Baffling in Juggling with Hedgehogs

I witnessed something quite staggering yesterday. It was one of those moments – well actually a series of moments that lasted about an hour - that left me truly discombobulated. I’m sure the rest of you won’t be remotely surprised, but hey, I can still manage to be kind of naïve and easily surprised even at almost 54 years of age. Maybe that’s something to be proud of, maybe it’s something to be ashamed of, I don’t know. But I was really flabbergasted.

I go to Commando Fitness twice a week. From next month, I’ll be going 3 times a week. I don’t just GO there though. I do stuff. Because, really, what’s the point of going there and not doing stuff, right? Well this is just it.

There was this girl. I’m guessing, from looking at her, that she was all of 22. Big girl. Well, look, I won’t gild it. She was fat. That’s kind of the point of going to Commando Fitness. Most of the people (but not all) that go there are fat, and don’t want to be any more. And before anyone gets uppity about my statement about fat people, let it be known I’m not fattist. I know that people put on weight for a variety of reasons. It could be hormonal (as is the case with me, I suspect, but that’s not the whole story, I’ve gained some pounds because I’ve been sitting on my arse eating crap – OK, confession is out there. I’m a bit podgy round the middle due to all the cakes), it could be a thyroid thing, it could be genetic, it could just be poor diet as part of the family habits and whatever. But the bottom line is, if you don’t want to be fat any more, and you have a clean enough bill of health to be AT a Commando Fitness class (everyone is advised to check with their doctor before proceeding, as it would be highly unprofessional for any personal trainer to do otherwise), then surely, SURELY, you’re going to actually move your body a bit while you’re there. Yes?

Well, no.

This girl. Oh my fucking god, this girl. What can I tell you? OK, I suppose the only way to explain it is to describe what we actually do at Commando Fitness (and no, it’s not about exercising without underwear – yawn).

It’s High Intensity Interval Training – or HIIT to those who like to talk in acronyms. It’s circuit training, interspersed with lots and LOTS of sprinting. The field is usually laid out with a number of exercise ‘stations’ in a roughly rectangular shape. We group up in 2s and 3s and we work our way around the stations one at a time. We exercise at each station while one group of 2 or 3 are doing the sprinting. They sprint between pre-marked cones a set distance apart, and they usually start with 7 sprints. The second circuit, they do 9 sprints, and the 3rd circuit is back to 7. Usually. Sometimes, that’s different. But basically the plan is that we all work our way around the rectangle, exercising at each station for the length of time it takes a group of 2 or 3 people to do the sprints. Some people are fast, some are slow, so the time taken up with the fixed exercise points can vary. And it’s bloody hard, I’m not going to kid you. The exercises include press-ups, crunches, ski abs, clean and press (with a 10kg barbell), planks, burpees, well I guess you get the idea. The first circuit is usually fine, we’re all fresh and rested and we do it and we’re all like ‘well that was OK wasn’t it?’ ‘yeah, that was fine’. By the end of circuit 2, we’re all gasping for air and red in the face and looking like we’ve just come out of a sauna fully clothed. But this girl. This girl that was in my group of 3. Jesus, she did nothing. I mean seriously, nothing. She did the sprints – well she walked a little faster than normal – because it would be really blatantly obvious that she wasn’t doing them. But the fixed exercises? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. For the press-ups, she sat back on her heels. For the ab exercises, she lay flat on her back. For the plank? She lay flat on her stomach. For the clean and press, she lifted the 10kg barbell and held it on her shoulders. Didn’t move.

It started to fascinate me, so I started watching her. The trainer, Chris, has to watch something like 30 people at once, so he walks around the rectangle, making sure people are doing their exercises with the correct form, that they’re getting the best out of what they’re doing and that they’re not likely to injure themselves. This girl, whose name escaped me, but for the purposes of this I’m going to call Sarah, kept her eyes glued on Chris the whole time (can’t say I blame her, he is HAWT!)…but it wasn’t why I would have (like I said, HAWT!). She was watching for when his back was turned. When he wasn’t looking at her, she did not move. She sat back on her arse, lay on her back, lay on her stomach, and stood still, and just basically did nothing. The MOST fascinating thing of all was the in-between sprints we had to do. Chris gets us to run from our exercise station to the (fixed, obviously) trees at the edge of the field, in between each exercise station. So, because the stations are set in a rectangle, as you go around, each station gets further away from the trees, so it gets harder as you go along (yes, he’s an absolute sod, but we all love him).

Anyway, I’m there, on the floor, huffing and puffing, doing my press-ups and I notice that ‘Sarah’ has got up off the floor and has walked around me. I’m like ‘what the fuck?’ and I look up, and she’s placed herself NEARER TO THE TREES!

OK look. Fat I can deal with. We all get fat. We all get a bit porky at some stage or another, we all have to cop to occasionally dumping an extra ice-cream or biscuit down our neck in a moment of weakness. But this??? This was just the worst kind of laziness I’ve ever seen. What the fuck was she doing there?

I mean, we PAY to suffer like this. We PAY Chris to train us so that we burn fat. It’s a FAT BURNING COURSE. And she was just coasting through it. The running she couldn’t avoid, but she even did that in the laziest way possible. I noticed that people started to stare. It wasn’t just me. Others were sort of nodding to each other and doing the ‘eyes’ thing – the ‘have you seen her?’ thing. I’m pretty sure Chris must have known, but he showed no signs. Probably just as well really, because after all, it’s her money if she wants to waste it.

I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. OK I get that sometimes people don’t want to work out (who does? It hurts. It makes everything ache. It makes you sweaty and uncomfortable and it makes you pant and wheeze and, well, just yuck!), but seriously I think it was more effort for her to be so strategic about her lack of exercise than it would have been to just bloody-well do it. She won’t lose a single pound carrying on like that. What a bloody shame.