Thursday, 13 November 2008
The Dumbbell Gazette
Not far from the dark satanic treadmill is the exercise bike, whereon today I observed a lass leafing through a magazine while the lower half of her body sawed away at the pedals. That's the ticket, thought I, concocting a summer schedule of simultaneous cycling and Turgenev, with intermittent bouts of Black Forest cake. But then I saw what she was reading - Slimmers' World - and my heart sank as only a heart exposed to two-words-one-of-which-is-world can. Picture, reader, if you will, the Apocalypse: hordes of benchpressers running around in pink lycra eating protein bars. One slimmer is dandy, two are hunky-dorey, three make you slightly self-conscious about your intentions vis à vis the Black Forest cake, but a whole world of them! I haven't felt this anxious since the 1997 release of Spice World, bringing platform shoes and PVC mini-frocks to a primary school near you.
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6 comments:
I've been fairly pleased with my book-reading tally of late; not so pleased with my physical exercise tally. In fact not with my body-movement-at-all tally, unless moving one's eyeballs to scan a line of prose and flipping pages in a book counts as a heavy workout.
I then thought about trying to install a book support in front of the treadmill or cycle. Read and run, y'see.
Unfortunately this hasn't gone down too well:
1. I'm too lazy to get my innovation going
2. I'm so unfit, when I start to do a it of a jog my head starts swimming which means reading anything or taken anything which needs any part of the brain faculty is ruled out. Now I know why people choose to run and watch reality TV instead.
3. Sweat from running ruins nice book and makes ink run.
It was a good idea at the time, though. Well, it seemed like it, til I had to decide between body or book and book won by a long shot...
-Maria
Your priorities are commendable. Reality TV would be better than the soft porn video-clippery they show at my gym. It's enough to turn a person off heterosexuality for life, the sheer bikinied gyrating slobbery constancy of it.
(Not that heterosexuality has a monopoly on slobber and gyration. But really, you'd think MTV could find something else to make a song and dance about now and then. The splendour of beagles. God. Transcendental meditation. The life cycle of the snap dragon.)
I assume that it is a university gymnasium of which you speak. In this case further delights await you in the first few weeks of semester one, when the new students will be sure to descend upon the place en masse, each with a view to finding a little slobbery constancy of their own. They do work out quite quickly that they'd have better luck at the bar, but you will have some stellar people-watching for a time.
Podcasts are good at the gym (I can't read and cycle either).
No, not a university gymnasium. It's at Northland MegaMall, a twenty minute stride from my spinster pad. My co-gymnasts seem quite civilised sorts - it's just the television that implies that normal people do nothing but prance around in their swimmers snogging each other (a little bit of prancing around snogging is one thing, but the novelty does pale in time).
Ah, perhaps it's a certain notorious chain of gyms of which I was a member myself quite some time ago. The music videos were indeed as described (unless you went at 2pm on a Sun when some kind soul put on David Bowie instead), but what disturbed me far more than the excess of flesh was the absolutely relentless misogyny of these videos. And they would be interspersed with advertisements for things like portable pole-dancing poles and pole-dancing lessons.
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