#gympug

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!’

#1: “Update on my moment of weakness vis-a-vis Gym memberships: went for my induction this morning. I was informed by a peppy teenage Personal Training Gremlin that, as I am nearly thirty, my testosterone's pretty much all gone. So I best get my shit together quick-sharp. After all, after your testosterone's depleted, you're pretty much dead (He may have been slightly less matter-of-fact with his delivery of this information).

Also, I'm experiencing throbbing pain in every muscle south of my eyebrows.”

#2: “Now totally convinced that Peppy is a sadist who wants me dead. And that some of the gym machines are just secondhand torture devices bought at that car boot sale they held at the Murder Factory.My arms hang redundantly by my side like two long socks filled with porridge. Functionally useless. I am now incapable of lifting anything heavier than a tea towel. Actually, scrap that, now even the tea towel's started giving me gip. And I've had to put my phone down twice whilst writing this status to have a little rest.”

#2.5: “Woke up at 7am today, shoulders on fire. I suppose this counts as Gym update three? Except I'm not going to the gym today because if I did that my arms would absolutely 100% fall off.We'll call it Gym update 2.5, as I'm going to spend the next 2.5 hours trying to stretch and most likely weeping bitter, vain tears into my carpet.

#3: “Woken up at 6 am by pain in shoulders. Had fallen down edge of bed into weird position. Dragged myself to gym. No Peppy. Missed him, almost. Much harder to motivate myself... especially with spikes of pain shooting out of every tendon. Had apparently got used to someone barking at me to make the next push or pull or whatever.Also, had fuck all idea of what weight I ought be doing on all the different machines without him choosing it...So I paid for some PT sessions. Like the chump that I am. And so begin the Painful Adventures of Zach and Peppy.”

-- Author’s Notes --

This blog started life as a series of facebook posts intended to amuse my friends and so that they could ‘enjoy’ the gym vicariously through me. I put it on here because I reached 10 updates and realised it was something I wanted to spend time on. Why pugs? Because I’m no gym bunny. Because everyone has seen bunny blogs, where they tell you how great you feel going to the gym, how easy and enjoyable it is, how trim you’ll get, how amazing you’ll look, how you’ll veritably glow with health whilst you work out.

Don’t believe those charlatans. They’re either deluded or they’re trying to sell you something. Most likely both. Going to the gym is a sordid, miserable nightmare that we all hope will end with feeling good and being happy. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that that hoped-for feeling will only exist any of the time that you are not at the gym.

I wanted to write a blog so that anyone who has just signed up to a gym will know they’re not the only one feeling like a misshapen, awkward, sweaty blob in those first few sessions. They’re not the only one bemused by all the strange slang that gets chucked around. There’s someone else out there who also thinks the whole thing is a horrible slog.