Onwards and downwards
Jeremy Clarke
Iwas running on the treadmill in the gym in the new custom-built trainers I’d bought in Oxford Street. I’d popped my foot on a sensor, the assistant had pressed a button, and my feet had been measured to the nearest half-millimetre from every conceivable angle. Then I’d jogged across the shop and stepped on a metal plate that relayed information to her computer screen about how my foot rolled as it hit the ground. The colour scheme and the materials used in the trainers’ manufacture were up to me. She helped me through the design process on her computer screen. The data was passed on to a shoe factory on the other side of the world and three weeks later my new custom-made trainers arrived by post.
Apart from the vending machine, the treadmill is my favourite machine at the gym. I was excited about getting these new trainers because I was persuaded by the subliminal message of the advertising poster in the shop that if I owned a pair I would look like Lynford Christie. And that they would be so comfortable I would feel as if I was tripping barefoot across the bosoms of maidens. The reality, however, was that the all-round tight fit made me feel like a victim of a Chinese foot-binder fleeing across the paddy fields.
It takes me roughly six months to get in shape, and two weeks to get out of shape. The magnitude of this injustice looms far greater in my mind than children having to labour in sweat-shop conditions in training-shoe factories. The new trainers were unbelievably expensive, and I hoped this would be a spur to greater and more sustained efforts on the fitness front, with fewer alcoholic lapses.
So I was on the treadmill in the gym running them in. I’d set the machine at 12 kilometres an hour with a 5 per cent incline for 25 minutes. Studying myself in the wall-length mirror after five minutes, I looked more like executed necrophiliac John Christie than Lynford Christie, but onwards and upwards. Behind me the gym was empty and I was free to pull grotesque faces. I did Ramses II when they took the bandages off, and I was in the middle of doing my 40-year-old cod on a fishmonger’s slab when a small party entered the room led by Ian, our fitness attendant bloke. Ian’s neck is wider than his head, which he shaves perfectly smooth with a razor, and he’s built like the Cenotaph.
From his party’s general air of diffidence, and their shapeless T-shirts, I guessed that Ian was about to give them all an ‘induction’. Before anyone is allowed to use the gym, Ian is supposed to demonstrate how to use the machines. The idea is that if new members strain themselves, they can’t sue the gym on the grounds of inadequate instruction. He led them over to the cross-trainer and motioned them to gather round. They were three men and two women. To be honest, two of the men had left it too late. The other man, whose T-shirt said No Fear, hugged himself with scrawny arms so that his shoulder blades protruded from his back like small wings. The other two women, gorgeous sisters, twins possibly, wore matching pink jog pants with silver sequins.
When I had my induction I was on my own. Once Ian had ascertained that I was familiar with fixed-weight machines, good manners, disdain for petty rules, and perhaps a desire to leave work early meant that he just went through the motions. We stood in the middle of the room. Ian inclined his great bullet-head towards a machine, then looked at me. This meant ‘OK?’ I’d nod. He’d incline his head towards the next one. I’d nod again. In this way we completed the induction in about 30 seconds flat. Then he raised both thumbs and motioned me to go forth and exercise.
But in the mirror I could see that this induction party was slowing him down with technical questions and that a vein was standing out on Ian’s temple. I watched their slow progress from machine to machine with emotions akin to those of a sixth-form bully scrutinising new boys on the first day of term. I despised the men in particular for their ignorance, their pedantry, their eagerness to ask the right questions.
They came over to the treadmills and clustered around the one next to me. I gave Ian the old veteran’s salute. As I did so, I unfortunately lost balance, stepped awkwardly, then was shot off the treadmill backwards, like a bullet from a springloaded gun, and landed heavily on my back on the floor. The inductees tittered uncomfortably. Ian never laughs. With Ian, amusement is normally expressed with a look of puzzlement. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. But I was too winded to answer.
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