It's the gym experience.

It's the gym experience.

You were always wary of the gym experience since the rest of Britain and the world think nothing of signing up for the gym at the beginning of the year and besides it had to be done. Every year those well intentioned members of the public who wake up on the first day of a New Year convince themselves that they're vastly overweight and that if they renew their yearly subscription for the gym then by the summer holiday season they'll have an impressively well defined six pack stomach, legs like Usain Bolt and generally feel fitter than they've ever felt  before.

So it was that you suddenly became aware that your midriff was beginning to expand and protrude rather disturbingly for anybody's liking. You'd kept up a regular running routine and considered yourself to be reasonably self disciplined when it came to working out with your body. But recently you had become aware that an asthmatic cough had rendered such an activity more or less pointless. Your sensitive chest felt very vulnerable and there seemed little in the way of benefit to be gained by running around the local streets amid blustery winds and freezing cold.

In the middle of January you took yourself around the corner to a relatively new gym that looked very tempting and after careful consideration you knew that you had to have the courage of your convictions. After much resistance and a refusal to embrace the gym experience you gave in and found yourself a new member of the gym. There comes a point in a man's life when a man's got to do what a man's got to do. It was time to consign the running and jogging regimen to the cupboard of history- at least for a while.

Now this is how my local gym works. Issued with a specific code number you tap in your code and then enter what can only be described as a space age pod. The perspex doors open up and you step very promptly into the pod. The Doctor Who tardis analogy is perhaps very real since that's exactly what it feels like. Inside the tardis you patiently wait for the pod to close before the entrance hums very quietly before allowing you to walk inside the hallowed portals or should that be a pod.

This is the moment of revelation, an HG Wells scenario, an exercise factory, acres of electronic equipment, machinery as far as the eye can see. You'd heard rumours about the gym and it all looked like too much hard work. Why go to all of that trouble of puffing and panting, sweating and aching when it was much simpler to go for a run and you didn't have to spend a penny on that kind of exercise? It all looked very supernatural and ever so slightly daunting at first but then you recognised the health advantages to be had, the rush of adrenaline and that wonderful sense of satisfaction after that first rigorous work out. But then you felt obliged to slow down, to pace yourself and simply not overdo it.

You trotted over to a series of bikes wondering all the while whether it was all the worth the effort. Your mind went back to a family cruise holiday where you first discovered the simple joys of riding a gym bike. Surely it couldn't be as straightforward as that or could it? Easing your feet onto the challenging pedals nothing could be easier. And so it was that you started pedalling away frantically before establishing your own pace and rhythm. At first you experimented with a half an hour spurt of energy and then gradually increased the time spent on the bike. This would be a piece of the proverbial cake. Nothing to it.

And then you wandered over to the rest of the facilities where your eyes would behold all manner of of gym hardware, a mass of metallic clanking, crashing and clattering weights that thud down on the ground and echo around most of the gym for 24 hours every single day of the week. You glance at the stretching, the punishing purgatory of it all, the face pulling around you, young and old men and women alike striving after the body beautiful. You can only admire the stamina sapping, hugely energetic folk, pumping pulleys and levers, steel ropes yanked to the most torturous extreme and finally, quite joyously, you stumble across the rowing machine where now you find muscles encased in your shoulders that you'd completely forgotten about. Sir Steve Redgrave eat your heart out and Matthew Pinsent had better not rest on his laurels. If you don't have a dream as the song once suggested.