Such a Brave Girl

People think brave is when you jump out of an airplane or when you get yourself into a standoff with a Taipei taxi driver. But I think those things are brave only if you're afraid of doing them. I'm not.

I’m afraid of bugs, dentists and of a lot of ordinary things. Such as sticking to something that’s boring and requires hard work. Or going back to something that you used to be good at but now you’re crap and have to start all over again.

Well, tonight I did something that's really, I mean REALLY brave and hard for me: I finally went BACK TO THE GYM!

After not having been since December. After having gone out of shape and gained weight and flab. Ewwww!

I almost didn't go. I almost talked myself out of it again. All you lazy bastards out there, you know what I'm talking about!

Gym is great. I LOVE going to gym. When I first came to Taiwan, one of the first things I did was join a gym, my second week here. I knew that things would be hard for me in those first few months and that one way to stay mentally in shape would be to have something familiar, a source of strength and discipline. And it was.

BodyCombat by Les Mills is my favorite aerobic exercise. It’s the Stambuck’s of the fitness world. You go anywhere in the world and you get the same class. It’s dictated by the Mighty Les from his throne somewhere in NZ (I use NZ because I can’t spell the whole country and I can’t be bothered to look it up. Sorry, Ant.)

This lady is one of Les' chicks. That's pretty close to what I consider to be the ideal female physique. If only her bee-hynde was slightly more in the J-Lo neighborhood. I, too, want to be featured on Les' poster one day, but I have to hurry up and get into shape, I'm no spring chicken anymore.

I used to go to BodyCombat with Diana in Holland. Our favorite choreography was the one with jabs and jump-kicks to the Survivor theme from Rocky II. We did it everywhere. In bars and restaurants, on the street, in department stores… All it took was for one of us to suddenly think of it and we’d start punching the air to the famous riff: Bam… Bam-bam-bam… Bam-bam-bam… Bam-bam-baaaam!

When I joined the Alexander Gym here in Taipei I started taking the BodyCombat class again and had a huge crush on the instructor for months. But, that's a whole other story.

So, how come I stopped going? Well, I'm inconsistent with everything. I will get bored with things. I lack discipline when it gets tough. So around the time I got a bit lazy about the gym, also Mr. Tash came into my life and I found a really legitimate excuse not to go anymore: I WAS HAVING SEX!!!

Howeverrrr... although the quality of the abovementioned activity was/is as high as they get, I'll have you know... it doesn’t constitute a valid compensation for gym training, two reasons:
A. We aren’t doing it as often as one would like to.
2. I myself ain’t doing all that much hard work during it, anyway. (90% of the time I'm of the “Let the guy do all the hard work School of Sex”.)

But now I'm back. Back among the trendy, glitter sweat-pants wearing Taiwanese girlies who use the treadmill to watch their favorite soap at resistance level ZERO. Life makes sense again.