Several of my colleagues have recently been trying to encourage me to re-join the gym. This strange cult of healthy individuals often wander over in their lunch break to ‘Work Out’. Now, I was once a member of gym and let me tell you this for nothing, a ‘Work Out’ for me consisted of ‘working out’ how on earth I’d ended up there in the first place and then ‘working out’ how soon I might be able to leave. I think that I must have had some strange sleep walking disorder and taken myself over there in some zombie-like trance or something because no human in their right mind would go voluntarily. That said, I’m not in my right mind so what happened is anyone’s guess. Let me tell you some more about the gym.

I had a little name card. They told me I could put my full name, just my first name or even a nickname if I so chose as long as I was sure I could identify my own tag. Wow I thought. What shall I call myself? In the end I thought, I’d settle for ‘Claire’ and then draw some flowers on it. Once that was done they took me over to ‘The Wall’. Upon this wall were two progress charts. You started out at the bottom of the first chart or ‘The Pyramid of Shame and Laziness’ and then once you had been enough times you graduated from that chart and were able to progress to ‘The Pyramid of Lycra and Great Joy’. I felt a tragic sense of deep humiliation each time I moved my sticker. Exercise is not my strong point and every visit to this place would bring with it a fresh bruise or wound of some kind. Whether it be knocking my head on a concrete pillar or whacking my shin on the pedal of one of those arsehole exercise bikes, there would be some sort of calamity. I was so bad I feared they might start making me move my name back down the chart but they took pity on me and saw I was a danger to myself but nobody else so they let me be.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever managed to graduate past the Pyramid of Great Shame and Laziness due to the fact that I am lazy and that after the third near death experience it seemed foolhardy to carry on. The reason I joined the gym and the reason I left it were actually very similar – I am lazy and bad at exercise. The main difference between the two being that when I joined I was full of misguided optimism and thought I would become one of those energetic people I hate. HA!

At one stage I even joined a class. It was the height of summer, 9 million degrees in the shade and a classroom with no air conditioning. A winning combination if ever there was one. The woman who taught the class seemed to have been dismissed from the army for being too aggressive. She bellowed at us to ‘push it’ and ‘feel the burn’. It was at that point that I started to get sceptical. ‘Feeling the burn’ has always been, in my opinion, an indication that it’s time to see a doctor and get some strong antibiotics. It certainly is not a target to aim for.

The class involved running around a room like a complete tit. Loud music was played and the more mental you looked the happier the drill sergeant would become. She gave the order for us to move around the room to various types of equipment and we would have to utilise them as best we could or ‘get down and give her 20’. There was an aerobic step which was sadly too low for me to throw myself off and some elastic stretchy things designed for biceps curls. The idea with those was that you put one end under your foot and held the other with your hand. The main problem with this was that the foot end seemed to have some sort of grudge against me and every now and then when I least expected it the bloody thing would ping up and launch itself towards my face. This in turn forced me to dive out of the way and usually go crashing into the hapless soul being forced to do Star Jumps until they collapsed, just feet away. There were also skipping ropes, exercise bikes and several mats each with a purpose more evil than the last. Purposes such as push ups, star jumps and my particular favourite ‘running on the spot’.

Now, any of these activities alone would, for me, constitute a thorough work out. All of them together crammed into a 40-minute class ought to have human rights activists heavily campaigning to force the government to intervene. That was a lesson learned although I have to admit it took about 5 or 6 classes for me to learn it. I can only assume I was addicted to the euphoric thrill of the class finishing.

Embarrassment is another big reason for me wanting to steer well clear of that place at all costs. Parading around in Lycra is not my idea of a good time under any circumstance. Embarrassment and pain were often very closely linked. One particular occurrence springs to mind. I had very recently joined (and was very nearly ready to never go back). I was new, stupid and unfamiliar with the equipment – unfamiliar enough to still actually have a desire to use it. I decided that in order to better improve my chances of catching the bus when I was late in the mornings it would be a great idea to use the treadmill or, as I now call it, ‘The Death Mill’. I looked at some of the sport-boffins already happily running along on their glorified hamster wheels and tried to copy their technique for minimum humiliation. They had their towels draped over the handrail and their water bottle’s cleverly wedged behind the electronic screen of pain (designed to show you that you’re slower than a malnourished snail). Looking back, there is no way I should have ever tried to copy this. It was, given my track record, a disaster waiting to happen. So what happened next? Well, I started the treadmill in motion and commenced jogging, slowly at first but eventually I gained the confidence to take it up a peg or two.

“Wow” I thought to myself “I’ve got the hang of this already”! It was at that precise moment that my water bottle was shaken loose by the vibrations of my stomping great feet slamming down on the conveyer belt of doom.

“Shit!!” I thought as I stupidly and automatically reached down to catch it. Sadly I missed the bottle and instead lost my footing. After a brave and valiant fight with gravity on the treadmill I was defeated. I was launched into the wall behind me at great speed. The water bottle escaped unharmed, I however had a bruised arse and an ego to go with it.

Speaking of embarrassment there is something else. The changing rooms were not to my liking, not one little bit. There were rather large quantities of ‘well endowed’ women at this gym. When I say well endowed I am talking boob size not brain size. Add this to the fact that the changing room was communal and there was only one way out and you don’t have a recipe for a happy Claire. I was once forced to stand and chat to a topless woman whose boobs were flapping about all over the place. She kept telling me about how much she likes the gym and how she’d been going there for years. I was nearly weeping, not knowing where to look or how to steer the conversation around to the novel idea of getting dressed. She was directly between the door and me. It was a living hell.

You might be able to tell but I am not the sort that would do well on a naturist beach. At school I was always one of the first dressed or changed for swimming while others seemed to relish parading round in all their glory! It was like some sort of horrific meat market! In the end I pretended I hadn’t had my shower yet and went back in until she went away. I know I’m pathetic – you can judge me.

The majority of these ‘bad things’ happened with the first month of me joining this evil place and by month three, I’m ashamed to say I had stopped going all together. Sadly, the direct debit to my account continued ‘working out’ at the gym for a further nine months before I was able to cut my losses and vow to never return. And so, with this in mind, I have to ask myself how long it will be before I buckle under the peer pressure and find myself tearfully signing another years contract and once again being suckered in to the scary place known as the gym.