Three newbies showed up in my boulder gym this morning. Three super-cute, 14-looking girls, a little on the chubby side. They followed the coach’s instructions, climbed some routes here and there while they took more selfies than anyone else in an entire year.
Quite a nice addition to the usual crowd too. It’s mostly extremely fit-and-pretty French and Spanish folks, and, well, me, the ageing geek locked into a prematurely hairy 16-years-old’s body. And I don’t mean the bulky teenagers that run around nowadays, I mean the weak ones in the 90s, with the apparent incapacity to gain muscle weight.
Anyways, the gym has multiple rooms, some with rocks to climb and some others with pull-up bars and other means of torture. My routine is to switch rooms every 15 minutes or so, and finish in the smaller exercise hall with the flying rings. Today I had to wait a bit before entering the last session: I heard the sound of the girls rope-skipping in the exercise hall.
Not much wait I mean, that’s chubby newbies skipping ropes. It takes like two minutes before they drop dead.
I was totally right, after 30 seconds the floor stopped shaking and I could start my exercise. By the time I entered the room the girls were just chatting on the floor exhausted, so the rings were free and I could start to crunch myself up.
That’s a lot of crunching. Mind you, flying rings are crazy hard to do for a person with no upper body, and that was the end of my workout too. With all the power I had left I pulled myself up, and then lifted my legs to form a perfect 90-degrees angle with my arms.
Then I’ve let my legs go down again just to pull them up once more. I aimed for five repetitions. I’ve contracted all my muscles, closed my eyes, and there they were, my legs, pointing forward again. At this point I’ve changed my mind and decided to go for three repetitions only. One last pull up then: more crunching, more pain, and the room is now totally silent.
Suspiciously silent, in fact.
My body is shaking, I’m grabbing the rings as strong as I can, and my legs are finally up again. There, I open my eyes, and see that the girls are all staring at me now.
With shiny eyes and their mouth open. I’m their hero.
I’m totally back to the gym tomorrow.