April 27. Day 118. You'd have to be kidding me

For most of my life I was convinced that people who said they enjoyed exercise were
a) Mad
b) Lying or
c) Both of the above
People who exercised always seemed to be in pain, or injured or hideously hot and sweaty. There could no possible joy in any of that.
Quite honestly I blame the education system for entrenching my anti-exercise beliefs.
I'm sure it wasn't their intent, but school sport had everything to do with winning and nothing to do with participation. If you were slow and uncoordinated (yep, hands up that was me); if you were always selected last when fellow students had to choose their teams; if you were never in the running for representative sport, the system fully supported the idea that really you were hopeless and should be leaving it to the experts.
And so I did.
Until I was 29, February 14, 1994, to be exact. That's the day I got engaged and at that moment I decided I did not want to be looking at multiple chins in wedding photos for the rest of my life. So that meant diet and that dreaded exercise business.
So I started to walk and I started to swim. Eventually I added the gym and aerobic classes to that. I exercised every day and I still exercise every day.
At some point, and I don't know exactly when that was, I realised I wasn't just exercising because I had to but because I wanted to.
Those fitness fanatics weren't lying after all.
My husband and son still don't get it. They think that the need for daily exercise is just another pressure I put on myself.
In fact, it's quite the opposite. It takes the pressure off. It's me time. The only time when I'm not someone's mother, or wife, or employee, or teacher. I'm just me and I'm alone with my thoughts.
Which isn't to say that there aren't times that I still question the sanity of all this. Like this morning. It was dark when I got up. It was cold and by the time I got home it was raining.
But it's a bit like hitting your head against a brick wall, it's great when it stops.
And let's face it the vision of people swimming at South Bank before the sun had come up was unusually beautiful. You wouldn't be doing that if you didn't love it.