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I had my first personal training session for the Men's Health Abs Challenge that I am doing between now and the Edinburgh Fringe. I have once again plateaued on my weight loss so hopefully this regime will help spur me onwards. I have been given a temporary membership at the swanky Third Space gym in town (apparently Prince Harry is a member, but I didn't see him today) and my own personal trainer, Ally. It will be interesting to see what we can achieve in a relatively short time. I'm mainly interested in improving my running and losing a bit more fat. I can't see me with a washboard stomach and massive muscles, but you never know.
Ally eased me in gently and I didn't have to do anything too demanding today, but I got a couple of good tips about my running style and we did some interval training which involved jumping on and off a moving running machine. My basic fitness is not too bad. Let's see where we are by the end of July.
I stayed in town to work on the play (and the Lord of the Dance Settee programme), sitting in various cafes and then heading to Soho House, the members club I got membership of in return for doing a gig. It's really full of pricks in there though. A middle-aged man in the loo had to wait because all three urinals were in use and then he commented as I left about how disgusting it was to have to stand there waiting for us to finish "sprinkling". I don't know if he'd ever been to a public toilet before, but that's pretty much the deal. It seemed a very odd thing to comment on strangers' micturation. I nearly challenged him on this, but thought I'd leave him to his nobby life. I didn't get too much work done as I was sat next to some people who seemed to work in advertising loudly discussing some Christmas campaign they were working on. They managed to each drink over a bottle of wine in the 90 minutes I was there (in the late afternoon) and unsurpisingly the originality of their ideas were in inverse proportion to how loud they were shouting them. But advertisers don't need to be original, they just need to be able to copy stuff (one of them had the idea to copy something from the film "Tangled" - she earned her money today). One of them used the word "literally" literally about three times every minute, even in cases where it was not possible to take the thing she was saying literally. I wanted to tell her that she literally didn't understand how the word should be used. I was trying not to listen to them, but it was hard. Astonishingly at one point one of them started crying. They were brainstorming ideas about family and I think he'd remembered something about his mother. It was good to see that someone in advertising had some vestige of human emotion, but weeping seemed so inappropriate that I wondered if he'd just pulled it out of his box of tricks to try and get his idea accepted. It was fun seeing the other advertising-bots having to try and elicit sympathy though. I am sure the wine played some part in all this, but it was literally extraordinary. Literally.
And the personal training sessions must really be working already because my wedding ring fell off twice today - once worryingly out on the street where it could have rolled down a drain. I am losing weight from just where I want it to go, my fingers. Either that or I am like Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense and have been dead all along. Spoiler alert.
