As part of my pre-New Year’s resolution to start exercising regularly again, I’m using this vacation as an opportunity to resurrect my old gym habits and, hopefully, resurrect a few of the muscles that have atrophied in the last few months. While the trashy gossip magazines I loved to read in the Swarthmore gym are sadly unavailable for the Kindle, I’ve dived headfirst into the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels, which are basically crack and make for fantastic elliptical machine reading. I’ve also done some revising to my trusty workout playlist. Some of the latest additions:
JLS – Beat Again
La Roux – Bulletproof
Daniel Bedingfield – Gotta Get Thru This (D’N'D Radio Edit)
Calvin Harris – The Girls
Lady GaGa – Telephone (feat. Beyoncé)
Other than the vague notion that I “should” be exercising, I can’t quite put my finger on why I’m returning to the gym, except that I feel woefully inadequate when compared to some of the Oxford athletes. While I know, intellectually, that Oxford engages in the same sort of recruiting of somewhat mentally-vacant athletes as other top-tier schools, seeing them walking around town makes me feel like a total failure. Not only are they in the same Oxford University Facebook network I’ve worked so hard to join, but they’re also totally fucking gorgeous and muscular. Swoon.
But, as was the case last year, I suspect that this motivation, too, will pass. No matter how hard I try to fake it, there’s nothing at all jockish about me.