Pain is just weakness leaving your body

Last night's Bootcamp was like having a catering-sized fridge (with optional ice maker ) fall on top of you just as your flat mate has left to go to work for the day. Nine hours later, barely breathing at all, thinking 'so this is how it all ends for me', you are rescued just in the nick of time but you will bear the scars for many nights to come.

It started out like any other Bootcamp workout with a bit of a warm-up. It being Bootcamp, the warm up is like a workout to a normal person. But we're all in it to win and we do the laps, the tower runs and the prisoner squats with the zeal of a simpleton, a toothless one at that.

Then the trainer explained the first circuit. A total of 20 minutes would be divided into 1 minute intervals. 1 minute intervals? A three day old baby could do that. In that first minute you were to do one push up and spend the rest of the time doing tower runs (these are runs that basically serve to disorientate) next minute you were to do two push-ups followed by as many tower runs as you could fit into that time and the minute after that three push- ups and so on. Guffaws all round. Walk in the park this workout!

So by twenty minutes you would be up to twenty push-ups and then have yourself a little run to cool down. 'Cept by twenty minutes, the clever mathematician among you will have worked out that you have in fact done one million, gazillion push-ups; you will have expended enough energy to run the national grid for a weekend and you are nothing but a pool of liquid and cloth. People were no longer able to communicate with words by this point. I have actually employed an assistant to type this up for me as I no longer have the use of my upper body.

With the flexibility of a wax version of the Tin Man, I have no idea how I will shave before I go on a sun break next week. Guess I will just have to pretend I'm German.

But this wasn't the end. NO. This is Bootcamp you fool. While people rooted around for morphine in the bleechers of the gym, the trainer announced that we would now work on our cores. CORRR! blimeys more like. A twenty second plank; well most of us having little more than a plank's range of motion managed it and then some Turkish get-ups, Burpees and Russian rolls; legal forms of torture in any other language.

Grown men left the gym, sobbing quietly. Women hobbled (we have a higher pain threshold I'm told) and our trainer left us with these soothing words. Pain is just weakness leaving your body. See you Friday - don't be late.