Laurel Alexander

Inspiring Wellbeing, Resilience, and Imagination

If I get an urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes.  Let me tell you about this one.  Secondary school!  The gym – what can I say?  A torture chamber.  That large trampoline around which we young gals stood while somebody bounced around in the centre of the thing.  In my case, my bosoms boinged up and down while my knees stuck sweatily together in knee tucks and my legs splayed unbecomingly in pike.  I’m surprised that my trampolining technique didn’t take me over the heads of the bored onlookers and out of the window.

Then there was hockey, running up and down the pitch, waving that rigid stick and missing the ball.  Rounders, don’t talk to me about rounders and how I couldn’t coordinate my eye, that long thin bat and the round white ball – they rarely met.  I can recall, not without some embarrassment, wearing the white polo shirt and navy knickers of the day.

Exercise in my later teens was boogie dancing at the discos, rabid sexual gropings, downing alcoholic beverages at the speed of knots and eating burgers like they were going out of fashion.  Exercise in my twenties went to rock and roll, jive, twirling like a top on the dance floor and sex (not on the dance floor, though!)

Nowadays, as I move through my prime years, exercise becomes gardening, housework, going up and down our three-storey house, daily walking and the heart-pumping action of getting down to bonking.  Still, I hate exercise.  For those who remember Marathons (now Snickers), I would like to say that I can do a full two marathons every month without training or running out of puff.