DAY 3 AT THE GYM

For Ann, my patient trainer

I can’t remember how many times I have bought a membership to a gym, or people have given me one for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries… or how often I have set foot in the gym, taken a look, and never returned, feeling very, VERY guilty about the wasted money and my lack of discipline. Worse still, the times I never showed up at all, and simply lost the money.

But hey, this time is different. Today was my third day. I started my routine (!) using the elliptical trainer… The first day I had been taught how to use it, but found it impossible to keep up my hand-and-pedal coordination. “Just grab the bars and use only the pedals,” my trainer told me. Perfect. I could do that.

So today it was back to the elliptical… After a minute, I thought my knees were about to shatter and I tried to concentrate on a girl in front of me who was on the same type of machine. To forget about my knees, I tried to follow what she was doing. She was petite, well shaped, in her twenties, keeping a speed impossible for me to follow. After a couple of seconds, she let go of the handles and started making dance-like movements in the air, and then moving like a boxer, her lower body dealing with the pedals and her upper body arching through the air like a ballerina on steroids… I couldn’t keep my own slow turtle-like rhythm, as I looked at her, my knuckles white around the idiotic handlebars. And there were NEW surprises… All of a sudden she felt too hot, and without missing a beat, stripped off her T-shirt down to a tank top. I was still getting over THAT when I realized she not only had the TV on, she was also looking at a magazine, flipping the pages every couple of seconds. My own feet were slipping from the pedals, but there was MORE! Moving wildly, she was also listening to music! “Could be worse,” I thought. “She COULD be talking on the phone”… I got my wish! Her phone rang, she answered and kept up her incredible speed, one hand on the phone, and the other flipping the magazine pages. At that point I almost fell off the machine. All this in the two minutes and 38 seconds that I lasted. All I wanted, before climbing off the machine, was to see her face… her sweaty, ugly face!

Ann Seelye Website