I was chatting to one of my best friends yesterday and our conversation turned to exercise, most especially me and my hurt machine. I mean, that’s going quite well, I’m up to forty minutes now without feeling like I’m going to collapse when I climb off. I’d go so far as to say I don’t even mind the first 15 minutes or so. Steady on, I’m not saying I enjoy it…I just don’t mind it, let’s not get carried away.
When I look back, my dislike of exercise was baked in by the time I hit my teens, despite getting off to a promising start. I remember my gym teacher at junior school, he was a lovely man with infinite patience, especially since I single handedly shattered his dreams of leading the gym team to victory in the annual schools’ competition. I didn’t do anything wrong as such when I joined gym club, in fact I gave it my all.
Sadly, I could barely pull out of a forward roll without grunting. My leotard regularly got swallowed by my butt cheeks, and I had a habit of changing my mind at the last minute whenever I was required to have both feet off the ground at the same time. Given that the majority of our routines demanded that very thing, I’m afraid I rather cramped their style. But what I lacked in ability I made up for in comedy value and enthusiasm, and I was part of the team.
It was a different story at senior school. My PE teacher was the she-devil. And she hated me for having the audacity to be fat. I mean that woman despised me, and there began five years of double-lesson Thursday afternoon hell. I remember standing up on the hockey field shivering my nuts off in the middle of winter, with corned beef legs topped off by a short blue skirt which barely covered my arse. The she-devil insisted on putting me in goal since I pretty much filled the net…I’d never known misery like it.
And to cap it all, you then had to strip bare naked and shower with thirty other girls who were cutting their teeth on the whole bitchy vibe you know? I think I claimed to be on a period every week for at least five years in order to avoid that particular horror. To be fair, there’s no wonder the asshole voice can reel off excuse after excuse why I can’t do shit, he listened to me all those years and I was awesome at excuses.
So I guess that’s why exercise doesn’t top the list of my favourite things to do. Although having said that, last time I was a skinny string bean I enjoyed cycling. And whilst my bike hasn’t made it out of the garden shed for the last six years at least, come summer I’m all over it. Need to lose a bit more first, I mean it’s a sturdy bike but there are limits, right? It wasn’t designed with Shamu in mind.
But I’m getting there, one pound at a time 🙂
