Perilous exercise

Ow, ow, ow, ow, and ow!

Deafinitely Girly is in pain today and I am afraid to say, it’s self-inflicted and centred around her neck.

As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, my gym has closed thanks to the trusty Crossrail scheme and so I must find an alternative form of exercise. Now, as I write this, I can hear running fans everywhere clamouring about how I should just go for a jog outside – it’s free, it’s great exercise, etc, etc….

Whatever!

I don’t like running – I have never liked running and much as I hope that if I ever took it up, I would become one of those beanpoles who proclaims how they couldn’t run for 5 minutes before but now they can quite happily run consecutive marathons – deep down I know this is about as likely as me suddenly waking up to discover my legs have grown to a reasonable length and my calves have stopped being obese.

It’s not actually that I don’t like running, it’s that I hate it with a passion usually reserved for Big Brother wannabes.

I remember once on a cross country run at school, my teacher actually gave me a piggy back as I was taking so long he was worried he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner and his wife would be angry. Doing well in the annual school cross country race was getting back before nightfall and during the athletics season I made sure I shone in rounders for both my year and the year above so I was always too busy to be called upon for the long-distance races.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely unfit, I don’t think…
I don’t wobble when I walk, I can do 2 pull ups on the handrail on the tube, will quite happily walk for miles, my BMI is apparently spot on, and I only just have a double figures figure. But I would like to keep it that way…

So anyway, as I was saying, while on the search for a credit-crunch, running-free exercise mode, I found an old exercise video under my bed. I’ll give this a go, I thought and rammed it in my video player before attacking the moves with gusto. What I hadn’t allowed for was the weird positions my neck would end up in, in order to keep lipreading the enthusiastic instructor while doing my crunches, lunges and goodness knows what else – I don’t think I was this deaf last time I tried it. So while my other muscles are slightly tender after my workout, it’s my neck that’s really feeling the burn and it wasn’t in need of toning up in the first place!

*sniff

But on a plus, I am actually doing quite a lot of exercise at my desk today as I cannot turn my head from left to right. So, instead I have to turn my whole body, which if you think about it uses more muscle groups… so perhaps I will benefit after all!