Military Fitness
“I’ve signed us up to a military fitness class.”
“I’m sorry?”
I had zero recollection of ever expressing an interest in such a thing.
“The first class is a taster so it’s free.”
Well, in that case.
This isn’t the first time Louise has made decisions without consulting me.
“Louise, who’s that man in our garden?”
“Oh, that’s just Joe. He’s our gardener.”
“Our garden’s pretty small, do we need a gardener?”
“Do you know how much a lawnmower costs these days?”
“No.” I opened the window. “Hi Joe.”
I reluctantly agreed to go to the military fitness class, although threw a strop akin to how I acted before classical guitar lessons when I was eleven, deliberately dawdling as I put my shoes on.
“Hurry up, we’re going to be late.”
“I don’t care. I don’t even want to go.”
As is usually the case when you do new things with people you don’t know, the opening few minutes of standing around unsure what to do or whether to strike up a conversation were unbearable. After giving a flat smile and raised eyebrows to a man in a Tough Mudder t-shirt, a handsome chap in camouflaged trousers shouted out.
“Fix up, look sharp. Grab your bibs.”
His biceps were the size of my head. If I stick with this, will I look like him one day?
The bibs signified difficulty level with red for easiest, blue for medium and green for hardest. This presented me with an early dilemma; while I’m no Iron Man, I’m reasonably fit so fancied myself to be fine as a blue, maybe even a green? Alas I am a pathetic loser and wanted to stay with Louise, who’d gone for red. I didn’t want to be paired up with a stranger for any of the exercises. As I pulled on my bib which was meant for a child, I was aware of dismissive glances from the man in the Tough Mudder t-shirt. He’d gone for a green bib. As he sprinted past me on the warmup jog, I felt a strong urge to ankle tap him.
We dispersed into our groups and our instructor shouted out.
“Right, get with someone who is a similar size to you.”
Louise is a lot smaller than me.
The next twenty minutes was spent grappling, piggybacking and commando rolling on the floor with sweat-dripping, middle-aged men, one of whom was far too competitive in the foot wrestle with gritted teeth and pulsating temples. I didn’t know foot wrestling was a thing?
After this, there was a sprint to and from a distant tree, where you had to grab a leaf to show you weren’t cheating, before we were divided into groups of four. My plans to remain by Louise’s side for the entirety of the class were thwarted one again as I ended up in a group with three women, one of whom had a blue bib on. A superior. My hay-fever had started up and my face was red and puffy, eyes streaming.
“So, is this your first class?” She asked.
“How did you guess?”
In one of the games, I had to put a bib in my shorts, while two women tried to prevent the woman in the blue bib from grabbing it. A weird game, which ended in predictable humiliation. My defences were breached and the grabber made a lunge, missed the bib and pulled my shorts down. Fully down. Ankles.
The class eventually ended and I walked back to the carpark near, but not with, a couple of the guys I’d been grappling with earlier. They were immersed in a conversation about an upcoming triathlon. I remained silent, rubbing my eyes with pollen-covered hands and trying to look like I was wiping sweat off my face, but actually blowing my nose on my t-shirt. I looked over to see Louise jesting and laughing with a couple of older women. Women are better at this sort of thing aren’t they?
“So, did you enjoy it?” Our instructor asked, leaning on his van.
Despite the distresses of the last hour, I was feeling oddly happy; relieved that it was over and post-exercise endorphins flying around. Near euphoria in fact.
“Yes, it was good.”
“Will you be doing it again then?” He asked.
“Where do I sign?”
They’ve got you haven’t they?
The following week, I had a worse experience at the same park. One evening, Louise was sat scrolling through her phone, grinning which is always ominous.
“Andy…”
“What?”
“I’ve signed us up to walk other people’s dogs.”
“Why?”
“It will be fun.”
It wasn’t fun.
We were met by a fraught-looking lady with a dog pulling hard on its lead, wagging its tail. He ran over and jumped straight up to my chest, making me stumble backwards.
“He’s not for the faint-hearted.” The woman said. “Haha.”
What this actually meant was; he’s completely fucking mental. Whichever direction you wanted to tried to walk in, he yanked his head the other way, causing friction burns on your hands. When he was let off his lead, he got into a fight with another dog and as Louise bent down to untangle his lead, he head-butted her and slobbered on her nose. I’d made my decision about making this a regular thing long before the woman said;
“You’ve got to be careful with him around children. He sometimes thinks that they are other dogs.”
Joining fitness classes and walking other people’s dogs is a telling sign that I am entering the next stage of life. This was further exemplified when I attempted a night out a couple of weeks ago. I’d won some money on the football so, spontaneously (after uhming and ahhing for three hours), decided to go to town. In the first venue, a rammed cocktail bar, I remember standing with a pint of lukewarm Amstel, unable to hear anything anyone was saying and not knowing where to stand, thinking; is this fun? After finally finding a spot to sit down, I got into conversation with a digital marketer who had a business on the side selling penis enlargers on the internet. It’s apparently lucrative - a high markup. I went home at eleven, catching the tail end of Match of the Day.
The end of your twenties is not all bleak. Last week two of my best friends got engaged - to their girlfriends not to each other - and a couple Louise and I are good pals with had a baby daughter, which is all great news isn’t it? Weddings and babies are flying in from all angles at present. How long does this stage go on for? Eight years?
I enjoy stag dos, although on the last one I went on, my friend and I got into a pickle. We’d inadvertently dispersed from the rest of our pals and found ourselves strolling the streets of Cologne at 3am.
“Shall we get a taxi back?” I asked.
“Do you have the address?”
“No.”
The schoolboy error of arriving, overexcited, in a city at night, not taking in your surroundings whatsoever and failing to write down your address. We’ve all done it haven’t we? After stomping the streets for two hours, the sun was beginning to rise so we gave up and stayed in a by-the-hour room in a motel, accompanied by a life-size statue of a Red Indian wielding a spear.
While my Monday Musings break has gone on for longer than planned, I have been writing a lot lately. My ideas for a second book are wavering as I’ve found that even when I try to pull away from it, almost everything I write is based on my real life. I lack the imagination for pure fiction. Much of my first book was loosely - and at times not so loosely - based on real happenings, but at the time, I was living in Hong Kong, arguably a more interesting setting than Horsforth.
I’m considering a non-fiction book of anecdotal tales. Basically just a much longer, hopefully better-structured version of what you are reading now. I’m confident I could think up enough material; last week I started writing about my first night out in a club called Bassment (not a spelling mistake but a clever play on words by the way) and it ended up as long as my final year dissertation was at university. The issue is, whether or not people actually give a shit. It’s a very self-indulgent thing to do.
A non-fiction book may just be a flash in the pan idea. I tend to be influenced by whatever I’m currently reading and at the moment, I’m enjoying Karl Ove Knaussgard’s books. Louise was unimpressed to see me ordering a poster of him smoking a cigarette for £16.99 minutes after I’d said I couldn’t afford to go and see the new X-Men film. There are nagging concerns that I’m not quite in his league however so who knows what the future holds. It remains to be seen whether there is a market for a book about a guy who moves back from Hong Kong, has a shit job for a while, fails his driving test a couple of times and signs up for a military fitness class.
