Oh, my legs.
I got a free personal training session today. Yesterday when I got to the gym, some guy offered, and since I'm bad under pressure and couldn't think of an excuse to say no, I said yes.
Let me tell you about it.
But first let me tell you about another personal training session I had, oh, about seven years ago. I was at the gym working out, and I somehow ended up making an appointment for a free session. I say somehow because a lot of the time when things happen to me, I really don't have any idea how they do. I never really have any intention of getting involved in most of the things I get involved in, but I somehow get involved in them nevertheless.
Anyway...about that training session.
Years ago I went to this personal training session with some cunt of a trainer. While I was there, she led me through an hour-long workout, and after it was over, she brought me into a little office and tried to sell me personal training sessions. When I expressed reservations about buying them, she looked at me sympathetically and told me that I had a really good-looking, young-looking husband who girls were always looking at when he was at the gym, and that if I didn't do something about the way I looked, I was going to be in trouble. It's been seven years, so those weren't her exact words, of course--actually, up until the part where girls were always looking at him at the gym, they are (I committed that part to memory)--but believe it or not, her exact words were just as bad. I think they were something like that if I wanted to keep him, I'd better get serious about working out. I don't know, but I do know that whatever they were, they were awful.
I wanted to slit my wrists after that training session. It was all I could do not to cry right then and there, and anything she said from that time on may as well have been in Swahili because I could focus on nothing but the humiliation I felt.
I did not buy the training sessions.
Well, it's been a long time since that incident. I still go to the same gym and so does my husband. He's still hot and young looking, and I'm still...well, I'm still whatever it is that I am.
Except that I'm not.
What I am now is the girl who went to a personal training session and, while it was done more subtly than last time, was once again tried to be made to feel bad about the way that she's made. I'm the girl who was put on a scale that's calibrated almost ten pounds above actual weight and given a body fat measurement that was taken by a body fat measuring doodad calibrated to three to four percent above actual body fat. I'm the girl who was told that her body fat goal should be no more than 20 percent and who was met with surprise when she said she wanted to weigh 138 (three pounds less than her actual weight but in the personal trainer's world, 10). I'm the girl who was asked why she wanted to get in shape.
Why do I want to get in shape?
Let's see. In the past five years I've run a half-marathon; in the past few years, despite injury after injury, I've taken more than two minutes off my mile and never given up trying to go further and faster; in the past few years I've run however many 5ks, getting faster every time; in the past year and a half I've ridden hundreds and hundreds of miles on a bike--actually, I've ridden hundreds and hundreds of miles on a bike this summer alone. I've also made it through the month of hell that's known as fitness boot camp, my resting heart rate is 50 bpm, and when I wash my butt in the shower, it feels way harder than the butt I always knew and rarely loved.
Mr. Trainer, I am in shape.
When I said that I'm not the same as whatever I was the first time around, I meant it.
Sitting there with that cunt of a trainer seven years ago, I wanted to kill myself. Sitting there with the trainer I sat with today, I wanted to laugh.
