The Gym...

Well the day of reckoning finally arrived. A little while ago I had been forcibly driven to the shops to buy some tracksuit bottoms (£5.00 Tescos best!) and sporting them complete with two go faster stripes down each leg, and feeling both foolish and as conspicuous as a porcupine in nudist colony, I went. One of the things that I hadn't taken into account was how much wearing trainers and cheap jogging bottoms generate static electricity. Everything metal that I touched seemed to preceded by a blue flash, a sharp crack and me swearing. I'll swear they could plug me into the National Grid and I'd make fortune!

In actual fact it wasn't so bad. We're all pretty much of an age sort of late fifties or early sixties, and at various stages of the scheme. We were met and taken to the gym where there is some pretty sophisticated equipment. Donning the heart monitor proved to be something of a challenge, as it fits in much the same way as a bra. Thank goodness I'm not a woman, I'd never manage! However after much fiddling and messing about I got it on and put on the "watch" reader. Simply putting the kit on raised my heart rate quite alarmingly! Afterwards I had my blood pressure taken (slightly raise at 140 over something or other) the the guy pulled a bit of face, but let me carry on

A charming young girl who looked to be about 12 arranged us around the gym on the various bits of kit. In all honesty the kit is pretty simple, mainly weights and medicine balls, and we started the drill. It seemed pretty easy at first, but soon I was sweating. After about a minute or so we all moved around the the next exercise and carried on. I was at my best doing the "gentle walk" and my worst lifting the medicine ball out at 45 degrees. By the time I'd been round all of the kit I was pretty pooped. We sat for a few moments, not still, you understand, we had to keep our feet moving and had a drink of orange juice. The we did it all over again.

They actually wanted the heart rate to be the same at the end as at the start, but mine refused to come down for quite a while and I was sent of on the gentle walk again. Maybe it was a flukey low reading to start with, but it never did, so I just took the monitoring kit off and joined the group again for the talk.

The talk was pretty interesting, about the benefits of exercise, and certainly gave food for thought. In England 70% of people lead sedentary lives, and it's getting worse. Just the amount of exercise that we did today lifted us out of that group and made us "active" - that's quite a thought.