Well it's come to this. I can no longer blame my lack of exercise on my recovering shoulder. OK it's still not great, and I certainly won't be trying to ski or play tennis for a while yet, but today I've booked myself on to my first body pump class in about a year. I will do it. I must do it, after all, I used to love it. Spinning first, then the next day pump. Just the thought of resuming squats is turning my legs to jelly, but even as I type this ramble, the graph of shame I have pinned to my desk partition is staring back at me (can graphs stare?), and pointing out the very obvious truth of the matter, that the very sharp downward turn on the scale 4.5 years ago has slowly been replaced with a steady but relentless upturn.
I'm not one for New Years resolutions, but I am loathed to accept the waistbands on my skirts being quite so tight, and my ability to do an impression of a blancmange with my comfy belly may be amusing, but is hardly admirable. I could look on the bright side, but I'm struggling to find one other than the need for less warm jumpers with a natural Eskimo layer of my own.
I can happily say that the spinning is ok, though the old bikes at the gym aren't a patch on the beautiful new Schwinn range I tried back at www.fitfantastic.co.uk in November, and the instructors are no where near as luscious (we all need eye-candy after-all). I however am much more chuffed to announce that Haggis, my dearly beloved Scott, had not rusted away (unlike my poor, equally neglected motorbike), and needed nothing more than a pump of the tyres before it whisked me happily away once more for a very cob-web defying, life-affirming 15 miles on a bright and beautiful winters day - I could wax-lyrical for many a paragraph about how unbelievable it is that we have such wonderful wildlife on our doorsteps in such a seemingly urban area, but I have yet to find a way to build up speed and take in the views, without scaring the birds off at the same time, so I'll leave the Bill Oddie narrative for when I have rebuilt my stability. Thankfully being a proper girlie-spec frame, and tweaked to my exacting torso/leg/arm requirements, I had none of the shoulder-stretching issues I'd previously encountered with the hired holiday bike, or the studio spinning ones. Vibrations still irk, but not half as much as seeing the likes of Mark Whalberg somehow recover from a shoulder injury in what the cinematographers would have you believe was a week! Official sign off from the specialist next month, so the badminton racquet came come out of hibernation, and I can attempt front crawl rather than a somewhat froggy breast-stroke!