BY FITS AND STARTS
A muscle-pounding half-day at Chiang Mai boot camp
My breakfast this morning has consisted of the following: pancakes with fruit and honey (3); a small flank steak (1) and an onsen (Japanese, I think, for “disgusting”) egg; the contents of a three-tiered tray piled with various fruits, cold cuts and cheeses (all); a rose-coloured health drink (1 bottle, possibly beetroot); a croissant (1); bacon (strips, 3); and hot coffee (1 cup).
Now, according to Mango, a trainer from Chiang Mai’s Absolute Bootcamp Fitness, we will twice run up the staircase leading to Wat Phra That Doi Kham, on which, he tells me, there are 700 steps, guarded on both sides by the golden undulations of a naga
snake- god-thing. Further investigation (i.e. Google) reveals this number to be anywhere from 300-700. Regardless, it is a great many stairs.
And still I say, “I’ll run it four times”, a boastful promise-prediction that is a catastrophic failure and a sonorous ode to the foolhardy demeanour of the male gender of the human species. By the 14th step of the first run, breath is torn rather than breathed from my lungs. I also wish I was dead.
“You are not very fit,” Mango says, when I reach the top and collapse at the surfboardsized feet of a 17m-tall Buddha statue. “Now go again.”
The second time up is worse — and more humiliating — because my range of movement has been reduced to the staggering lurch of a bullet-riddled soldier. I arrive at the top some 24 years later. On the oxygen-starved walk to through the temple grounds, back to Mango’s car (the seats and floor of which, as a client-sweat preventative, are covered with newspapers and magazine pages), he continues to regale me with information as to the ways in which am not physically capable.
He is further proven correct during the second activity of the day: a 45-minute Pilates session given by instructor Monika Braendli, of Move Smart Pilates Studio. I am the only male in the session, which is not particularly bothersome, but does further proliferate the idea that Pilates is most suitable for — and almost certainly more preferable to — women. Plus, adds the chauvinistic portion of my brain, bending is easy. I bend all the time. I literally bend in my sleep.
But, of course (and obviously), Pilates is not easy. By the time the session ends, each of my limbs feels as though it has been forced through a laundry wringer. (In my defence — and due to a coincidence so thoroughly coincidental as to merit intervention of divine origin — I later that day stumble upon a Muscle & Fitness article stating that Pilates is inefficacious to the inflexible participator, meaning that it will do nothing, so to speak, to turn the unbendy human into a bendy one.) Victory. Minor and technical victory.
With that, we are finished, and at only 11am, not yet lunchtime. The car ride back to the hotel is short, but nonetheless allows plenty of time for reflection vis-a-vis the pitfalls of braggadocio — and on my own overtly conspicuous inadequacies. The car pulls up, I exit and I limp, both physically and mentally, to my hotel room, where I spend the next three hours in the comforting embrace of a flat-screen television’s glow.