After a lifetime of failure followed by a determined burst - that also resulted in failure - I am doubling down on my journey to Sexytown. Photo / Getty Images
After a lifetime of failure followed by a determined burst - that also resulted in failure - I am doubling down on my journey to Sexytown. Photo / Getty Images
One-time middle-aged bridesmaid Helen Van Berkel is back. This time she's taken up a new challenge: She's on her way to "Sexytown".
I look at myself critically in the mirror. I see a scowling middle-aged woman with poodle hair hiding a glass of wine behind her back. Photos / Supplied
A colleague didn't say good morning to me. He gets a left jab, right jab, left hook. The boss who spends his day burying me in messages: haveyou done this/fixed that/finished something else? He gets a jab, left hook, right uppercut. The judgy editor who thought I didn't take my last fitness journey "seriously enough": "Maybe you should try not drinking wine and not eating Baileys cheesecake? Do it again." She gets a jab, cross, hook, cross.
The punching bag is beaten into submission and sweat is making my neck folds itch. The trainer is backing away slowly.
"Stop growling," he begs. "You're scaring people."
The faces of the people who pissed me off fade into the taut black leather of the punching bag and I fall into a dripping rhythm as the trainer yells out the combinations: One two, one-one two. Two, two, one two, three. Repeat.
After a lifetime of failure followed by a determined burst - that also resulted in failure and an extra 20kg still spread unattractively around my person - I am doubling down on my journey to Sexytown.
I need to step it up from a genteel afternoon with a PT, which is why I found myself sweating – and swearing – as a perkily named eight-week challenge got under way at the local boxing gym. The eight-week Journey to Sexytown started on a high. I got the high scores on everything: body fat, visceral fat, thigh fat – winning!
Then comes an epiphany straight from heaven. Did you know you can banish push-up carpet burns from your knuckles forever by putting on boxing gloves? Your hands are nicely padded, you're lifted an impressive few extra centimetres from the ground and the only things on fire afterwards are both your shoulders, both your arms, your cramping big toe and your core.
Did you know you can banish push-up carpet burns from your knuckles forever by putting on boxing gloves? Photo / Getty Images
Sure, the gloves mean you can't pull up your gym pants when your gut makes a break for it, but a spreading wide of the legs followed by a few sharp but subtle rolling thrusts of the hips, one after the other, takes care of that. Push-ups done (well, most of them) and it's back to the boxing bag. More shouted combinations, followed by 10 burpees. More combinations, 10 squats. Hitch up the pants. Combinations, mountain climbing; combinations, lunges. The torture gets ever more inventive. Combinations, bear crawls the length of the gym. We look like scuttling red-faced Gollums.
Not one single part of your body is left in peace. Just when you think it's over, you're ordered "out the door for 200". The first time I don't realise that means actual running. I'm tricked into an embarrassing public shamble down Onewa Rd in rush hour. Luckily for shocked motorists I've ditched the gloves and can pull up my pants.
The next time, I'm smarter and sidle on to a rowing machine. "So what's your excuse?" asks a fellow malingerer of a similar advanced age. "Sprained ankle. You?" I say. "I'm too old to run." Her honesty makes me confess: "I hate running. I'd look like a crazed stalker if I lumbered after the class. The sprained ankle was three months ago."
We become besties. We studiously row 200m.
Each class is administered by a different torturer. I learn to hate the ones who take burpees to a whole new circle of hell by adding a medicine ball. But as I gaze at myself burping in the mirror I can't help but marvel at the distance I've come in just two days. My body is long and straight, angles of defined muscle in black lycra. I leap skyward like a glorious goddess nymph fairy princess, my slender arms above my head as I raise that medicine ball to the heavens, my beautiful red hair bouncing luxuriously around my head like a golden nimbus of youth and loveliness.
Wait, what? I don't have red hair. I wipe the curtain of sweat from my eyes and refocus from the marvellous teen (aka my daughter) at my side, in the prime of her gorgeousness, to the tragic puddle that is me, pulling up my pants and struggling to my feet like a baby elephant out of a swamp.
Wait. Back up the bus. "Pulling up my pants"? Clothes falling off has never – ever – been my problem. The "ahem, the girls are out" conversation as a button pops, yes. The embarrassing bursting of a seam (rip? No! I just farted!) yes. Drooping pants? No. I look at myself critically in the mirror. I see a scowling middle-aged woman with poodle hair hiding a glass of wine behind her back. I see overhangs. I see no change.
But the scales tell a different story: 2kg gone. The measuring tape shows 6cm hse disappeared from my waist - and I'm not desperately sucking it in this time.
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