Progress report

It's difficult to say why people like physical exercise. I always knew I didn't, until I found I did. Which happens every time I start a regimen, as I did about six weeks ago, when I joined a gym, partly to get back into the shape I was once so happy in and partly because I really needed to get those endorphins racing along to deal with aches, pains and other unnecessaries both physical and emotional. And in many ways working up a sweat on the treadmill or elsewise has done the trick. And along the way I and my body have remembered what we had collectively forgotten - that exercise is kinda fun, sending those good molecules zipping happily through the system and making both of us feel so much better about life and living it.

So this morning, when my trainer was trying to bend me into a shape I am not yet ready to assume, the whys of it all floated into my head. Why was I up and out so early, dodging the street cleaners and breakfast carts to walk across the block to the gym? Why was I wearing these clothes that I would normally not be seen outside the house in, with my hair tied firmly up and my nose decidedly shiny, my fingers bare of diamonds and my feet in sneakers that were so far removed from my usual stiletto heels that they made a fashion statement in themselves? Why was I allowing some strange man to grab my arms and legs and cause me perhaps more pain than I went through in many months of physiotherapy? And why, oh why, was I tottering back home after an hour of all this, with my aforementioned hair dripping saltily with sweat and my T-shirt clinging soggily to my torso, every joint that I owned disputing that ownership and demanding to be sent to another country, via speedpost?

Because at some masochistic, self-flagellatory, tortuous level, I liked it. The pain felt good, because at the end of it all, I knew, I would look good. And my former physiotherapist was right, after all, when he insisted, 'No pain, no gain'. The results were already there for people to see, for me to feel. And the pain was changing, from the immediate burn of unused muscles to the insistent dull ache of lactic acid to the twinges of almost-recovered sinews. It was starting to work. And that, in itself, was something to celebrate.