One of the benefits of belonging to the Walnut Creek Sports and Fitness Club is the many classes that you can attend as part of your membership fee. I've documented my love of all things Les Mills, which is but a small part of the spinning, yoga-in-the-dark, step, body sculpting, etc. that you can torture yourself with from 5am to 11pm, should you enjoy that sort of thing.
Amongst these many and various activities is Zumba. It's described as an exhilarating, effective, easy-to-follow, Latin-inspired, calorie-burning dance fitness-party. "Are you ready to party yourself into shape?" asks the website. Evidently I was not. Further warnings were issued by the instructor wearing bright orange trousers with pink tassels on the back pockets. She arrived, then the music started.
I had asked Hannah earlier if we should attend an introductory class. She confidently stated that she'd done loads of exercise classes and you could pick everything up very quickly. To be fair, BODYPUMP ("lift...and down. Lift...and down.") didn't require an inordinate amount of brainpower to get through the first time. So in we jumped.
It took only the opening bars of the first salsa-driven track for me to realise our huge mistake. I was the only man in the class, and Hannah and I the youngest, and the only ones to have no idea what we were doing. The instructor stated that she was "quite technical" and liked to make sure everyone knew the moves. And then proceeded to explain nothing. As she shimmied and shook at the front, in the manner of somebody receiving a nasty electric shock, everyone else seemed completely capable of mirroring her every twizzle and gyration.
I once read that samurai wore long robes to hide their feet, as it is the feet that give away where the next attack is coming from. Just look at her feet, I kept telling myself, and the rest will follow. This vaguely worked to begin with, although strangely having my feet doing something similar to hers didn't seem to keep my flailing arms under control. Every now and again I would catch sight of myself in the room's mirrored walls, and wonder at this vision of a pasty English person with no rhythm or ability. I was the geography teacher at the school disco.
Half-way through the hour I lost the ability to concentrate on her twinkle-toes and just sort of jumped around flapping. "Into your Sugarcanes!" she would shout, and all the middle-aged women would click in precisely co-ordinated patterns to her command. I put in a bit more effort when I thought she was looking at me but, frankly, I was lost in a terrifying world I did not understand.
The instructor came up to us at the end and asked how our first time went. Was it that obvious? Unfortunately the South American beats could not overcome the natural British ability to lie pleasantly, and I thanked her and told her how much I'd enjoyed myself. Then I left, never to return.
Me and Hannah, today.
