Fitness SpREE

Our Fitness which art on treadmill,/ Hallowed be thy gym./ Thy aerobic come, thy work-out done,/ In Nike as it is in Reebok.

I remember a couple of years back when I was a self-professed atheist, i was nervous. For i was about to enter the temple of a new religion. The new religion – which according to some is the fastest-growing

faith system called Fitness.I’d heard of the religion of Fitness that was sweeping the nation, and of the temples dedicated to it called gyms that were popping up faster than pizza joints. But i remained not only an atheist but a gym-atheist, or a gym-nastik. Then one day the inevitable happened. A gym got set up in the housing society where i live. I hadn’t gone to the mountain of Fitness; the mountain had come to me.

There was no help for it. Along with all the other worshippers at the altar of Fitness, i queued up at the

door of the gym. But, as in the case of all places of worship, first i had to acquire the appropriate

investments, the ritual costume required for entry. In the case of the gym, this costume is called a kit,

the first and foremost component of which is something called cross-trainers. It turned out that cross-

trainers are not, as i would’ve thought, bad-tempered people who travel by trains. Cross-trainers are a

special type of footwear which you have to put on to get onto the treadmill, the holy of holies of the gym.

I went to buy cross-trainers. The shop was full of all kinds of cross-trainers, of bulbous shape and lurid

colours, like bullfrogs with strange skin diseases. They were all called REE-something, like REE-flex and

REE-play. I looked at the price tags and REE-coiled. Don’t you have anything called REE-jects which are a

bit cheaper?, i asked the sales assistant. He looked at me as though i were something REE-volting, if not REE-pulsive. In the end, i forked out what seemed to me a REE-markable sum of money which had me REE-ling for what in effect were nothing but what used to be called keds, except these were keds in fancy dress, and with a lot of zeroes added to their prices.

So in retrospect i got a fit because i wanted to be fit.

=)

PS/Words of wisdom:

The reason i skip the gym at times is not because am lazy (or i ran out of good excuses) ,it is because i

want to preserve my sports wear. Common, who does not want to be pinched ("New pinch") for old clothes .It has its merits. Try it.