Wasting Away

Each Minute I sit in this room, I get weaker...

I heard this line for about the 30th occasion last Thursday afternoon but never before has it held so much resonance. I'd really slacked off the fitness over Christmas. Particularly when you define Christmas as beginning on the date of your Christmas Party. What's even more concerning is that said party was on the 12th. I had vowed to make it back up with a strict regime beginning in January, along with every other half-arsed buffoon who buys trainers and a 12-month gym pass to ease that gluttonous guilt.

As if to spite me, I caught the mother of all colds just after New Years that really laid me low. It was one of those ones where even groaning took up too much energy. I was wasting away before my very eyes during the time where I had planned to 'cram-ercise' my way to strength and fitness. I was surviving on chicken soup and flat-lemonade alone. It was on the 6th day of not leaving the flat that I heard the above quote and it stung me into action. By sitting in that room, I was losing strength and time. It was time to change. That, combined with not wanting to go to the doctors to get a medical certificate, saw me ignore what my body was telling me and get into the office. This went surprisingly well, and I theorised that waging war on your own body was the only way to get it to comply with your wishes.

Ignoring the obvious flaw in logic of waging war against something that isn't a separate entity to myself, I decided that the next battle should take place in Battersea Park. Glen led the trim trail with some vigour and maybe it was my lack of recent conditioning, perhaps it was my illness, or perhaps it was the minus 4 temperatures, but I resisted the urge to vomit on at least half-a-dozen occasions. I felt headpsins that I hadn't experienced since an ill-advised encounter with a nitrous-oxide balloon at Glastonbury a few years ago, and my legs felt like they were going to explode.

Needless to say, the illness convincingly won that battle and I was laid low again for a couple of days. Nothing describes my perilous state of health better than the fact that it took me all day to watch a 20/20 match on Sunday. I woke at 8:30 to watch it live, fell asleep after 15 overs, watched the replay at 2pm but fell asleep after 30 overs, and then set my timer to watch the last 10 overs during the 6pm replay. And they say Kids have a short attention span…

Needless to say I'm looking a little more like Marlon Brando at the moment than Martin Sheen. Then again he did have a heart attack whilst making that film due to overwork and stress, so I’m confused.

The Horror