I’M SPINNING AROUND, MOVE OUTTA MY WAY

Each month a sum of cash finds its way from my bank account to my local gym’s bank account. The is an arrangement that has been going on for some years now and both of us abjectly lack any valid desire to change this set up. Even though most times, my money sees more of my gym than I do.

The reason I never change this arrangement is due to one word. Summer. Ok, make that two words. Summer and bikinis.

Which is how I found myself back in the gym around mid October. When I walk in the door for the first time, I noticed the staff had changed from last year. The last lot probably finished uni and got real jobs as public servants or stand up comedians.

They greet me with enforced joviality and care. Really they’re thinking, oh crikey here comes another one that we need to forklift onto the treadmill.

“Good morning,” they beam, all fake white teeth and spray on tans. “Is this your first visit?”

“No,” I dourly reply, “but the last time I came, you were still being breastfed.”

I am fortunate in that my gym has a pool. A decent one at that – 25 metres long and eight lanes wide. Think Olympic and halve it. Twice a week, I join the aqua aerobics class. I love this class. At 46, I’m the youngest. They think I’m their adopted grandchild. Last week they brought me bags of lollies and told me to make them last till the end of the week. The week before, one of them gave me a dollar and told me to put it towards something I was saving up for.

Get the picture?

I like aqua aerobics. You can work really really hard if that’s your mood. Or you can just splash about a bit and have a giggle with Dot and Pam, the two oldies who hang around the end of the pool pretending to work out but in reality hoping to pick up. Seriously, Dot has her eye on Alf, but Alf, as can be typical of men at times, has no idea she’s interested. Who needs Bold And The Beautiful?

After a week or two in the pool, I realised I needed to add diversity to my exercise program if I was going to make it into this year’s Bikini Olympics. Mmmm, I thought, what other group exercise can I do?

Definitely not Body Attack or Body Combat. No way. Not only is there all that unsightly jumping and running (I’ve got boobs, for goodness sake) but if you miss a step, the rest of the class trips, you feel like a bozo, and everyone immediately knows you’re both unfit and unco.

Which is how I ended up in a class called Spin. It has nothing to do with darning. Which is good. This one time I tried to sew up a hem, but ended up sewing my finger to it, so I now get qualified people to do my mending.

In a Spin class you hoist yourself onto this new age stationary bicycle and pretty much move the pedals around and around for 45 minutes. Wherein you get off, fall over, and crawl on your belly to your car.

Spin has two very endearing features. First of all, you do it in the dark. Or as close to dark as possible. You wouldn’t even have sex in this sort of light. I think they make it dark so that we keep our senses alert. Which staves off the boredom of pedalling around and around for 45 minutes.

It also means that if you slacken off a bit, no one can see. Not even the instructor.

The second endearing feature is the little knob in the centre of the bike that increases tension thereby making your workout harder.

You turn this little knob to the right and suddenly it’s like you’re riding your bike up Mount Everest after a heavy snowfall. Turn it to the left, and it’s like you’re riding your bike along Santa Monica Pier with George Clooney catching your tail wind.

And much as I try to keep that knob turned to the right, it all gets a bit much for me, and I have to knock off Everest and go back to Clooney.

And because it’s dark, nobody knows. Yesterday, while pedalling away, and trying to shift my mind away from the glaring monotony of pedal, pedal, pedal by thinking of interesting things, such as the players in the 1975 Australian cricket team, I had a thought.

What a relief that all our knobs don’t carry sensors, with massive reporting boards on the balls of the room. Imagine every time you knocked it back a few degrees, a bulb would flash or a siren would go off. The instructor would position her headset and shout, “Bron, gear it up, no slacking off” and I, of course, would immediately arrange to change my name. And my gym.

Tomorrow is Body Pump. I hear that has nothing to do with sex. Apparently it’s about weights. Heave-ho then...

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Once I worked with a lady who hired a personal trainer. Buff young man who ran marathons to relieve boredom. Personally I thought he was putting the “fun” back in dysfunctional. For a few weeks, maybe a month, they got along swimmingly. Exercise pun totally intended. He’d rock up at her place at 6am every Tuesday and Thursday and off they’d go to box, or jog or cartwheel.

Until one morning she didn’t want to do it. Late night, too cold, too tired. He knocks on her door, she opens it in her pjs, hands him the $50 fee, closes the door and goes back to bed.

Exercise. The poor person’s plastic surgery.

I’ve tried a few personal trainers in my time. My gym had a 20 year old energiser bunny called Charlie who taught me my fear and loathing of squats.

Then, similar to my workmate above, I had a fellow present at my place two mornings a week. It went well, until I realised that he was costing me almost as much as my mortgage and I decided I’d rather have another house than a 25 inch waist.

Sometimes, I try and engage them in a conversation in order to delay the inevitable pain that will come when they make me do 100 lunges.

I whimper at length about my fitness goals. How I really don’t want to be fit and strong, I just want to look good naked. How my boobs hurt when I jump, and how I think triathlons are a mental sport because you’d need to be insane to do them.

Of course, what I never realised, is that the only time (and money) I’m wasting is mine. This fellow probably couldn’t give a toss if I wanted to discuss the merits of holding a Mardi Gras in Brisbane. Or whether amphibians need to wait an hour after eating before they get out of the water.

Sure honey, he’d think, chat away, I’ll just pop down on the grass beside you and join in. Ooops, there’s your hour up. $80 thanks. Chat again Thursday.

Eventually I made my iPod my personal trainer. She and I go for long rambling walks along the Brisbane River. She only plays the 80s songs I like. When I want to put some grunt into my walk, maybe even a faux jog, she makes sure “Eye of the Tiger” is next in the song queue. When I am stretching she spins “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.

And I only had to pay her once.

But seriously, I would exercise more. Only I’d spill my wine.

MY “PRETTY WOMAN” MOMENT

If they could get it so wrong with Julia Roberts, who even as a hooker looked amazing, then it’s not so far-fetched that they could get it wrong with me.

I know it’s a movie, I know it’s make-believe, I know it’s all fantasy but the principle remains. Remember how Julia – all legs and torso exposed – struts into some high-end Rodeo Drive clobber shop and is just as quickly evicted as not being suitable calibre? Or some such nonsense.

Yet she returns replete in Prada et al, in a fab hat and total glam. And tells the snooty assistants to get stuffed. Brilliant moment (and one that she revisited at the tail end of the movie “Valentine’s Day”, possibly the best part of that labouring movie).

Here’s what happened with me.

Living in New Farm, on Brisbane’s lazy meandering river, means that my favoured mode of public transport is usually the ferry. The other day, I had reason to catch the ferry twice.

First time was just before lunch. I had an appointment in the city and figured that while I was there, I’d reacquaint myself with my gym. We’re like long-lost friends. "Hi sweetie, gosh it's been ages, how've you been?"

So I chucked clothes for my meeting in my backpack and trundled to the ferry in my daggy gym gear. I know gym gear has a tendency to be daggy but mine is a little daggier than most.

I run in the old shorts I painted my house in. My sports bra is so stretched that I usually need to wear several of them to get adequate support. I hide my bed-hair up in a baseball cap. Etc.

The guy who puts out that little bridge for you to walk onto the ferry was a bit cute. And being the lovely person I am, I called him a  cheery “good morning” and smiled a bit as I boarded.

No response. Almost dismissive. Now this happens a bit to me anyway, most times when I’m going about my business. I think it is because I work from home and alternate between slothing in my pajamas and donning the ugliest clothes known to mankind to slip down to get coffee and the papers.

So I wasn’t that surprised at the ferry man’s reaction. As the song so aptly says, "don't blame the ferry man".

Fast forward about four hours. I’ve been to the gym, had my meeting in the city, done a bit of work at home and now I’m heading back to the city for a pre-dinner drink.

So I stepped out of character and glammed up a bit. Straightened my hair, popped on some heels. Even my treasured Chanel lip gloss had an outing.

And as these things go, old mate on the ferry was still working his shift. Again, I repeated my cheery greeting, using the p.m. version, not the earlier a.m.

Not only did he simper and smile and coo a bit, he sat with me on the trip. Couldn’t shake him.

Bugger being Wonder Woman or Lara Croft or even Medium’s Allison DuBois. My superpowers are GHD and Chanel.

Sha-zammmm!