Hmm.. well I bet you’ve been thinking the walking thing is all over. That I’d gone a bit quiet and that the grinnercise has gone by the wayside. Well… it hasn’t. I’m up to day seventeen of the early morning walking thing. And Kirsty says it takes twenty one days to form a habit. So I’m nearly across the line, I think.
Since we last spoke, a number of surprising things have been happening in the world of grinnercise. I’ve varied my route a bit for starters. Shocking, I know, but some stuff happened. And it sort of made me rethink things. A few little things shook my new-fitness-resolve – but it’s not what you think.
It was nothing to do with the blog-stalkers hiding amidst the bushes. They didn’t bug me, despite the brazen way they had their iPhones cocked, waiting to snap and upload me to their Facebook pages. I’m used to those girls. They follow me everywhere. Don’t blame them. (Damned Bloggerazzi.)
It wasn’t anything to do with PJL (Pink Jumper Lady), despite that fact that she threw me completely when she trotted past me in her horsey leggings wearing a coral skivvy. Coral! Nope, it’s not her fault. (I DO think she might find a horse to practice that pony jog she’s got going on, but that’s not why I don’t walk the park at the moment.)
If you’re thinking it was the ladders, well I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t the ladders either. Three Mario-esque men with matching blue ladders marching Indian file along the pathway towards pretty much NOTHING is pretty tame in these here parts. A cakewalk, you might say, only with ladders.
It really wasn’t the extremely neat-haired lady from the little-house-turned-possum-sanctuary driving her car along the pavement behind me at 5km/h that turned me off, I swear. (Although I was quite impressed by her actually, especially when she drove out of the park and fanged off at high speed down the streets of Carlton with ABC radio blaring. Totally hardcore. No fuzzy dice though. Perhaps she had left them in the ironing basket. She’s totally the sort of person who would starch her dice.)
And before you ask, it definitely was NOT the picnic rug men, the big net, the nude old lady, the dinosaur, the cracks or the early morning squirrel. It wasn’t the fault of the frozen, park-sleeping man with shivery lips chugging port straight from the bottle at 6am either. None of these were to blame.
What did stop me walking around the park (and start walking the wild streets of Fitzroy) was the banana smell. You see I’d grin my way about the park each morning, giggling along with ‘Lykke Li’ and ‘Flight of the Conchords’. Merrily marvelling at the beauty of the everyday. Looking for notes. Sighing at marshmallow-y clouds of steam and ducks perched on sculpture shoulders.
And then I’d come hurtling in the front door, full of inspiration and ready to take on the world. The world, however, had other ideas and rather unprettily consisted of:
One crusty frypan, a sludgy reminder of Cam’s special fried rice, submerged in a sink full of last night’s long-gone-cold rainbow dishwater.
Two permanently-banana-fragrant lunchboxes filled with little balls of cling-wrap and stray cocoa pops and
Three grumpy-but-cute messy-haired starving people seeking hot buttered toast.
It all felt a bit deflating. Lovely as my little world can be, in my elated post-exercise state, I needed more. I needed someone to notice my epic effort. Or at the very least I needed a reward. And that reward was not the smell of 7 months worth of banana. Not by a long shot.
So here’s the drill now – I walk/jog a huge square along Brunswick Street and Gertrude Street and Alexandra Parade and Smith St– and it all ends at about 7.05 in a café down the road with a great big latte. It’s called the jumbo. Not the café, the coffee. (Come to think of it, the cup is rather wrinkled like elephants are.)
I have one sugar in an effort NOT to undo the goodness just executed. And I get it to go. And then I kind of wander fuzzily past lovely shops like Zetta Florence and Douglas and Hope and Hunter Gatherer. Sipping and looking and thinking. It’s really quite perfect. Because I like coffee. And I like shops. And I like walking fuzzily. And because five minutes in my own little world is my kind of reward. (And it doesn’t smell like bananas).