OK, so I did it.
Got up at 6 when the alarm went off, hit it fairly hard until it squeaked, and got my ass and the significant rest of me over to the gym.
"You'll have to be re-inducted," they said - which to me sounds like something a Doctor Who villain might say. Apparently, the gym has just recently had a complete equipment re-fit - some of the stuff that was there before has been upgraded, and some of it shipped entirely out in favour of newer, funkier stuff that does the same job or something similar, with less metal and more pull-cords. Anyhow, the re-induction was some form-filling, and some oohing and aahing and oh-right-I-seeing with a Liverpudlian women whose name now escapes me, but almost certainly wasn't Bernadette.
So I didn't get on the exercise bike till 7.15. The new exercise bikes at the gym are rather sleeker, and computer-processed and altogether rather more bastardly than the old ones, which now, in my memory, feel like big old lollopy dogs compared to what I find myself compelled to think of as the Dalek Bikes. They demanded information before you could deign to ride them - age, sex, height, weight, chosen workout profile...Answer! Answer! ANSWER!!!
See? Dalek Bikes. Had to look up a pounds to kilos conversion on my phone before I could give them what they wanted, then began pedalling, to the initial sounds of Alice Cooper in my one working ear. The thing about the old lollopy bikes was that if you set them on a program, they'd follow it and it had a certain logic - you'd go up in gradations, and down in gradations. So imagine my rather breathless consternation when the Dalek Bike went from Level 9 effort straight to Level 19!
It would be true to say that by the half-hour stage on a Dalek Bike, I was thinking about quitting. Well, needless to say I wasn't just thinking about it - in my head, I had run away to a tropical island with quitting and was plying it with fruit-flavoured local hooch. I was drooling into quitting's ear, telling it about how cool and froody the world was before the Dalek Bikes came to exterminate me.
Which was when quitting slapped me round the face and stormed off in a huff, proclaiming it wasn't that kind of possibility. I was left alone and sweaty and desolate, with only my mate Sian on text saying "Keep at it!" like a kind of mentalist chipmunk cheerleader, the nicely odd sound of Bill Bailey's Leg of Time (Metal Version in my earpiece, searing pain in just about every bit of me, and bastard-stubbornness.
Bastard-stubbornness and I are old friends. I've absolutely no doubt that as I grow older, bastard-stubbornness will mature into flagrant self-righteousness and moaning on about the government and the shit that's on the telly - in fact, I know it will, because the process has been ongoing for about the last eight years - but every now and again, bastard-stubbornness shows up in my everyday make-up like a deeply closeted drill sergeant, all mustard-coloured moustache and perfectly pressed beret.
This morning, bastard-stubbornness demanded of me whether I was the kind of hopeless blubber-sack he thought I was, or whether I had any goddamned spine at all. I wanted to punch the bugger, but that's the problem with abstract concepts - they live inside your head, so you end up punching yourself in the face, and then being taken to a nice white room for a lie down and a chat with the three-dimensional people.
If I had a backbone, he said - and I did, I could feel it screaming - then I'd finish the hour I had said to everyone I was going to do, and THEN get on the muscle machines. Bill Bailey moved on to Apocalyptic News, I straightened up and kept pedalling. Not only did I finish the hour, I did an extra fifteen minutes so I could notch up 500 calories (I know, I know, it's not much for an hour's pain and bastard-stubbornness, but I'm led to believe that every little helps, alright?). Then, I hit the muscle machines.
They hit back. Did some back work, some shoulder work, some pectoral work, and the stupidest sit-ups in history. They can't really be considered sit-ups. The sit-up machine was one of those that had bitten the dust when the Dalek Bikes invaded the gym. What replaced it is just weird - it's an arrangement where the straps of a rucksack are attached to a shitload of weights. You stand, strap on the rucksack-straps...and then you lean forward. the weights are lifted (if you're doing it right, and don't throw a back-bend in to impress your fellow gym-goers), by the crunch of your abs, so it does the same job as a sit-up machine, but let me tell you - if you say "Yeah man, did 20 sit-ups", you feel righteous and virtuous and like you deserve the finest pig-based breakfast on the planet. If you say "Yeah man...I did 20 lean-forwards" you feel fucking stupid, and vaguely ashamed, and like Oliver Twist after he asked for more gruel. So I think it's best to say I did 20 vertical sit-ups (Ooh yeah, that sounds hard and cool)...and then I fucked very definitely off, still a bit John Wayned from straddling the Dalek Bike for over an hour.
I thought of the weigh-in that awaited me, and the potential of making my own cereal for breakfast - and instead stumbled across the road, pre-weigh-in, for breakfast at McDonalds. I was half-good; I ordered the plain gruel, with a calorific value of 285. Annnnd then I blew it by adding a coffee frappe, calorific value about 300. I remember being about 85 calories over my Dalek Bike allowance on that breakfast anyhow. So on the one hand that was a wasted hour that, come the end of my life, I shall heartily resent, but on the other hand, and looking at it with my Positivity Specs on, it was practically a free breakfast and it filled me up till way past lunchtime.
I went back to work, but something had clearly occurred to other people that hadn't occurred to me since the half-hour stage. I had an email, a couple of missed calls and a voicemail from d, and a text from Sian, all pretty much saying the same thing - "Oh god, are you dead?!"
I assured them both that I really wasn't. In fact I was so much the opposite of dead that I intended to do the same thing tomorrow (without the re-induction to slow me down).
d asked about the weigh-in.
"Ah, well," I said, "I was up a pound and a half, to 18st 9.5, but I weighed in after breakfast, so..."
"What did you have?" she asked.
"A McDonalds porridge," I told her. There was mirth on the other end of the line.
"Wow..." she said, "the rationalisation math of the Disappearing Man..."
"Hey!" I said, "you don't know how dense that stuff is! There are physicists looking for Dark Matter to explain the disproportionate weight of the universe, you know. I don't reckon it's dark matter at all, so much as Grey Matter. Never underestimate the potential weight of a serving of McDonalds porridge!"
"Yes dear," she spluttered, before bursting into laughter again.
"See how y'are," I muttered.
Anyhow, day 1 of the two-hour plan, achieved, thanks to Bill Bailey, Sian and bastard-stubbornness. Bring on day 2...
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