It's Easier if you Breathe

5.50: CrossFit day 1. I make my way down the path to Crossfit Platinum. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. The room is pretty quiet except for a few guys warming up on boxing bags while Fort Minor’s yelling that it takes “5% pleasure; 50% pain” in the next room. I breathe for the first time since leaving the carpark and announce that I’m new. Small, quiet, something to pound on; I can do this.

5.55: I’m in the wrong room. Of course!

5.56: I can’t do this! The room is packed. As far as I can tell it’s some sort of Barbell Barbie & Kettlebell Ken convention. And I’m sure at least one of the Lilliputians flying up at the pullup bar has her clothes airbrushed on. 5% pleasure my a**.

5.58: Flashback to last Sunday at my gym when I dropped my blackberry onto the treadmill – again – and it went ballistic on the jogger behind me. Amazing how you can still feel so big while someone makes you feel so small. I don’t like girls like this. I don’t like their smugness. Their “don’t hate me cos I’m beautiful” attitude. The fact that they can wear spandex without looking like their behinds have been prepared for a moon landing.

5.59: Feeling fat. And small.

6.00: Class over; butterflies starting up again. I shuffle over to the coach, but two of the Barbies make it there before me. They’re dripping sweat all over the floor but annoyingly they look like they’ve been sprinkled with summer rain. Why don’t I sweat like that? Why do I sweat like a sausage under a grill? OMG, OMG one of them is saying something. I’m probably standing between her and the water cooler.

6.01: Nope; conversation is directed and me. Something about “welcome and enjoy” I think. It’s hard to tell when your heart is pounding in your ears.

6.15: I’m in a corner; carefully cordoned off with a kettlebell and a mat; working on deadlifts with my broomstick. (I hope no one’s watching me.) Since we’re going to be getting intimate and sweaty with each other I decide he needs a name. He’s very stiff so I settle on The Duke of York.

6.30: No one’s watching me! They’re all too wrapped up in their “50% pain.”

6.31: And then it happens. The class vanishes. The agonisingly vivid images of the day and its problems fade into watercolour swirls.  It’s just me and the music and my muscles hot and firing and my blood raging and my mind silent and clear … and that feeling of coming home.

7.00: Class is over. I’m glowing like a sausage. But I walk out feeling beautiful. Beautiful and big enough to take on the world.