Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I went to the gym yesterday after work. I gave up my membership at JJB because I couldn't really afford it and I wasn't going along enough to merit the cost. So yesterday I went to circuit training at Maes Glas instead.

It was horrible. I like athletics quite a bit and I'm a big fan of circuit training normally but otherwise I wasn't big into sport at school, and this was just like school sports (except not as nice as my school's sports). It smelt of a school sport hall, it has scarily bright changing rooms with communal showers and it's hard to find which room you're looking for.

The class itself had about sixty people at it, and it was incredibly hard to hear what the instructor was saying over the music playing in the background (she did have a microphone but it was very muffled). I missed the point where I was supposed to say if I hadn't been to the class before because I couldn't make out what she was saying, and the group of five I was in got in trouble because we were doing an exercise lying on the floor (where, obviously, the bass from the music she was playing was much louder making it even harder to hear her) so didn't hear her repeatedly telling us to get up and jog on the spot. So she told us off severely and added extra time to everyone's jogging to punish us, saying "if you're unhappy you can blame the people in group 4."

I'm not twelve! I'm not in school anymore! I'm a grown up and I have paid to attend this class, I don't want to be treated like a naughty child, dragged up and shamed in front of the whole class. What a contrast to JJB, where the changing rooms are very pleasant and clean, where it smells nice and where the light in the gym itself is gently dimmed so people don't have to feel self conscious (in Maes Glas they have a women-only gym because the men doing weight-lifting seem an awful lot more scary in bright light). Maes Glas does have good gym equipment, it just isn't a nice experience. I don't feel relaxed going there.

I wasn't really enjoying it anyway, so I pretended to go get a drink of water and just left. Frodo and I went for a jog to Menai Bridge instead. I'd already done about half an hour of exercise and I always get wheezy when I run in the cold so I wasn't much good at it, but I did manage enough running to make my legs very very sore today. It was much more fun than Maes Glas. It didn't smell, nobody was shouting at me, and it's really nice standing on the bridge at night. I'm going to do some more night-time running and then I'm going to beg JJB to let me back into their ranks.