I felt far more enthused about this morning’s gym session. Having made peace with the recent floor plan reshuffle and satisfied that my favourite equipment was intact, I trotted off for my warm-up run with water bottle in hand.
Apart from the obvious physical benefits of regular workouts, I always look forward to catching up with my gym buddies between sets. Over the years, I’ve discovered there is a strict, unwritten protocol to gym conversation. You must time your chat precisely during rest intervals, select topics that can be thoroughly covered in under two minutes before your muscles cool down, and, above all, never hog the equipment. Nobody likes an equipment hogger when everyone is trying to squeeze in a workout before breakfast.
I engaged in one such exchange with Julie as we crossed paths near the StairMaster. She noticed me giving this Goliath of a machine an exceedingly wide berth just as she was preparing to climb aboard. It’s worth noting that Julie is perpetually happy, fiercely positive, exceptionally fit—she runs exercise classes—and always eager to lend a hand.
“You’re brave, Julie!” I called out, quickening my pace past the monster.
She removed an earbud, smiled warmly, and replied, “Morning, Mark!” Clearly, she hadn’t heard me over her workout playlist.
“I said, you’re brave tackling that monster!”
She smiled again, removed her other earbud, and paused. I hadn’t intended to disrupt her session at all; I was merely offering a passing commentary.
“Haven’t you tried it yet, Mark?” she asked cheerily.
“No chance. It looks far too terrifying for me.”
She was, of course, entirely unaware that I once got motion sickness and had to be rescued from the Teacups ride at Thorpe Park.
“Oh, it’s really not that bad!” Julie reassured me. “You just need to be mindful of a few basic safety rules.”
“A FEW safety rules?!” I gasped. “What, like the risk of catastrophic heart failure while your foot gets trapped in a revolving stair, launching you across the free-weights area?”
Julie laughed, clearly assuming I was exaggerating for comedic effect. “Let me show you.”
I was now thoroughly embarrassed. Not only had I interrupted Julie’s morning routine, but she now felt morally obligated to deliver a complete health and safety induction on the StairMaster.
“The most important thing to remember,” she explained sweetly, “is that if you drop anything—like your phone, your earbuds, or your car keys—the mechanism will swallow them whole and you’ll never see them again.”
I stared at the dark, churning abyss between the moving treads. This wasn’t a piece of exercise equipment; it was an industrial shredder with a digital display. If it made light work of set of car keys, I didn’t like the odds for an exposed ankle or a stray shoelace.
She then proceeded to demonstrate how to power it up, how to make it go faster via a shiny, suspiciously unused button, and, most crucially, how to hit the emergency stop—a button over which my finger was destined to hover for the entire duration.
“You can even set it to simulate climbing the Eiffel Tower, Kilimanjaro, or Kathmandu,” she added enthusiastically.
As someone who lives in a single-storey bungalow, simply walking up Pewsey Hill to see the White Horse is a significant mountaineering feat these days.
“Oh splendid, that sounds like a project for the distant future,” I offered. That was my secret code for: That is categorically never happening.
To be fair, once I had emptied my pockets of all chewable possessions, stepped onto the moving treads, and figured out where to place my feet, it wasn’t completely awful. I didn’t scale the Shard, K2, or Kathmandu, but I officially tamed the beast.
Whether my legs will actually allow me to walk tomorrow morning remains to be seen.
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