Lockdown in Paris Day 5 : In Which I Try to Exercise (Again)

I’m already nervous about waking up to the news tomorrow so I’m just ignoring the fact that 2020 might be winding up to a truly spectacular Knock Out Round. I can sense it there in the tunnel of tomorrow, limbering up in a shiny pair of shorts with a towel round its neck. What if this godforsaken misshapen beast of a year is even now hopping lightly from foot to foot to the sound of the roaring chaos outside? What if it’s doing practise punches - left-right-left! - and sucking on its gumshield? Oh god. 

I spoke to a colleague in New York today (something I never thought I’d say) and she said they were boarding up storefronts across the city expecting carnage either way. She said people she knew had taken the day off, knowing they’d be neither use nor ornament while they waited for the country to find out whether it had managed to haul itself gasping onto a raft or been sucked under as the ship of its own sanity finally went under. Sometimes only a nautical metaphor will do. 

For now, though, let’s sweep another potential global disaster to one side with a fixed and slightly manic smile and talk about how I did exercise yesterday and now I can’t walk. I know, I know, one does not “walk” in my flat - there must be a minimum number of steps taken to deserve the verb and ‘three’ is not it. I was referring more to the fact that I managed about 20 minutes of activity yesterday and now my legs have seized up.

Last week when lockdown started I hadn’t done any exercise in weeks, for no other reason than I didn’t want to, which is always Number One on my list and thrice underlined. We know this, you know this, I know this - exercise for me is literally the last thing I would ever think to do, let alone actually do. Nor have I ever responded well to things I should do, so all in all it’s a miracle I ever venture into any activity that might make me aware of the heart that is, one must assume, plodding away in my chest. 

I am endlessly suspicious of people who regularly seek out physical discomfort. Being uncomfortable is one of the worst things you can be in this life and exercise makes it an absolute certainty. It’s not so much the doing I struggle to fathom - it may surprise you to know that in my day (I think it was September 24th, 1997) I too felt the thrill of competent physical activity. I also get the appeal of AFTER, and - if I really stretch my imagination - I can even understand the satisfaction of DURING, but what I cannot and will never understand is how you consistently get from NOT DOING EXERCISE, to DOING EXERCISE. This is set to be perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of my life. 

What, for instance, would possess me to shed warm clothes in favour of shorts, trainers, and a sports bra that could support the Forth Bridge? Why would I do that? Why would anyone? Knowing what then must inevitably follow? What am I, a lamb to the slaughter? Not to get all mathematical on you but the second I don the shorts and the Forth Bridge, the probability of me having to do exercise increases exponentially - lending weight to the argument that this is something I should at all costs not and/or never do. 

If I do do it though, this incredibly irrational thing, I’m committed to minutes-on-end of miserable inner-monologuing which, I don’t mind telling you, is insufferable. Exercising Steph is an absolute misery: naturally I avoid her at all costs.

On the rare occasion that exercise does become unavoidable, it begins with the shortest warm-up video I could find on Youtube. There follow 5 interminable minutes of me silently yelling Oh god this is it I’m doing it this is awful and it’s only the 5 minute warm up I can’t BELIEVE I’m going to do 15 more minutes AFTER THIS, I hate this I hate this I HATE THIS SO MUCH.

I do this warm-up video because I honestly try hard not to be an idiot wherever possible, and while there are much more thorough and sensible warm-up videos this is literally the most time I’m willing to spend on not snapping my tendons. 

After (during) the five minute video I have the joy of realising precisely how unfit I am, which really spurs you on to do more exercise except it doesn’t. But I’m in the shorts and the Forth Bridge now and I am teeth-grittingly aware that it would be a new low to do a five minute warm up and call it a workout. So on I go, a truculent toddler jumping about with a face like thunder while my brain mutters its endless oaths. 

Maybe it’s because I know I will have to do this over and over and over and over again to see results and the chances of getting past the first “over” are already nil. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no immediate pay off, and I have no patience. Or maybe it’s just that exercise is SO BORING AND I HATE IT BUT I DON’T WANT TO GET FAT BUT I HATE EXERCISE BUT I LOVE FOOD AND WINE BUT I HATE EXERCISE BUT YOUR AGEING METABOLISM BUT THE GIN AND THE FOOD BUT THE EXERCISE YES BUT THE ENDLESS SPIRAL OF HOPE AND FAILURE BUT BURPEES?! BUT NO! BUT I MUST! BUT I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY AND I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH REALLY DON’T WANT TO. 

Yes. I think it has something to do with that.