27 November 2007

Mirrors and bodies

Mirrors. Mirrors everywhere! ... and I can assure you that I do not have an image problem but I can't understand why there are so many mirrors at our local gym? Stand in the right place and you see an infinite number of sweaty, puffing, red faced, straining bodies working and grunting there way to um ... perfection?

But such a fascinating place - all the interesting people.

You get those who bounce from piece of equpment to the next, playing a kind of pin ball. Have a go on this, have a go on that and bounce out the door again.

There's the couple of friends chatting away on the exercise bikes peddaling at a snail's pace ... on and on they go ...

The superfit granddads! So very impressive, I've a very long way to go before reaching such an enviable level of fitness, but then I've some time before becoming a granddad (I hope). Very inspirational.

Pot bellied body builders. They always appear to be hurting. They seem to spend hardly any time on aerobic fitness and load the weights on all the resistance machines.

The young guys flexing there muscles, looking in the mirrors checking this muscle, that muscle. So blatant and confident, I always reserved my body inspections for the bathroom. Glancing over at the fashionably dressed young ladies - trying to catch an eye.

The young ladies, I try not to look and definitely refrain from catching an eye. It's not good for me to talk about this group for obvious reasons but I do have to say that those mirrors don't help ... it's so very difficult to look anywhere without looking at somebody at the wrong moment.

It's a lot easier when I visit the gym with Mrs Jenks but alas she's not very well tonight so I shall head down by myself, gulp!

Why do I do it? We're trying to keep up with our growing boys, skiing in a month's time, general health, a bit of vanity too.

But a huge reason for me is that this year I've been introduced to a new asthma treatment and for the first time I can exercise without wheezing. You can't imagine how exciting this is for me. I've never been able to run long distance and it became particularly worse when I was about 14/15 when I had quite bad pneumonia. The problem was at school I didn't realise I had asthma so I just tried harder to get fit ... it helped but never quite worked. The new treatment 'is' working very well :-)

I must say that I don't have bad asthma just exercise induced asthma. This also includes coughing and laughing induced asthma - very irritating. That's about the level of it really, irritating. I just kept away from triggers which doesn't mean I didn't exercise, I just limited the type of exercise or extent, but now ....

Trouble is when I removed the asthma symptoms I was left with a lower level of fitness and that's how I started going to the gym.

Next year I'd really like to try some running.... Tonight I'm going to the gym and I shall ignore the mirrors, and the young ladies too - it's not too difficult as they ignore me too ;-)

What’s your experience of gyms?

No comments:

Creative Commons License