Return to 1997 SPRING Index
By Boswell
There are laws that govern the universe, the Law of Gravity (what goes up...) the Law of Sod (what comes down will land on your head,) the Law of Diminishing Returns (what lands on your head will be less than what went up) and, my favourite, Parkinson's Law (what lands on your head will be large or small in relation to your hat size).
It is this last law combined with a shift in critical mass that disturbed my post-Yule inertial. I thought I had grown all I was going to, that I had expanded to fill the waistband provided and that I had therefore reached a critical mass. No point in dieting or jigging about in lycra (heaven forbid). I was in the shape that God had intended, a disappointment to designer labels everywhere, but we can't all be ectomorphs. I was in California mode 'I love my body (except my nose keeps growing every time I say that)' until I decided to wear my leather trousers of yesteryear. Zoicks. They looked painted on, my thighs resembled black puddings about to make a bid for freedom. I shrugged on a long (very long) jumper to hide the worst and went out for a night on the town with a new date. I spent the whole evening obsessing about my shape and drinking Guinness to feel hip. Oh God HIP!
I felt hip, thigh, tummy and bummy. What a relief to say a hasty 'adios' and wriggle into my car and out of my trousers. I had been oxygen starved all evening. No wonder my partner's eyes had started to glaze over as I mouthed like a dying fish some incoherent nonsense. Haven't heard from him since. Was it the trousers?
My natural laziness dwindled post Christmas into almost complete inertia. I sat in a flomp in front of the TV looking at beautiful thin people advertising food and considering my own expansion. A dwindling life and an expanding waistline seem always to run together for me and this was a crisis of outsize proportions. What was I to do? Eat? This was my usual reaction. I am unhappy, I will eat. Unfortunately all you are then is fat and unhappy, an aching heart surrounded with fatty deposits, threatening to clog the arteries for good. In a complete departure from the usual 'chocolate heals everything' code of living I joined a gym. I tell my friends its a Jim in the hope that they might mistake it for a secret love life. I actually revelled in my new identity as a gym Goer for at least a fortnight before I actually went. Just joining made me feel pounds lighter (£110.00 to be exact) and I rummaged happily around in forgotten corners of my wardrobe to disinter the track suite I knew I had because I had used it as pyjamas on cold nights.
I made an appointment to be introduced to the gym and its facilities. Having spent an eternity trying to look the part by sausaging my socks over the top of my bashed up Nikes and pondering whether the seat pants looked better in or out of the socks I got in the car and drove around the corner to my new temple of the body fit and beautiful.
There is a pervasive odour of perspiration throughout the clinical interior of the temple. People who don't look as if they need to go to a gym bounce past on their air soled trainers. I wonder why I don't bounce in mine...perhaps I have a double puncture. A petite brunette takes me in hand and we sit together filling in forms. Do I have a heart problem/ suffer from epilepsy et, etc. I admit to asthma but this doesn't seem to cut the mustard as far as my mentor is concerned. Anything less than triple by pass surgery would be unlikely to impress I suspect. Already feeling twinges of writers cramp and digit tiredness she bounces and I plod to a bicycle machine for a warm up.
The various contraptions all look rather Heath Robinson but they Techno contraptions with zillions of buttons to push before you actually get down to the peddling thing. A far cry from my old Raleigh three speed shopper these stationary computers with wheels on can measure your heart rate, calorie burn off rate, mileage, revs per minute but they have most groin splitting seats imaginable. I pedal away dutifully watching my heart rate rise until it reaches 150 and I feel a bit pooped: however, I am determined to be a woman of steel to show that even unfit, vertically challenged horizontally advantaged people like me can manage the Tour de France with no trouble - its a matter of pride. I smile nonchalantly (I hope) and try to regulate my breathing as she asks if that's about the right speed, 'oh, yes (gasp), fine (wheeze), easy (puff).
Then it's onto the stretching. This was great and gives me chance to recover my equilibrium, although I feel a complete nana. I start eyeing the rowing machine and so she takes me over and shows me how to work it. This is a more familiar machine to me as there is a little TV screen in front and you are sitting down watching it. I decide to row the Oxford and Cambridge boat race but my oars are hardly in the water before my mentor moves on to a step machine. I have stairs at home but I avoid having to go up and own them as much as is possible and now I am paying to use a machine that is like going upstairs - weird. Least favourite is the treadmill. A man has been running at an exhausting rate the whole time I have been in the gym and I am on the machine beside him trying to walk. His T-shirt is saturated with seat and his feet pound a tattoo on the rubber band that is his tract. I plod along as quickly as I can feeling like a penguin and lose my balance once the machine is turned off. My legs, it seems can't believe their luck and continue to feel the earth move beneath them - 'how was it for you?' asks small petite teeny weenie fit person at my side. 'Fine (wobble) great (wibble) no trouble (buckle).
Weights next. Weight... a familiar concept this. I feel I can redeem myself here. Lifting is not a problem for me. I'm unfit but strong and gaily increase all the weights to impress my skinny companion. Unfortunately I might end up looking like a trucker if I hang around in the weight room too long. Men huff and puff and look as if they are going to do themselves what my Mother would call 'terrible damage' red and straining like constipated Baboons bums, the perspiration in the air makes the whole room feel like a tropical climate before the monsoon.
It was all over. I had been inducted, led like Dante through the strange and unfamiliar landscape of my future. I have been good and inspired by the cash investment my membership represents, have started to o in earnest. I may not be fitter or thinner yet but I have broken the cycle of inertia, now I just have to hope not to break the inert cycles.