It’s spring in New York, and the trees are vibrantly green – which can mean only one thing: time for my annual week-long obsession with exercise.
My history in this area is completely consistent, in that it is reliably unimpressive and rooted in delusion. Over the past 10 years, I have leaned heavily on the phrase “structural exercise” to prop up my belief that I’m in good shape. I run around all day (for which read: back and forth between school drop-off and pickup, with a solid eight hours in a chair in between) and occasionally lift weights in a desultory fashion. Beyond that, I’m prone and staring at my phone.
Except for this one week in May, when the temperature lifts and I decide Something Has To Change. Most years, this manifests in going for a single run, reminding myself how boring and exhausting it is, and retiring my efforts for another year. But this year – hope springs – I think things are going to be different.
I have glanced at enough management theory books to know that habits can be formed and broken by changing small external details of one’s life, and as luck would have it, just such a detail has happened to change: a tiny gym has opened up across the street from the school gates, requiring that I make no detour from my path, and offering 30-minute workouts starting at 9am after drop-off. You could be in and out and back at your desk by 10am, I figure, feeling like the most successful person alive.
The smartness of this psychology extends to the slightly makeshift appearance of the gym itself, a single room in the basement of a building with a modest dressing room. On the rare occasions I have conned myself into joining Equinox, New York’s “premier gym chain”, I’ve been put off by the six-floor complex, including spa, massage and restaurant facilities, which has always made my tentative venture towards better health feel like a huge deal, an announcement to myself that I’m doing a major life overhaul. By contrast, the tiny gym across the street from the school indicates to me that I’m making a tiny adjustment to my existing schedule that amounts to little more than a brief stop on my way home, like picking up milk from the store.
And it’s eye-bleedingly expensive. This should be a turn-off, but of course, getting myself to do things I don’t want to do requires weird roundabout incentivisation. If it was cheap, I’d skip it. (I should admit here that there is a decent gym on the ground floor of my apartment building, but it’s free, so of course I can’t bring myself to use it). The monthly membership fees for this one-room facility are so painful that I’m not even sure I can afford them, an anxiety that, the minute I feel it, unrolls a bunch of corollary thoughts like a carpet: investment in something as important as health should be expensive, and it’s my absolute duty to suck up the pain.
I’m writing all this in the last stage of the head rush I had from attending a single class on Tuesday and – pattern breaking already! – another class yesterday, in spite of my dying quads (are they “quads”? I have no idea). On Tuesday, after an intense 30 minutes, I came home, ate a quesadilla and went to bed for three hours. This isn’t ideal, and not sustainable from a work point of view.
Yesterday morning was better, after an initial wobble when I ran into my children’s 15-year-old babysitter in the class, expressed delight at her presence and surprise that at such a young age she felt the need to work out, and was told off by an older gym bunny who informed me, “It’s not about fitness, it’s about feeling good about yourself?” Oh, piss off, you dowdy bint.
But I have to admit, it was great. I’m a truculent person in some respects, but in others am easily manipulated by arbitrary competition-based goals – getting the number on the thing to go above 500 this morning – like a lab rat conned in the direction of its own death. I worked so hard, I feel like a million dollars and while on the way home, I made a lot of noises coming down the hill. They weren’t middle-aged noises; they were feel-the-burn noises that made me feel extremely important. I don’t even want to lie down, right now, although I do want to eat a quesadilla. Early days. But maybe, finally, this year, I’ve done it?
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
