The Gym, or Please Keep Your Pink Secret to Yourself

So, I was laying in bed this morning, willing myself to get up and go to the gym. Not an unreasonable request as I've done ridiculous amounts of travelling (and therefore eating too much without any real exercise to speak of) in the past 6 weeks. Mags was still asleep, so I could actually sneak out of the house without it having to be to the accompaniment of her wails. But I was tired. So tired. Travelling, or more correctly, sleeping in beds other than my own had really cut into my sleep these past few weeks, and I am still trying to catch up. That, and I feel as though I am coming down with a slight bug, which is draining my energy. So, I got up and creaked down the stairs to the bathroom, already composing a weak-ass excuse to not go to the gym and instead flop about the house for the day. That is, until I got to the mirror. And parts of my body that are not supposed to jiggle...did.

So I got dressed and went to the gym.

I didn't do a full routine, which I probably could've used, but I was honestly still feeling like someone had turned up the gravity, so I didn't beat myself up over it. I did most of my regular time on the treadmill, and then opted to do some stretching, which I desperatetly needed after all those airplanes. After a short while, two other women joined me in the mat/ball room, pulled out mats of their own, and began to do their own thing.

I've been trying to stretch out my lower back and hamstrings, so a lot of the stretches I was doing involved lying on the floor. And like most people, my eyes kind of wander around when I'm holding a stretch for any amount of time. But Lo! And what to my wandering eyes should appear? A little red sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer! I kid -- and also recoil in horror. Because instead of reindeer, I see one big Beaver.

That's right. Off to my right, at eye level, one of the women is lying on her side, doing these frog-kicky things. She's wearing jogging shorts, which are not the longest things in the world, and NO UNDERWEAR. We are talking serious jungle-foliage, break-out-the-machete, lips a-flappin' action here, folks. It was as if a Tribble had landed in her crotch and was chewing gum with it's mouth open! Now, I'm all for the beauty of the female body, blah, blah, blah, and if you want to exercise au naturel, godspeed, but there is a time and place, people! And it is not, I repeat, NOT at 830 in the morning in the YMCA!

What else could I do? I left. I calmly got up, put my mat away, and headed for the door in a dead run. I managed to restrain myself from ripping off my own underwear and shooting it at her off of my thumb slingshot-style. Thanks to the gym, I'm thinking I'll lose quite a bit of weight this week; not because of any sort of regular exercise, but because my appetite is completely GONE. I'm going to call it the 'Leave it to Beaver' weight loss program.