Time for another blast from the Blessham Hall past. Please don’t see it as a cop-out because I am trying to devote as much time as possible to getting the next Joe Wilkie/Blessham novel finished and I’m having a lot of fun with it.
But this one, from the BH Website Blog archives, is a short (I was badly exhausted at the time) but sublimely funny little piece that details an exercise session that Ange and I attended at our local swimming pool in 2022. It was called hydrolates, which I mistook for what it actually was. I imagined gentle water-based stretches and slow movements as the temperate water softly caressed and held me.
I was wrong.
Woefully wrong.
But read on to discover the full horror of...
Aqua Boot Camp
Yesterday my exquisite wife and I attended our local swimming pool to partake in something called Hydrolates. Basically Pilates in water. Or so I thought. In my foolishness I had imagined it to be a forty-five-minute series of gentle exercises whilst listening to relaxing music. I was expecting a therapeutic time.
HAH!!!
What it ended up as, or so it seemed to me at least, was nothing short of an almost militaristic Aqua Boot Camp.
The unfeasibly energetic session was led by a pretty and athletic young lady who bounced eagerly around and shouted encouragement and various buzz words from the side of the pool accompanied by the sound of a boom-box playing dance/trance/techno music; I don’t know for certain what it was as it all sort of merged it one homogenous dirge. Now, I’m fairly sure that I was the youngest person there (and the only male) at a mere 56 years of age and I have a penchant for the likes of Yes, Rush Uriah Heep and Jethro Tull, so who exactly that gosh darn awful affront to and crime against music was aimed at I just do not know.
But that was the very least of my worries.
I had imagined that all we’d be doing was a series of gentle exercises and stretches, letting the water take the strain, and that by the end we’d have a serene sense of well-being and profound achievement. Pah! It was high impact aerobics cunningly disguised as water-based Pilates. The only well-being I felt was from the sticky piece of delicious and desperately needed flapjack I just had to have in the cafe afterwards to prevent myself from fainting and measuring my length on the coffee shop floor. I even had half of Ange’s flapjack, which she kindly and lovingly sacrificed.
And the only achievement I could identify was actually being still able to dry myself off and get dressed again afterwards without screaming the roof off the place.
The session was akin to some form of medieval torture wrought by the iron hand of some tyrannical and maniacal despot. And to be honest, the young lady didn’t really match that description but she was definitely relentless in her pursuit of reducing me to a quivering shambles of a man.
If that’s Water Pilates then give me a triathlon instead.
This morning my body is a total train wreck. It’s in an abysmal state. My shoulders are shouting, my biceps are burning, my midriff is moaning and my legs are as limp and languorous as an opium fed sloth. My fibromyalgia has never been happier and is having a whale of a time with me.
To use the vernacular – I’m seriously f***ed up!
I honestly believe that if I’d gone for a 25-mile route march across the Highlands with the SAS and a full kit bag I would be feeling better than I am right now. And I must confess that there were several of the exercises that I just didn’t even attempt at the genuine and very real risk of losing my life or at the very least separating muscle from bone. Yes, that bad.
For a while there, about half way through the session, I began to think that the next journey I took would be in an ambulance.
I won’t be going next week or the week after or even the week after that, because it’s going to take a lot longer than a few weeks for my body to recover (if it ever does) and besides, I simply don’t have medication strong enough to cope with it. No, I’ve had my first and last Hydrolates session.
Now, if you’ll all excuse me I’m going to lie down in a darkened room and cry like a lost child in a supermarket for a few hours.
Yes, it really was that bad and despite the humour I employed in writing about it I really was in the most God-awful pain for a long time after.
The moral of the story, if indeed there is one, is get all the facts about what you’re going to attempt exercise-wise before you start.
Hydrolates indeed! I ought to report them under the Trade Descriptions Act.