Health and Safety

Being of a dramatic persuasion, I often utter the phrase ‘I’ve lost the will to live’ but I never knew what that would actually feel like until last Thursday. I was at the gym with my friend C - in itself an ambitious act because C is a runner. I don’t mean she goes for the occasional jog in the park – I mean she entered the New York marathon as an amateur and came 14th. Anyway, somehow she had persuaded me to come with her to a Tae Bo class – we were both a bit hazy on what this might entail but it sounded like that gentle exercise/meditation thing Chinese people do in parks, and certainly nothing that would warrant a sports bra, let alone any real athletic ability. In actual fact, the class was led by some sort of bionic woman, programmed to inflict a finely calibrated program of torture by eliciting from the hapless participants a non-stop series of manic punches and roundhouse kicks delivered while our feet moved wildly in a style reminiscent of Riverdance. Our instructor clearly favoured psychological warfare as well as physical, constantly demanding 20 repeats of something, only to bark instructions to do another 20 just as we got to zero. After a few of these, there wasn’t much energy in my punches, but there was real aggression. Gradually it dawned on me that this wasn’t just a high-energy warm up to prepare for the tree-hugging – this was going to last for the full hour.
As latecomers trickled through the door I wanted to yell at them ‘It’s too late for me – but save yourselves! Run, run for your lives!’ but I didn’t have the energy, plus tunnel vision was kicking in, making it increasingly hard to avoid walloping the elderly lady to my left. Halfway through a guy came round to make an announcement about a car parked in the wrong place but damn it, the energy required to keep waving my ankle around my earhole had dulled the other functions of my brain and I didn’t even have the wit to pretend it was mine and hobble out, so I had to carry on until the bitter end – 15 minutes of stomach crunches which by the time we got to it felt like a cocktail on the beach.