you're beautiful...

There's a guy in the changing room at work who has a locker just in front of a large mirror.  He gets changed in front of the mirror making loving eye-contact with himself throughout.  He does stop short of slowly rubbing moisturiser into his pecs, which is what I've seen guys at my gym doing in front of the floor-length mirrors.... but he's not that far away, and I can't help but look at him and fight the urge to tell him to get a room with himself.

Speaking of the gym, after nearly twenty years, I've finally cancelled my membership.  I've never exactly been one to pump iron and chug protein shakes in the changing rooms whilst admiring my guns*, but I did try to swim a couple of times a week. I really ought to be swimming two days a week because it's a great holistic exercise that works my weak shoulders in a way that running just does not.  I really should.  I should also probably be using the extensive selection of weights in the gym to work my weaker left side and to try and reverse my muscle wastage.  I haven't done that either.  Since I started training for that first marathon in 2015, the plain truth is that I've added two additional runs to my exercise schedule and haven't been swimming at all, never mind set foot in the main body of the gym.

In fact, the last time I set foot in the gym at all (since they closed the Sweatshop that used to be the meeting spot for my running club) was when I popped in for a pee in the middle of a long run a few months ago.

Hmm.  That's probably a sign that there are better things I could be doing with that money, right?

So we went in to cancel. As we went through the process of signing forms and things, I looked around at the kind of person who goes to a gym like this.  All sorts of people go to gyms like this, of course, but the people I was seeing were pretty much exactly the kind of people I don't want to be.

There's a Starbucks concession inside the gym. It's about a 50m walk from there to the car park.  The car park has Starbucks cups discarded all over the place, in spite of also having plenty of bins.

Those kind of people.

That guy who gazes at himself lovingly in the mirror in the changing rooms at work? I saw him in the shop at lunchtime today, and he was browsing the Valentines cards.

...he's buying that card for himself, right? I hope he likes it.

* I have names for my guns: they're the Bennett Brothers... Alan and Tony... and they're every bit as impressive as those names might lead you to believe.