It’s not the first time in my life that I’ve had a gym membership, but it is the first time that I have found myself wanting to go. The gym is only about 50 metres from my house so I can’t use distance as an excuse not to turn up. It’s a lovely space, with pastel walls and big industrial windows. The bathroom has free emergency supplies of tampons, deodorant, hair ties and sometimes even chocolate, and there is always a pot of spiced cinnamon tea you can drink before you start your class.
Here, I’ve learned how to bench press, deadlift and squat. I’ve giggled through dance routines, I’ve boxed out my anger and I’ve discovered stomach muscles I never knew existed in pilates.
I surprise myself that I keep turning up, but I do. It’s one of the few regular things in my life, the only place I feel I must be. It is my small routine and I cling to it. Now I go four times a week, sometimes five. Early in the morning when the sky is still dark or late in the afternoon when I’d prefer to be lying on the couch.
There are classes I particularly like because the instructors are young and funny, and they have playlists full of music from artists like Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers that I listened to back when I was young and funny.
Most days, I disappear into a sort of perimenopausal brain fog around when the instructor is explaining the exercises, so invariably I must ask them to show me again how to do something. And without my glasses, I can’t read the whiteboard that outlines what the class will involve so I just sort of bumble along.
I can never lift the heaviest weights, pull off the lowest squat or even stretch expertly at the end, but it’s not that sort of place. It’s not competitive. It’s friendly and inclusive and I never feel like I don’t belong. I pull my greying hair into a ponytail, wear old gym pants that have seen better days and a T-shirt covered with paint stains, and mostly manage to keep up.
I go with a friend who lives around the corner. If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure that I would always respond positively to my alarm in the morning and get out of bed. I might turn it off and go back to sleep. But she keeps me accountable and that’s a good thing.
My friend and I joke about the guns we’re going to have one day, which we both know will never happen. It’s enough to feel the slight rise of muscle on my upper arms and the ease of dashing up the stairs without my calves hurting.
Until now, my body has mostly changed without my input. It has changed through puberty and pregnancy, through ageing and nature. But due to the gym classes, there are now little changes caused by my own will. And with each of these changes, I feel a connection to my body that I haven’t felt in a long time.
When I was a teenager, I played netball and tennis, swam laps and ran for fun. I kept playing netball into my adult life and only retired when each week one of my teammates would end up off the court with an injury and I was too scared that I’d be next. If anyone had asked me as a teenager why I loved playing sport, I might have said because I liked the competition or being social or because I had a crush on someone on the team.
Now I know that exercise for me is not about any of those things (although I do love the morning chats with my friend at the gym). I think exercise is partly about leaving my thoughts behind. I’m no longer just a head on legs. I’m connected to muscles and joints. I’ll never be able to achieve the perfect burpee or run a marathon, but I don’t care. I just want to stop thinking for an hour and move.
But the main reason I’ve become a fan of lifting weights and jumping around is that now when my body hurts, it’s not just because of ageing, but partly because I have caused it. Because I have woken sleeping muscles with unfamiliar movements. That is the joy for me. That I now ache because of something that I did.
Not just because I’m getting older.