The Case of the Missing Mats

So aerobics was peculiar the other night. What bothers me, is the way the instructor smiles throughout the lesson. Is there any need for that? I mean, does she really need to smile while she exercises?
Anyway, this week she got us doing some sort of horrific thigh exercises. You might recall that the (also smiling) ball class instructor got us doing thigh exercises the day before – ribbety frog, etc. (in combination with the announcement that we wouldn’t be able to walk the next day). So this week has mostly been death by thigh exercise.

After we’d done these awful thigh exercises – which included a lot of leg extending and squeezing, during which the damn instructor was still smiling (what’s wrong with her?), it was floor work time (nope – not just laying about the place, breathing and stretching, oh no – crunching and then crunching to the left and then to the right and then pulse crunching and then pulse crunching left and then – yeah, ok, you get the picture – and when I say crunching, I mean of the abdominal sort, not the breakfast cereal variety).

So, when smiling instructor would usually announce that us “girls” should “grab ourselves a mat”, she was horrified to note that on closer inspection, the mats had disappeared. (Sounds like a case for Nancy Drew eh? Well it’s not. Nancy doesn’t engage in cases that involve grinning aerobics instructors, sore thighs and non-slip mats. So don’t bother her with it – alright?). So not having the mats, I was hoping this might mean we could just sneak off home early, but oh no. Grinner had other ideas. “Ok, well we’ll just do it without the mats”. So we proceeded to act out this pretence of stomach exercises – STANDING UP! Ridiculous – couldn’t feel a thing – but of course when grinning lassy asks if we can feel it, we all grin back and nod. “Erm… no”. WHAT? What is this I hear – someone admitting to her that the whole palaver is a charade – does the girl have no sense of pain-escaping-solidarity?

Thank god grinning instructor told her that it was clearly down to her own inability to hold in her stomach muscles (I mean, look at everyone else – they’re nodding, they can feel it).

Long live mat disappearance, I say.