Working It Out

Over the last five years I’ve been involved with a fitness group in Bedford that was set up for overweight men over 40. We started as part of a larger organisation that did three months of longer sessions including an hour of information about nutrition, portion sizes etc., and an hour of physical exercise routines.  It was a fairly decent programme, and certainly helped some of the group with losing weight.

Once that first course was over, the organisation lost the contract they had with the local authorities, so it all collapsed a bit.  However, we worked with the trainer who did the exercise side, found a village hall in Bedford that could/would take us, and spawned off into our own group – and then two other related ones in other nearby locations where that organisation had also held courses.

The trainer turned out to be fairly disorganised and flaky, but it gave us a good grounding in what we wanted, and we ended up with a decent group that worked fairly well and met twice a week for an hour’s workout session.  Not really enough to enforce weight loss, but also far better than nothing.

Just under three years ago the trainer buggered off to an overseas posting, and our group was the only one that had anyone daft enough to step up and keep it going, organising the sessions and workouts, as well as paying for the centre we used and so on. The trainer came back to take it all back, but proved to be even flakier, and quit completely about eighteen months ago.

So at that point I took it over completely. I sorted out insurance, organised workouts, and sorted out stuff that had always been promised previously but had never appeared.  I’ve kept it going since then, and it’s been fairly successful, keeping about 80% of the initial members.

When I moved, it was just coming up to the end of the current quarter’s sessions, but without enough time to hand it over cleanly to someone else – so I made the decision that I’d be the one to keep it running ’til the end of 2022.  It’s added a lot of mileage over the last three months, and been a bit of a bind, but in general it’s been worth the effort.

Now, though, I’m done.  Things didn’t work out perfectly on timing, so last week was my final session – and today is the first time since moving here that I’m not now belting down the M1 to do the group and then come home. And that’s a very odd feeling after so long (both there and here) but also quite a nice one.

I’m honestly not sure if the group will continue now I’m done with it.  The other members have said they want to do it, but no-one’s been prepared to take on the whole thing so it’s now being “run” by three of them (which amuses me quite a bit, having done the entire thing on my own as well as that extra dollop of mileage in the last three months) and we’ll see how it goes.   I’ve been able to hand it over as ethically as possible – they’ve got a whole load of prepared workouts and so on, so it should actually be easy to run, but… I don’t know.  I hope it does, but I’m not holding out much hope.

But anyway, I’m going to be sitting here doing my own thing on a Monday evening for the first time in far too long, and I’m pretty happy about that.