"All I've got here are books and music, I used to have excercise but I outgrew it..." (Eskimo Joe)

It takes a certain kind of person to be a fitness junkie: you either are one, or you're not. You either live and breathe gym mats and BMIs and fat pinch tests and personal bests, or you don't. Achieving taut abs, rock-hard gluts and rounded calves is either a sign of spiritual fulfillment for you, or it ain't.

It's not a matter of laziness or the decay of our Western lifestyles, it's a personality thing -- I'm sure of it. I probably should have realised that by now. If not when I was vainly pounding the bitumen clad in a t-shirt and bloomers during a junior athletics fad, then surely during swimming lessons, my short-lived foray into tennis, the year I wore a lycra leotard and irredescent stockings every Saturday to dance classes or the time I signed up at the gym and allowed an aging ex-athlete to pinch my stomach fat with plastic tweezers in order to determine my body fat percentage and devise a mind-numbingly dull program of lifting weights and running and running and running and getting nowhere.

But ever slow to learn, I braved the weather last night -- weather fit for neither woman not gym junkie -- to attend my first kickboxing circuit class. It's supposed to be an hour worth of 3 minute sets (to simulate fighting time in a ring) of skipping, push-ups and pad and bag work.

And it nearly killed me.

I had the misfortune of being partnered with some Slavic superwoman. A tall, lean blonde with a strong accent, designer track suit pants, painted nails and an endless supply of energy. After jogging around the room so many times I lost count, with our instructor yelling drill-sergeant-like "knees up!" "push ups!" I was fairly knackered and after the first few rounds of pad-work (alternately kicking and punching heavy boxing pads with Katya the Fearless was holding) I was about ready to curl up in a ball with a pint of hot chocolate. But it was my turn to hold the pads -- which weighed about as much as a small child -- while Katya proceeded to kick and punch the hell out of them. I didn't have any strength left for resistance, so I just limply held them at waist height. She had to keep adjusting them to face-height and I was sure I was going to lose a tooth. My blood pressure plummeted and in my dizzy, fatigued state the smell of feet (which had attached itself to everything, including the pads I was holding) was making me nauseous. During a thirty second break inbetween sets I happened to glance down at my feet and noticed that the big toe on my right foot was torn and bloodied, no doubt the victim of a shin kick that went awry. Nice.

It went on like that for an hour. I've never been so glad to leave a place.

Driving home, with the rain belting my windscreen in much the same way that Katya was belting me not sixty minutes ago, I had an epiphany: "it's not friggin' worth it." I recalled the sight of the couple I'd seen jogging on the drive in. They were wearing blue shorts and short, fluroescent yellow rain-jackets that flapped in the wind and rain. At first I thought they were uniformed cops and wondered what they were doing sprinting around a relatively quiet part of the suburbs. Then I realised: they were excercising. And so single-minded were they in their quest for fitness that they couldn't take one night off, citing a thunderstorm as an excuse.

They truly are a different breed, are fitness fanatics. And though I might occasionally wish I was fitter or that I had Gwen Stefani's abs, I have been to dark side: and it's not worth the work.