Saturday, July 12, 2014

28 days later

My first visit to the gym for twenty eight days. First it was our two weeks holidaying in France and Italy, then my week of food poisoning and finally my week of 'regaining strength'. Anyway, conscience doth make gym bunnies of us all and so today my toe was dipped once more into the breach.

Do you know how fast you lose fitness when you stop exercising? Exponentially. Usually I treat two kilometres (= 240 Calories) on the cross-trainer as a wholesome warm-up. Today, I made 1.1 km and then had to have a sit down. After a rest, and with Chris Froome-style willpower, I returned to the infernal machine .. and managed another 300 metres before l'abandon.

Aerobics done, it was time to hit the resistance machines, where I was pleasantly surprised to hit my three sets of 15 repetitions per machine. Pleased, that is, until I again ran out of energy and this time had to lie down. I pretended to be doing stretching exercises.



On my arrival, I had thought the staff would have noticed my long lay-off and had my excuses prepared. But they smiled as usual and when I laughingly confessed that I hadn't been for a while, they looked genuinely surprised and enquired "Why is that?"

I must stop thinking I am the centre of everyone's universe!