evil tracksuit people

Generally at the end of fieldwork I'm super-fit and feeling great, and then when I get home after a few weeks of sitting behind a desk and eating moms cooking (which is great, but generally when I'm away I eat much simpler food, and less meat, because I'm too lazy to cook much at the end of a long day) I'm right back to where I started. which means 2 things: 1. whenever I go to the field/on a fieldtrip the first few days are always really difficult. 2. I never feel as good about myself when I'm at home.

So on monday I went back to the gym and got a new contract. It was pretty expensive, althugh I got a lovely 20% student discount, so I figured that that would be a great motivator to get the best value out of said contract and make sure I go regularly. Which meant that I left home just after 5am on Tuesdayt morning and went off to gym. By the time I'd arrived, got past security (I didn't have a membership card yet) and got going it was almost 6, and after jogging a little bit I saw that the 6am class was starting, so I figured I go and join in.

Big mistake! Firstly it was a combination of cardio (stepping and suff), weights and random other exercises that involve all those core muscles that I think I was born without. They were also the kind of exercises that I might almost manage, except for the fact that we were expected to do them all with a whole pile of weights. When we finally got to put the weights down they strapped them to out ankles and made us do other stuff.We also got split into groups, and I was paired up with a lady who obviously runs 45 kilometres every morning before doing pilates and then aerobics and then spinning, all ebfore breakfast. She was the kind of person who would use the rest periods (when the rest of us were collapsed in a puddle of sweat) to do her own exercises. It just wasn't cool. I was tempted to slap her and say something along the lones of "yes, look at you. You're so fit! Oh wow. One day when something goes wrong on the flight to Mauritius or the Seychelles and you end up stranded on a deserted island, you'll regret your 0.2% body fat! You'll have to eat your own leg to provide energy for the 10km hops around the island that you'll probably want to do every morning." But I didn't, I just battled through, sharing pained looks with the other participants.

That afternoon and the following day, I could hardly walk. Jen had advised me to keep going to make it hurt less (I couldn't sit up to get otu of bed, couldn't sit, couldn't stand up...) so I went off to gym the next morning, avoided all calsses like the plague and managed a limping jog and a few weight machine before hobbling off to the showers. The rest of the next day was even worse! In the evening, after a long and quite hilarious lab where I couldn't sit down for 3 hours partly from busyness, but largely due to the pain, as well as Luke's not even veiled sarcasm) I went home, sank into a hot bath with this weird mustard homeopathic stuff I used to use for stiffness after hockey (not the ice variety, but normal on fields hockey) tournaments when I was at school.

So this mornign I woke up feeling fantastic. It was the weirdest thign! so I went off to gym, had a fantastic run dashed off to wits, and foudn that climbing stairs still hurts, but not too badly. Jen already gave me the 'told you so' talk, but I don't mind. So here's hoping it never gets that bad again. And also hoping that I manage to keep going every day without giving up because of the horrible soccer-moms with too much free time for exercise!

Oh, and I must also write about the monkeys, I keep forgetting!