First published by The Times on 19 January 2019
If you’ve seen me exercise, you already know what I’m about to confess: that I am a feeble, poorly designed spaghetti-woman. I’m relatively tall and I have no serviceable muscles to speak of, apart from incongruously powerful calves, for which I thank my childhood ballet classes. I can’t help you to move the futon, but I’ll obligingly put my hands underneath it and pretend that you’re not doing all the work.
I was a teenager for whom regular dance lessons constituted an excuse to dodge everything else. I loitered in a half-arsed way at the back of the cross-country group, arriving back at school late and mid-conversation with a friend, my hand in a bag of Space Raiders. I feigned continuous verrucas to dodge swimming, and years before I started my periods I was regaling my PE teacher with tales of terrible PMT. I became a twentysomething for whom a pub crawl was an athletic pastime, and then a thirtysomething who did a yoga class once a week, mainly to relieve stress. I’d not been in to a proper gym until a year ago, so I was as surprised as my friends and family clearly were when at 34, feeling knackered and a bit depressed, I gave in and joined up.
Depending on your perspective, you might let me get away with saying that I’ve learnt a huge amount since then. Nothing about muscle groups or high-intensity training, admittedly. Nothing about the best cardiovascular workouts or why everyone’s always banging on about protein, or what you’re supposed to do on a cross trainer. What I have uncovered, mainly, is the answer to a long-held question: what the hell goes on at the gym?
The world of the workout has always been mystifying, tribal and unappealing to me. My flatmate is wildly enthusiastic about the awful-sounding Barry’s Bootcamp and comes home exhilarated by the well-paid sadist who shouts at her throughout. One doctor friend subsists on a diet of mainly chicken so as not to compromise his fitness regimen; another pal tells me that he goes to a very serious, “mamils”-only cyclists’ centre, where everyone talks competitively about their “functional threshold power”.
At my gym — chosen because it is a 12-minute walk from my home — I’ve signed up for a variety of classes, selecting the ones that feel like exertion, but not actual torture. Anything with a relaxation or meditation section at the end automatically gets in. Barre, yoga, Pilates, Zumba and a weekly swim have all passed my test; I swim as an excuse to use the steam room and sauna, of course. Zumba is fun, but it has also been an eye-opener: on a dancefloor, I now realise, I look like one of those inflatable wind puppets stationed outside car dealerships.
Sometimes my system is ruined by staff holidays, when substitute psychos arrive to teach someone else’s class. Barre is one of my favourites: 45 minutes of ballet-ish exercises to tone your legs and core, and perk up your “glutes” — everyone’s favourite gym euphemism. The usual teacher is cheery and brings a soundtrack of Chaka Khan and George Michael. Her substitutes are nightmarish. One is a professional ballet dancer who raises a steel-straight, sinewy leg up to his shoulder and looks around optimistically as though any of us — a rag-tag group of pregnant women, new mums and me — is capable of doing the same. For days afterwards I can’t stand or sit down without wincing. The other substitute is a brutal woman with a James Bond baddie accent who plays techno music and keeps up a relentless fast-paced scream for 45 minutes: “PULSE IT! PULSE IT! PULSE IT! YAS! LIFT IT! LIFT IT! LIFT IT!!”
This is a bit humiliating, but get used to it: the gym in general is no place for dignity. The environment itself, while superficially shiny, is subtly disgusting too. I press my face to the provided yoga mats during sun salutations and inhale the sour stench of sweat from someone else’s downward dog. I have to surreptitiously wipe my own wet handprints off the barre. While swimming, I breaststroke unidentified flotsam out of my way as I travel the length of the pool, gagging squeamishly. One Sunday I gave a guest pass to a friend. We were deep in conversation in the whirlpool — usually inhabited by men who think that it’s OK to sit back and stare intensely into the eyes of the female swimmers in the pool — when I absentmindedly lifted my left hand from the water and found it wrapped in a mouse-like cocoon of matted hair.
Then there’s the nudity — the flamboyant, baffling nudity. I’m not a prude. I’m a fan of the human body. There is a difference, however, between being quietly naked in private, or even in the spacious glory of nature, and being naked with gusto in a chlorine-fragranced, moist-aired communal changing room. It is the latter space that attracts the kind of person who is happy to wander around nonchalantly in their birthday suit as though they’re posing for a series of freestyle Lucian Freud portraits. It’s one thing to be comfortable in the buff; it’s another to stand for 15 minutes nudely reorganising your gym bag in a public place. At that point, one starts to suspect that the opportunity to do this was the reason they joined the gym in the first place.
On one occasion, almost dressed, and pulling on my socks and shoes, I became aware that someone had arrived and rejected the other 500 available lockers in favour of the one next to mine. As I glanced up, I found that she was five inches from my nose, starkers as the day she was born, bent away from me and lovingly moisturising her shins. Eyes wide, I turned back to my shoelaces and concentrated on them as though I was trying to defuse a bomb.
That’s just one type of person who exists only at the gym. I know loads of men in real life, but I don’t know any who are 12ft tall and have magnificent, stallion-like shoulders that slope out from their jaw. I’d say that about 40 per cent of the blokes at my gym are human mountains. They stride around like Thor, if instead of a hammer Thor carried a water bottle and a tiny towel.
As for me, my body hasn’t changed enormously in the past year. My tummy is perhaps less squashy, my arms a bit more al dente; my stamina has improved. The biggest change is that I’ve started to look forward to going to the gym — to feel impatient when more than four days pass without it. I get there, I embrace the indignity and I look forward to the relaxation section, when I can lie back on the acidic yoga mats and be soothed by the anatomical fictions told by the teachers. “Breathe into your pelvis,” they purr. “As you twist at the hips, remember you’re literally wringing toxins from your organs.” It makes no sense, but I calmly concentrate on wringing out my liver and spleen. Then I put my trainers back on, walk past all the Thors and go home to check the cupboard for Space Raiders.