Going to the gym - A lot like crawling around on the floor looking for a lost contact lens

I've started going to the gym recently in Leeds.  It was Joy's idea really, I started off just tagging along with her for a free session.

I've been a member of a gym before, but it wasn't too successful.  Although at that time I was allocated a personal trainer, I basically just had one session with him where he worked out a program for me and then after that, if I ever bothered to turn up at all, I would just go and do the workout he'd recommended minus all the boring bits or the bits I didn't like, and then go to the cafe next door and have a slice of cake and a latte with full fat milk, so it didn't really do much good at all.

The new gym I've joined is called Tribe, or at least I think it is.  It has a fancy logo TRIB3, which I think is supposed to spell Tribe, but it may indeed simply be TRIB3.  There is no actual gym there where you can just turn up and do your own thing.  There are only classes.  I've never really known what circuit training is, but I imagine that's what it that I've been doing for the last few weeks.

Generally we start on the treadmills for about 5 minutes and run till we're out of breath and till our heart rates reach their maximum, which is measured based on your weight and age by something you wear round your chest.  This information is relayed to screens all around the gym so you know how close you are all the time.  The ideal is to be in the Red Zone, which is above 90% of your target heart rate.

Then you go and pick up some dumb-bells for about 5 minutes and do various Resistance exercises with them.  It's pretty dark in there and there are 3 sets of dumb-bells; 5kg, 7.5kg and 10kg.  The first time I picked up two out of the dark I could barely lift them so I assumed they were the heavy ones but they were only 5kg.  I've never really attempted to do anything with my upper body.  I naturally have big thighs and a big backside and mostly over the years I've done running or cycling or sports like football and rugby but I was always a lot more interested in cardiovascular fitness than muscle definition or strength.  I've never been any good at stuff like press-ups and so lifting dumb-bells with my two floppy bits of celery that I have instead of arms was hard at first, although it seems to be getting easier.  And although I'm still flabby round the middle, it feels less so than when I started. Working with dumb-bells is very good at keeping me in the moment, because I constantly have to remind myself not to drop them on my foot or my face, and the higher in the air they are, and the more sweaty my hands get, the more afraid I am of doing that.

The third station is called Intensity.  It's very varied.  It can be running around in a little box drawn on the floor, or doing squats or starjumps or jumping about with no bodily coordination whatsoever as if you're a drunken disco dancer or touching hands fingers knees and toes to other body parts.  Or it can be lifting kettle bells or medicine balls and throwing them around (without letting go obviously) Whatever it is, it usually leaves me with legs of jelly.

In an average 45 minute session you usually go round each area 3 times.  Often I finish with Intensity and that means that I generally end each session crawling around on my hands and knees with jelly legs and sweat in my eyes as if I'm looking for a lost contact lens.

The sessions are quite expensive at £15 each, although so far I've had some free sessions and also they have multi-buy offers which make it a bit cheaper.  I don't know if I'll be able to afford it long-term but I've been enjoying it while it lasts.  Although the sessions are demanding, the trainers who run them are really supportive and unless I am a poor judge of character, they don't appear to be sadistic maniacs.  They are really friendly and happy to advise and correct mistakes and seem genuinely interested that we're getting something out of it.

I thought I might be more self-conscious in there because a lot of the time I lack the coordination or the flexibility to do the exercises properly but a) it's dark in there so no-one else can really see you and b) everyone else is in their own world of pain, so they're too busy for sight-seeing.

The changing rooms have free lockers and showers with shampoo and body wash and deodorants and moisturiser all provided, so there's no need to lug around a big bag of toiletries with you when you go.  Also, if you order it in advance you can get a recovery shake for when you finish.  These cost £4 each.  The sessions I've been to so far have generally been early on a Sunday morning, or last week I went to the 6.30 am session on a Wednesday.  Although I don't like the getting out of bed part, once I'm there I get to feel virtuous that I'm doing exercise while lots of people are still asleep.

For me, the main point of the gym is to help improve my fitness for running, and I think that's already happening.  My times are already improving on my regular runs and as well as that it doesn't take as long to get my breathing back to normal when I finish running now.

Overall, even though I just copied this idea off Joy and didn't think of it myself, it's been a good experience.

Linguistic Determinism and Japanese - Going back in time

I had my Japanese oral exam this week.  I took it in the Liberty Building at the University of Leeds. The Liberty Building was built on top of my old school swimming baths.  I never really liked swimming, it didn't seem like real exercise if you couldn't tell that you were sweating.  I went to Leeds Grammar School between 1979 and 1986, and at that time the school was on Moorland Road on the edge of Woodhouse Moor in Leeds.  It's moved now to a bigger site outside the city and they let girls in now, but when I went there that's where it was.  The buildings that the school used to occupy have been swallowed up by the University, and so I'm effectively back in the same place I was when I left school.

Just next to the Liberty Building used to be the old gymnasium where I took my A Level exams.  So in 31 years I've moved about 50 feet.

I'm studying Linguistics now at the University, and we've been reading about Linguistic Determinism, the idea that the language you know affects how and what you can think.  I've been taking Japanese as a Discovery Module, along with Spanish.

Taking Japanese has been a humbling experience.  I've always been quite good at languages, as long as I could read them.  The mixture of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana that make up Japanese writing have left me at times feeling like I was 4 again, before I could read English. Certainly in the Japanese exam I took before Christmas I felt illiterate, because I could barely read or write anything.

Usually with languages, it's the speaking part I find the most difficult, but with Japanese it's the other way round, because at least with speaking I don't have to read anything.

As part of my exam last week, I had to do a mini presentation.  I was allowed to take in 3 photographs to help me.

Despite my struggles with Japanese, my teacher Sensei Manami has always been on hand with good advice.  When I told her before Christmas I was really struggling, I expected some sort of soft soap and sympathy approach, but her advice boiled down to just two words: work harder!  It was good advice.  Her advice before the oral exam last week was to realise that we only know a limited amount of Japanese, so the best thing is to construct sentences out of the Japanese we know, rather than trying to translate our English into Japanese.  We just don't know enough to do that.

I chose to do my mini presentation about my Lejog trip of 2014.  Constrained by lingustic determinism this is what I said.

Kore wa shashin san-mai desu.  Kono shashin ni wa watashi no jitensha desu.  Ni-sen ju-yo-nen ni nagai ryoko jitensha de ikimashita

Here are 3 pictures.  In this picture is my bike.  In 2014 I went on a long journey by bike.

Kono murasaki iro no gyo sen-mairu deshita.  sen roppyaku kirometeru.  mainichi hyaku kirometeru. muzakashikatta desu.  kantana dewa arimasen.

This purple line 1000 miles is.  1600 kilometres.  100 kilometres each day.  It was difficult. It was not easy.

Hitori ikimasen deshita.  Issho tomodachi to ikimashita.  Ju-hachi nin deshita.

I did not go alone.  Together with friends I went.  18 people there were.

Kochira wa Erwan san.  Watashi no tomodachi desu.  Mareishia-jin desu.  Isha desu.  Byoin no Sukoterandu de shigoto o shimasu.

Here is Erwan.  My friend.  He is from Malaysia.  He is a doctor.  Works in hospital in Scotland.

Nimotsu wa basu de ikimashita.  Kochira wa untenshu deshita.  Namae wa Chris desu.

Luggage went by bus.  Here is the driver.  Name is Chris.

Ju-nana yobi deshita.  Tenki subarashikatta desu.  Hitobito subarashikatta desu.  Totemo tanoshikatta desu.

17 days it was.  Weather was wonderful.  People were wonderful.  It was a lot of fun.

I was pleased with what I managed to say.  It didn't come anywhere close to describing the experience in full.  For that you can look here   I used my mother tongue for that, and it contains a lot more detail.  Chris was so much more than a driver, for example.  But limited as it was by Linguistic Determinism, it did at least contain some fundamental truths.

I may not have moved very far in 31 years.  On Thursday I was sat doing an exam just next door to where I've taken lots of other exams before.  From my entrance exam in 1979 to my final A Level exam in 1986.  You might say that although in Time I'm going in a straight line, in Space I'm going round in circles.  But at least I'm still learning.  And I'm still trying to describe the world as best I can through the languages I know.