameron Diaz up there, so from a mile off you can spot a hilarious assortment of bums, bouncing merrily to the tune of Candyshop or whatever equivalent trash they're playing to keep the mice at the wheels these days.
I rush to list myself for the treadmill. There's always a bloody queue for them and the gym tries to make it less bloody by having a civilised list. My half hour is due after Jason, in twenty minutes.
Meanwhile, I find a bike and hop on. The indelicate whiff of sweat suddenly registers. Of course by the time I leave I'll be blending in quite beautifully with the surrounding aroma and it won't strike me that much.
I cycle...…and cycle... and cycle some more: for a full three minutes and twenty-three seconds. They're airing some boat thingy on the sports channel - about as interesting as my kunjata mumbling about her bingo expeditions, and slightly less thrilling. They're playing music I haven't heard before. Normally it takes a full hour to get used to a gym's ten-song repertoire. I'm bored! I start to think up mental plans: what to wear tomorrow evening, what I need from the grocer......…I run out of lists in precisely one minute twenty-two seconds. I start missing my mp3 player. Mental note to self: hunt it up as soon as I get home.
Jason's time is up in five minutes so I get off my bike for a breather, take a swig at my water bottle, wipe the bike and mop my face (not with the same thing). I go to wait for Jason a discreet 2.5m away from the treadmill, waiting for him to hop off.
I find myself smiling: treadmills are cruel. Occasionally you hear a monstrous Thud! Thud! Thud! as someone breaks into a jog and you see the red-faced and sweaty jogger, too blissfully miserable to be embarassed at sounding like a jogging elephant. Mind you, it's fun to watch the first-timers stop in embarassment when they hear the thudding, but the oldies are immune to the embarassment of it all.
The guy's flab bounces before and after him as he breaks into a jog....
Jason's timer says he's got two minutes to go. And then he cheats! He restarts the timer and keeps on walking. I am livid, but I look the guy up and down and console myself with the fact that, at least, he needs it more than I do. The guy's flab bounces before and after him as he breaks into a jog and right on cue there's that Thud! Thud! Thud!. Of course he's not embarrassed - after all if he'd been sporting those shorts throughout his work out why would a thud embarrass him? Oops, I'd forgotten to tell you about the shorts - they are the wide, white satiny sort. The embarrassing type that some (including Jason) pair with shin-high white sock - do you get the picture?
Finally, ten minutes later, he gets off the machine and gives it a cursory mop-down with a paper towel sprayed lightly with the nameless, muddy liquid the gym provides. After that pig has sweated on it for half an hour (plus a stolen ten minutes, may we not forget), only fumigation would really make that treadmill OK(ish), but I grit my teeth and hop on. Off I go, trotting in front of the mirror. Do you think they put mirrors all around so we can admire our gazelle-like elegance as we exercise? Naah! It's the same brand of sick humour that put the steppers back to the door, creating the bouncing-bum situation I told you about before. You are made to watch your flab, enjoying that little tremor with each step and the beads of sweat forming on your forehead.…The bastards!
I realise that I'm "walking" between two steroidal guys. Gym haunters fall into types, you know. The steroidal guys are over-inflated at the top and then kind of taper at the bum. They walk with their hands sticking out, because they think something primordial in the female is still attracted to baboons. They tend to wear full kits including gym gloves, gym belts and tops open at the sides. They pump iron like it was polystyrene - not even the treadmill dares thud under them. When they run, it just gives a more subdued kind of phamm at each stroke.
Two treadmills down from me there's a homely lady, the sort who turns up at the gym because she really has to do something about her body, and who dresses in a way which does nothing but accentuate her flab. I like these women, they help me: they scare me into exercising more. Then there's the other type of woman: the super slim, super sexy, perfect-bummed lot. They are so blessed by the gods, that throughout their exercise routine (which often involves a lot of bum-accentuating stretching) they don't even sweat…and their hair remains intact no matter how long they exercise. They're quite disgustingly perfect in fact. Luckily, I am spared sustained comparison with one such Amazon as I get off the treadmill just a few minutes after she hops on to the one next to mine.
I venture towards some weights: I sit at the machine, remove all weights from it and start lifting. Steroidal guy comes over. ‘
"Bil-mod, Miss," he says.
I only acknowledge his existence with a glance, but he persists. ‘
"Bil-mod.... idejk 'il barra," he insists.
"Tqal ta," I respond, with a grimace.
He suggests I reduce the weights, goes to do it himself and stares.
"M'għandekx wejts hawn!" he says, surprised.
I give him a helpless grin as I get up. Now I remember the other reason I used to bring my mp3 player - it used to block steroidal guys out. I leave him to the machine, as he loads a disgusting amount of kilos.
I go for my sit-ups, but the moment I lie down I get the unholy urge to relax and stare at the ceiling. Back in the days when my stomach was so deliciously flat it was nearly concave, I used to do five hundred sit-ups in each session. Today, being my first time back, I intend not to aim beyond three hundred.
I do fifty and start praying for sweet death!
Come on, I chide myself. I struggle through another fifty and start hallucinating. I go to do some weight stuff for the legs. Yeah, I said "stuff". How the hell am I supposed to know what this tangle of metal-work is called? I just know that this time no steroidal-being interferes, so I must be doing it right,…or else no one wants this machine. A few minutes later, my upper legs feeling like jelly, I hobble back to the carpet for more sit-ups. I struggle through a final hundred and crawl to the door.
I feel a wreck, I'm hot (in the wrongest sense possible) and I can imagine the pain I will be in tomorrow. But I'll be back with my trusty mp3 player in my hand, and a box of painkillers waiting on my bedside table.
************************
I go home, settle into a bubble bath and start enjoying the warm sense of self satisfaction one gets after a workout, because regular workouts are integral to a healthy lifestyle.
Or are they? OK there's tonnes of back and body injuries that can result from exercising. And the sharing of sweaty machines, changing rooms and showers can spread dozens of diseases, including MRSA.…And, of course, there's athlete's foot lurking in the showers, ready to hop on. And yes I know some fuddy-duddies somewhere claim that a healthy lifestyle is found in climbing stairs and walking to the grocer's. They even go as far as to claim that punctuating a sedentary lifestyle with bursts of frantic exercise may lead to heart attacks. But really, should one listen to fuddy-duddies?
Besides, I never use gym showers, and Jason had kind of wiped the treadmill, hadn't he? And as for heart attacks following frantic exercise - let's be frank, one can hardly call what I'd just been up to "frantic", can one?
So I'm OK then?
Right?
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