I’ve been away for three months but now I’m back in my gym shoes, gym glasses and faithful old gym pants with the colour washed out of them and I’m presenting my membership card to the bloke behind the desk. It’s the same old unfit unfriendly fat bloke. He probably hasn’t broken into a run for 20 years, but because he works on the membership desk of a gym he dresses like an Olympic athlete. Think Gordon Brown in a shell suit. ‘Gym and swim,’ I tell him. ‘Long time, no see,’ he says, not particularly glad to see me. ‘I’ll put the cardiac unit on speed dial,’ he adds, wafting my card under his reader.
Nothing has changed at the gym since I was last there, except for a new notice headed ‘Lone Gym Usage’, which I can’t bring myself to read. The air-conditioning is turned up too high as usual and there’s no music. Overall the place is as depressing as it usually is.
One other person is using the gym — a young lad pumping weights in front of the mirror. I recognise him. We’ve spoken on occasion. He is an intense individual who changes his shape dramatically and often. Over the past couple of years I’ve seen him go from fat to thin to ripped to fat to ripped again. Steroids are expensive, so presumably his ever-changing body shape reflects fluctuations in his bank balance. Today he is ripped again, but his skin has an alarmingly waxy sheen. And he’s shaved off his eyebrows and replaced them with pencil-thin lines of make-up. He is lifting a barbell and pulling an agonised face in the mirror, which changes to a grin of recognition as he sees me come in.
I do a few stiff, half-hearted stretches on the blue mats then climb up on to one of the treadmills. I walk at 5.4 kilometres an hour for five minutes then I switch it up to 10.6 kph and start to run. When I was last in, I could run for 20 minutes without much effort. Today I’m puffing and panting after a minute and a half.
While I’m on the treadmill, the gym supervisor comes in and walks past me. He looks at me without a flicker of recognition. Before my recent lapse, he was seeing me up to three times a week and usually managed at least a manly nod of acknowledgment. If he was in a rare good mood I might even get one of his laid-back greetings. Of course we both know that if he had his way, only youth and beauty would be allowed to use his gym. But we live in an imperfect world and even a grudging salutation would be nice.
‘Aren’t you even going to say “hallo, how are you?”’ I say, genuinely surprised at his wanton rudeness. I could understand it, perhaps, if I’d had my earbuds plugged in. He stops, turns, and eyes me speculatively. ‘Hallo. How are you?’ he says, finally. He follows this up with a slow, enigmatic smile of his that might be mistaken for diffidence but is in fact contempt. ‘Mind your own business,’ I say.
Two thousand metres on the rowing machine and ten minutes on the cross trainer at level 13 finish me off. I get changed and go for the swim. It’s that hour of the day when only those over the age of 50 are permitted in the pool. Two lanes are set aside for lap swimming. The minimum-wage pool attendant seated on his high chair looks bored out of his mind. I join a big woman who is progressing very slowly up and down in the fast lane. She’s doing a stately, meditative breaststroke. Viewed from beneath, her body is hanging down in the water at an angle of about 45 degrees. She is swimming so slowly I overtake her twice before she reaches the end and four times before she reaches the other end. The next time I overtake her, I lightly brush her thigh with the tips of my fingers. It’s the lightest of touches, but her dignity is impugned. She stands up in the water, calls me an effing idiot, and leaves the lane with as much hauteur as she can manage given that she has to duck herself under a floating rope. A woman in the next lane observes drily, ‘Well, you’ve really gone and done it now.’
I never count my laps. I just swim until I’m exhausted. Today it takes only 20 minutes to reach that state. It’s been a pathetic performance all round. But I exit the leisure centre feeling about a million times better about myself than when I went in. I’ve taken that first step. I’m back in the gym and the pool for the New Year.
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