Louisa Simmonds

We’ve reached the end of the first week of January, so I wondered how everyone’s doing with their fitness resolutions? Or are you, like me, surreptitiously gorging on carbs and quaffing wine when no-one’s looking?

I’ve been walking/jogging for the past ten days. I say ‘jogging’, but my pace is actually somewhere between a fast walk and a jog; I suppose it’s progress of sorts.

I’ve decided that the best way to attack and succeed in my personal goals this year is if I’m mentally and physically stronger. Gyms have never been my style because they’re too enclosed, have people and I get cabin fever, so I’m trying to find something I can do in the fresh air that doesn’t involve sweating embarrassingly, too much tit wobbling and running up hills.

Anyhow, I came up with this plan where I walk up hills and then jog/fast walk on the flat and down hill; that is until a ‘friend’ pointed out last weekend that I will fuck up my knees if I run downhill now I’m middle-aged, so now I just jog on the flat.

Although my fitness goals are nothing to do with losing weight (lying), it has been hard for my vanity to completely erase the awful memory last year when my client’s daughter asked her mother if I was pregnant.

What I keep trying to remind myself is that being middle-aged, I’ve got an excuse for being a bit porky but it’s hard not to get sucked into the obsessiveness of confusing fitness with weight loss, and inevitably I started the week with that whole soul-destroying drudgery of weighing myself every day. Which I know is the wrong thing to do because two days into my new regime I had gained half a kilo – most likely due to the late descent into my belly of that body weight of pate and French bread I stuffed into my gob at the New Year’s Day party to compensate for no fucking alcohol. Nevertheless it was a huge blow to my confidence…and the point at which I usually fail, miserably.

So from this point on I will only weigh myself once a week and I will starve myself for 24 hours and get an enema beforehand.

Exercise is all well and good when you’re feeling upbeat and positive but so much harder once you’re back at work, carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Today my feet felt like heavy, pneumatic drills, digging into the concrete, added to which it was windy so my brain kept calculating over and over again how the wind velocity would affect the results of my workout – something I shall have to consult the astronaut about because I can rely on him to give me some convoluted scientific mumbo jumbo for an answer that I have no chance of understanding but will want to hear, if I promise him a free bottle of vino.

Before this week, the old man would occasionally lower his standards and accompany me. We have very different levels of fitness obviously, him being an unemployed bum and all, with so much free time to waste on exercise. But we made it work. He would run up and down several miles of steps while I plodded down a very steep hill, say, or do five circuits to my one. But now I can sense that he is just too competitive to come out with me anymore.

My suggestion that he put bricks in a rucksack, tie his arms behind his back or wear a blindfold as handicaps seems to have fallen on deaf ears and it’s obvious he just can’t force his athletic (his words) body to decelerate to my pace, so I am a lone wolf on the streets again.

But I’m trying to remain positive…

Fuck middle-aged weight gain. Fuck fitness. Fuck resolutions.

#middleage #Women #Health #Humor #fitness #exercise