No-one Memes about Back Day & Sick in a Bin: A Two-Parter
Back day again.
There’s nothing quite as terrifying as the youthful, exuberant slave-driver you have temporarily placed in charge of your body declaring that they have “made an exercise up”. It’s pant-shittingly scary. Trust me when I say that you madly start wracking your brain in search of a legislative escape route. Some sort of EU regulation? A council edict? Doesn’t a new exercise have to win a competition first after being judged by a panel in a strange Studly Beefcake version of Britain’s Got Talent? Surely there has to be an independent scientific study?
Apparently, nope, if you are a card-carrying Personal Trainer you can just fucking freestyle it like the mad, meat-packed genius you are.
In this case, the exercise involved a big heavy metal stick being used as a paddle. For those adventurists amongst you who like to cocktail their extreme sports: It’s as if you mixed Kayaking... with the inexorable sensation that you are unscrewing the entire top half of your body like the lid of an expensive pen.
This seemed particularly unfair of the Pepster given that I had only just beaten all previous records set during the last time we played his little challenge of ‘how insane can the amounts of weight I put on for GymPug to shrug pink-necked and vascularly whilst nudging his own balls with the bar’ (we are now up to a staggeringly painful 150kg). The final effect, after rinsing both back and abdominals until I cried and tapped out mid-exercise whilst making little sickly pigeon noises in the back of throat, was that on exiting the gym I felt the entire top half of my body, as an entity, separate from my lower half. I wobbled out into the sun; a warped, weak, rust-springed Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout.
Sitting down briefly on the way home (less a moment of contemplation, more a beleaguered attempt to knit my two halves back together), I bemoaned the lack of a decent meme to status-update with. All the wobbly-leg gifs in the world, but try and find a decent picture of a post-gym Slinky the Dog, and you’re barking up the wrong tree.
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As a side-note, if you intend on doing this gym / weight malarkey yourself, I recommend getting some sort of belt to brace your back. Peppy provided me with his - I imagine without it my spine would have zigzagged into my hips like a cheap concertina.
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Sick in a Bin: A Retrospect
This actually occurred a few weeks ago, but I felt it was important to revisit.
You’re never really the same after you’re sick in a bin. There is a vestigial innocence that you used to carry around with you like an old, loved moth-eaten scarf that your Nan bought you. And now that you’ve been sick in a bin, it’s nowhere to be found.
Of course, I had been sick in a bin before. I must have done - I was a drink-addled youth once, wearing crap trainers and listening to shit music and being sick in bins - but the drink had bleached the memory clean, or the sick had not been bin-specific, or no-one had been around to witness it. Or I just hadn’t given two shits because I was a moody self-absorbed teenage fuckmuppet.
So the moth-eaten scarf of my vestigial innocence had remained somehow, until the first time that I was assaulted with the full spectrum of abdominal exercises that Peppy had to offer. The jostling and jumping, the calling into action of strange hitherto-unknown muscle groups, took my stomach by surprise. Inevitably, ignorantly, it blamed the breakfast I’d just eaten.
“Fuck this!” it cried anthropomorphically.
“If I’d have known all of you eggs were going to start kicking off, I wouldn’t have invited you in. Go on, fuck off then! And you can take that toast twat with you!”
And so, publicly and violently, I bin-sicked with a force of propulsion not unlike a NASA lift-off sequence. Peppy had kindly removed the bin lid but now stood, camera in hand, grin on face, making sure the Gym’s Instagram could be graced by my crunch-induced upchuck - ‘Look Ma, I’m famous!’
Probably for the best that I lost that Metaphorical Innocence Scarf - I’d only have got sick on it.









