Gym-phobia

I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t made it to the gym this year.

I’m mentioning this now because I was silly enough to make the gym my new year’s resolution for 2008. And I was even sillier to make this resolution within in earshot of people who will not fail to ask about this resolution the next time I see them.

Great.

It’s so easy in the midst of new year’s revelry to issue forth with promises about change and new starts. It’s all Happy New Year! Things are going to change! I’ll be a new person. La la la!

And then cometh January. And it lands with a thud, crushing your all your good intentions.

For the first couple weeks I nimbly avoided the gym. You know, what with settling back into routine and being busy with “this and that”, well, I hardly had time for the gym, did I?

That worked for awhile, but by the third week of January, I was pushing it with the settling-back-into-routine line, and if I wasn’t careful people were going to start asking exactly what “this and that” meant and why I was so busy with it.

And here it is February 1^st and I still haven’t managed to drag my sorry old carcass through the door of a gym. And even worse, I’m running out of excuses.

I know it shouldn’t be that hard. It is just a gym for heaven’s sake. People go all the time and most of them come out trim, strong and fit as fiddles.

So what’s the problem?

Well, I don’t know exactly, but I will say this: Whenever I walk by a gym and peer through the window, it’s not a gym I see. I do not see weight machines, stationary bicycles, treadmills or IPod-festooned people exercising their way to health and fitness.

No. What I see is a dungeon full of 17^th-century instruments of torture.

I see flushed faces in various states of grimace. I see sweaty bodies grappling with clunky machines that are made from pulleys, wires and black brick weights that land with a jarring clank.

And I see people sitting on one-wheeled bicycles spinning and spinning and spinning and getting nowhere. I also see people rowing, rowing and rowing but not moving an inch, and worst of all I see people running on a treadmill.

I went on a treadmill once. It made me feel like a hamster.

I used a cross-trainer once. I fell off. Fell off a cross trainer. You aren’t supposed to fall off a cross trainer.

I tried a weight machine. I made me feel as though I were being punished for acts of witchcraft. Being thrown in the river with a heavy stone tied to my ankle would have brought more pleasure.

The machines and contortions I see in gyms are the things I see in my nightmares. I’m convinced that if you dropped some poor wretch from the 17^th century into a modern gym, they’d run for their lives. That’s what I want to do whenever I see a gym. Run. For my life. Because if you’re running for your life, at least you’re getting somewhere.

Clearly then, I am in need of an attitude adjustment if I’m ever going to live up to my resolution to go to the gym. Either that, or I will need new friends who were not present on the night I made this silly resolution to go to the gym.

Freelance anti-gymnast Gail Lethbridge is seeking new friends who did not witness her new year’s resolutions for 2008. Visit her blog: http://giftedtypist.com