I’ve been cautious and wary of my gym’s exercise classes. I’ve only been punishing myself at the gym for three months, but have strictly avoided organised classes and their associated motivational shouty instructors. That, and the fact that it probably involves submitting myself to trance music.
Yet a class would break up my exercise routine a little, so I figured I’d begin with something easy: cycle classes. You just ride a bike while someone yells at you to a background cacophony of Sash, I figured. After some searching, I located the cycle class area – it was tucked down a long hallway. Cautiously, I peered around the corner, making sure to reveal only my eyes and forehead before committing the rest of my body, and announcing my full presence (somewhat like Jordan’s baps preceding her actual entrance into a room. Look, if I was friggin’ straight, I’d have a better big-boob girl to reference, but I’m kinda falling back on the default here). If I didn’t like the look of things, I’d at least have the option of a swift exit.
Nervously slinking into the room, everyone was abuzz with cycle warmups, final adjustments to their bicycle, and detatched inspections for stray body hair. Straddling the bicycle like I was trying to tame some sort of metallic dinosaur, it occured to me something wasn’t quite right. Apparently I’d been gaping around slack-jawed for some minutes, because eventually a lycra-shrink-wrapped young thing pouted in irritation at me. ‘You need to insert the handlebars,’ she sighed, and signaled in a masturbatory fashion in my direction.
At first, I thought she was calling me a wanker, until I understood she was showing me how to remove the handlebars from the bottom of the bike, and insert them at the top. Removable handlebars? At least I’d have something to pelt at the instructor’s head if he pissed me off too much.
With a stage entrance, the instructor appeared from nowhere, and cranked up some awful dance track. He struck me as the exercise equivalent of that guy Scooter who plasters dance beats over bad 80s songs, then shouts ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah!’ and ‘Here We Go!’ over the top of them. This was not much different from my regular routine, except that he was shouting very gay encouragement at us all. Lots of “You all so nasty with your hard cycles!” and such.
This was when he screeched at us to attempt the mountain climb – pedalling with your arse off the seat, in more of a standing position. At this moment I concluded that my strength was endurance, not strength, as my calves spasmed like a Neighbours background actor at Lasseter’s, desperately trying to prove their acting worth. My body was squealing with agony, and I knew that I couldn’t last much longer – but at least I knew this was as bad as it got.
How wrong I was: the instructor tipped by playing that awful dance remix of “She Don’t Like That” by James Rayne. Unable to handle the stress on all levels, I started wobbling violently from side to side, nearly toppling over the entire row of sweating pro-atheletes beside me.
“Now we progress to the REAL THING!” wailed the instructor, and turned down the lights in the room, and turned on some purple dark-lights. The fuck? I’m working out at a gay nightclub now? Now I’m supposed to pedal as hard as I can while everyone else grunts disapprovingly at the amount of lint on my tshirt!?
Now, I’ve got a minor condition with my right eye, called blindness. The iris of my right eye has been broken since birth (that’s right – broken eye, broken dick, I’m in tip-top shape mate!) and doesn’t really effect much of my day to day life (see my entry below for more on this) – although I’m probably the only person whose partner calls them “my little cyclops”. However, I can still get some very minor peripheral vision in the white part of my eye. There’s one odd phenomena, though – when I look at a blacklight with my blind eye, it sets off some sort of crazy visual acid trip, and all I can mostly see is a wall of solid purple through both eyes. It’s not particularly pleasant.
So picture, if you will, in the space of five seconds: I’ve gone from doing my best at pelting up the side of a pretend mountain which, strangely, is shouting encouragement at me all the way; to suddenly – and literally – being in the dark, struck by sudden anxiety that I’m not using enough fabric softner as the average fag, accosted by one of my most hated dance remixes ever, and then struck by what looks like some sort of Prince video clip sonically transmitted directly to the inside of my eyeballs.
Deserve a fucking medal for surviving that class, I do – especially now that I can barely sit down. My arse is killing me from the metallic bike seat. If my butt feels like it’s been grinding down on a gargantuan demon cock for five hours, then I at least want to make sure that’s what caused the pain in the first place.