I am relieved to find I am not the only ancient auld wan lifting in the gym

On March 11 2020, I had my last session in the gym with my trainer. Everyone in the gym seemed to be on edge; there was confusion and a palpable sense of fear. I told Drei, my trainer, that the gym would surely have to close now and we’d be needing a Plan B. An hour after I left, the email arrived advising the gym was closing that afternoon. Still, I never imagined that I wouldn’t go back.

Plan B, once it found its legs, involved working out in Bushy Park with Drei and small groups of inevitably younger, faster, stronger women. It didn’t last long. The rules changed and now even small groups were no longer allowed to gather. It sort of suited me anyway to move Drei’s sessions to my back garden, where the only other witness to my general decrepitude was The Small Girl, who occasionally joined our sessions.

Then the winter came and even back garden mustering was banned and we moved our weekly sessions online; me lepping around like a bear in my front room while Drei shouted instructions from his apartment a few kilometres up the road. When he moved to Malaga, it didn’t really make any difference.

When the gyms re-opened, I decided not to go back. As somebody who has frequented gyms for my entire adult life, it was a pretty seismic call. It wasn’t just that I’d no appetite for all that wiping down and sanitising myself raw — something else had shifted too. The gym that closed on March 11 had a swimming pool, and while I never used it myself, there was a large coterie of older women who did, which meant that I was never the only older woman fooling myself on the gym floor. But Ben Dunne — for it is he — had used the fallow period as an opportunity to fill in the pool and time had passed and I was certain that now that the gym would be full of pumped young fellas with tattoos saying things like ‘only God can judge me’ and that this would be no country for old women.

When Drei moved to Costa Rica with its anti-social hours and unstable wifi, I decided I’d go it alone. But over the summer, the free weights on my bedroom floor gradually became less appealing and when I noticed new pockets of flesh appearing over my bra strap, I knew I’d lost more than motivation.

And so, two and a half years after I walked away from my gym life, I was back.

The first sign of this new dawn came in the bike shed, where I stabled my ancient steed beside an escooter — which I’m pretty sure wasn’t even a thing back in March 2020. Televisions were definitely a thing back then — when this place first opened, every treadmill and cross trainer had its own individual screen — but in this brave new world, there isn’t a single opportunity to watch repeats of the Today Show while you offset lifting a 30 kilo barbell against the futility of existence.

In any event, the pumped up post-TV kids were too absorbed in their ear buds and apps to take any notice of ancient new arrivals — and mercifully, in spite of the lack of a festering chlorine pit, there were enough residual older women to allow me to grab a bench without too much mortification.

I realise, for comedic purposes, it would be better if I’d somehow managed to mangle my leg in a resistance machine while simultaneously bringing a rack of kettle bells down on myself, but the truth is that I loved it. Within minutes of lifting my first weight, muscle memory kicked in and the endorphins flowed and I remembered why I used to come here four or five times a week.

By the end of the session, my only reservations were against myself, for stupid vanity and for staying away too long. When I looked at myself in the mirror to check my form, I didn’t see those new pockets of flesh; I saw a body that looked as though it was used to being in a gym, and that made me happy.

Five minutes later I had to ask a (young) stranger to open my locker because I couldn’t see the numbers on my combination lock without my glasses. I now realise that my delighted reaction to my mirror image should be tempered by the fact that my muscle tone isn’t the only thing that has deteriorated in the past two and a half years. I am a half-blind, half-toned work in progress. But baby, I’m back.