[not yet] off trippin, 2

OK, so where did we get to? Rhetorical question.

I went to the gym today. Wow, you might say. I was so surprised I nearly walked straight out again, but first I spent a good 2 minutes trying to open the door, which was depressing. Then, having made it to the treadmill without significant mishap, I stood on the thing and tried to make sense of all the numbers and buttons visible. Now, normally I love buttons, I just don't like them in the context of exercise. These buttons had labels like "incline" and another said "hill", which seemed somewhat redundant, but anyway, I put in a random weight (70kgs, god knows if that's significantly more or less than mine), and pressed "quick start". It didn't appear to start at all, so I pressed the speed-up button and held it. I stopped at a random number and paced along for a moment. Felt like an idiot after about 3 seconds because I was being out paced by the ancient woman next to me. Really, really ancient. I love old people, honestly, but dear god, I'm surprised she didn't snap to bits whenever her foot hit the floor, I'm further surprised by the way she was apparently enjoying the experience. The clicking of joints that accompanied her every movement was not so pleasant, however. There was also, as it happened, a really, really old guy who had to be literally led on someone's arm to each machine in turn. How he was able to use the machines once lifted onto them is anyone's guess. Sorry to any grandparents who may be reading this. You know who you are ;)

Spurned into greater ambition, I cranked the speed up a bit more and ended up in a sort of indefinable zone between walking and running, which was most uncomfortable and I moved from that as fast as the machine would let me. Unfortunately, I may have held the button for too long for while I had already stopped pressing, the infernal contraption was still catching up, getting progressively faster and faster. When I was literally sprinting, in some danger of being sucked into the mechanical depths of the beast, I was lucky enough to catch the cable of my earphones with my flailing arm and yank my iPod out of its resting place, landing on the treadmill right under my rapidly approaching foot.

I managed to slow the thing down and had 25 minutes of relatively uneventful slog. It was noticeably easier than a similar distance (or even less) in the real world, which makes me suspect that the machine is lying to me... Whatever.

Anyway, back to half term. I genuinely can't remember where we got too, I need to go home and check the pictures to remind me. I may as well post this story, since it'll be ages before I get around to the rest! Damn choirs and operas and things.

In fact, I'm going to add a work in progress box at the side, to show what will appear if I ever get typing fast enough! It's having to reply to all your massive emails that does it (please don't stop!).

Dom