OK, here’s a thing.  Don’t go to the gym at 4 o’Clock on a Friday.  All 20 something males have an inbuilt homing instinct that is triggered at 3.30 when they leave their lairs and make their way to my local gym and more specifically the free weights room.  Now don’t get me wrong, it was not ugly.  They congregated in orderly fashion, swaggering slowly as to not to scare the quite timid 44 year old novice nun hovering in the corner (that’s me).  They were definitely not overdressed for the occasion either.  So all good there.

But they did not need to be there, whereas I did.  They could already hammer curl (?) 40kg (to my 4kg) and had muscles in places that my 140g of daily protein can only dream of reaching.  They were perfectly well behaved, letting me finish my teeny tiny sets of single arm rows and split squats.  Have you ever squatted before an audience of 15 perfectly honed specimen of the male race? It has not been in the top 10 of my experiences so far.  In fact I wanted to die, or run, or run and die. I am old enough to be their mother and wanted to inquire whether they were going to eat properly later.

To make matters worse, I could not remember what a KB/DB Dead Lift is.  Who makes up these names?  I looked at my workout sheet.  Dead. Lift.  Makes no sense.  If you are dead you cannot lift, and why would you want to? Could mean anything.  The dead lie down, generally.  Which bit am I lifting, lying down? It involved some weights, of that I was sure, but where do I put them when lying on the floor pretending to be dead?  Maintain neutral spine it said.  Yes, that is easily achieved when playing dead.

Determined to complete my full set of exercises I sidled up to young man not currently grunting (yes there was that too) and asked him.  Oh the shame of it. He was however perfectly happy to help (I probably reminded him of his mother)  and demonstrated said exercise to perfection and pointed out what to watch out for, which muscles to use (well he had them, I don’t). I nearly asked him to do it again, but that would have been gratuitous. It has nothing to do with anything dead.  It’s basically the Milton Keynes Shopping Bag Lift That You Do After Having Lunch At Yo Sushi.  They could have just called it that and everybody would know what to do.  My shopping bags weighed 12kg (in total thank you, did not overspend today), he tried to give me 20kg in each hand, I nearly said “ah bless you”, but just pointed to the teeny weights.  I don’t think he knew they came that small.  He didn’t watch me do them.  I love him.

Maybe if I bake them all some protein balls and bring them in next time, they will adopt me?

And here’s another thing.  What do you do with all your clobber.  I purchased my £1 locker token (cost:£1??) and put my car keys and sunglasses and mahoosive jumper in there.  Was still left with iPod, iPod holder, water bottle, exercise notebook, pencil, keys to locker.

I was thinking of this:

or this:

Or even this:

And finally, what do you do with your sodding iPod?  Rowing, yes arm holder thingy works nicely, as long as I don’t pull it too tightly over my massive biceps so that it doesn’t ping off every time I engage them and spend ten minutes threading the earphone cable through the sleeve of my t-shirt to prevent strangulation.  After that the arm thingy is useless and there is no room in my leggings for a pocket as all the room is taken up with flesh and sticking it in my waistband would mean lifting my t-shirt up.  And that’s so not happening.

I think I will get myself one of these and stick it in the hatband