Activated

As part of the wedding prep, along with picking out shirts for the guys and flipping though books that offer speech writing advice, I have found myself a personal trainer. Lourdes. She is wonderful. I go to the gym and we train for one solid hour. Even the word ‘train’ should give you a clue as to how we behave during this hour. My gyming experience is no longer about meandering through an imaginary park on the treadmill then pretending to count the full set of tricep curls on a machine that is probably not for tricep curls at all, followed by some half-hearted stretching and then a smoothie at Kauii for all my hard work. No no. The smoothie part is the same but now it is truly a reward at the end of a brutal session of uphill running, tummy crunching and weight lifting with every conceivable muscle. In fact, I better go carbo-load soon - Lourdes likes me to eat my main meal of the day two hours before training otherwise I might not make it through session, and I know that because it has almost happened to me before.

This training thing can be torturous; I say, ‘Lourdes I can’t, I just can’t do another one’, and she says ‘5 more’. And in the morning, like now for example, it hurts just to type and when I get up to go prepare my meal I’m gonna have to do it reeaal slow. But as much pain as I feel, the pleasure is greater; I’m feeling healthier, fitter and stronger, I am breathing life into bits of body that have lain dormant for years, my arms and legs are developing lines of definition AND I have a focus (and something to keep me from nightly binge drinking and sleeping till 2 in the afternoon), which, without the routine of university or a job to keep me focused, is crucial.

So, even though my gyming life is in its crawling stage, I can feel my genetic disposition to a healthy lifestyle is kicking in and soon I might be quoting my father saying things like, ‘Nothing cures sickness, sadness or stress like a good work-out’.