Some things in life happen with a certain degree of predictability. Take traffic lights, for example. It’s a well established fact that when I’m driving anywhere in a hurry, all of them immediately turn red. And then shortly afterwards, I too turn an extraordinary shade of puce, as frustration at the great god of traffic signals reaches its peak.
So it was with a certain degree of predictability a couple of weeks ago that, with a familiar ping, my email chimed like a kind of polite 21st century town crier, and proudly announced the news that fees for the new academic year are due. Student contribution? Slightly more than last year. Check. Students’ Union membership? Check. TCD Sports Centre levy? Something else I’m never going to use. Check.
I wouldn’t recognise a football were I to trip over it.
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Like so many, to me, the Sports Centre is little more than a line on my annual college bill. For a sizable percentage of us on campus though, going to the gym is a daily occurrence as natural as waking up. Having lived through the delirious heights of the Celtic Tiger, playing rugby at schools level while being twice the size of the generation before us was considered something of a right of passage. Joe Duffy was regularly inundated with concerned parents, wondering what little Fionnán-Oscar was doing, hoarding contraband protein in his bedroom and wondering when he was going to inflate excessively to the point of spontaneous explosion.
Off the pitch, we shopped on the Abercrombie & Fitch website (long before it took up residence just outside the front gate). We gazed at the semi-naked models (which has always struck me as a strange marketing policy for a company peddling clothes) and we knew we wanted to look like that. Fitness, bulk and a Southern Californian tan in South County Dublin reigned supreme.
Personally, I never got caught up in it. This may be because I have no sporting ambition and even less sporting ability. I wouldn’t recognise a football were I to trip over it. Moreover, I actively avoid episodes of activity day-to-day. I refuse point-blank to hurry for buses and will happily wait twenty minutes for the next one if it means avoiding suffering the indignity of having to run somewhere – because running highlights my complete and utter lack of coordination and makes me look like an octopus falling out of a tree.
I don’t like lifting heavy things either. Indeed it’s something I would go as far as to say I detest. Annually, we take Christmas decorations out of the attic (another predictable life event), and annually I have to hoof this outsized carton of fairy lights and baubles dating from 1980 down two flights of stairs, completely blind, while fighting the urge to drop it. Mostly because it’s heavy.
All of these aversions to exercise has led to me to develop a generously proportioned middle-age spread. People used to say I was mature for my age, and I am, having acquired a belly of which any middle-aged middle-manager would be proud while still being in my early twenties. Unsurprisingly, I’m also a bit overweight. This can be viewed as an even more impressive achievement, given that I don’t have arms so much as bits of body that connect my hands to the rest of me. So all that weight hangs around my midriff, making me look less like an hourglass and more like I’m ‘expecting’ in a biologically-impossible sense.
All that weight hangs around my midriff, making me look less like an hourglass and more like I’m ‘expecting’ in a biologically-impossible sense.
I’m not alone. I don’t use the TCD Sports Centre to cure the problem because it’s filled with people from the rugby team with arms the size of my head. The rowing team are there too, talking about ‘benching’ as a verb and not as a piece of garden furniture. I don’t go to the gym.
Until now.
Over the next few weeks, I’m planning to shake off my hang-ups about the gym and find out what life is really like inside the Sports Centre. Working with the fitness staff at TCD Sports, The University Times wants to see why it is that the gym is perceived as being just an exclusive playpen for the athletically gifted, and find out if that’s really the case. Using me as the least-fit, least-experienced guinea-pig imaginable, we’ll bring you top tips from the Sports Centre’s best advisors on a wide range of issues, from diet to exercise to using the gym for the first time yourself. We’ll be talking to the sport scholars to get the other end of the spectrum – men and women on campus at the peak of physical performance – and bring you news, views and analysis on how and why they got there.
You can get involved yourself too. Email us on [email protected] and follow me on Twitter as I pant, sweat and swear my way through learning to lift heavy things voluntarily on @grahamsgymsaga.
Will it work? Who knows. But one thing is for certain – it won’t be predictable.
