Let’s get physical: Emmet McElhatton steps into the ‘cult’ of group fitness

In an attempt to claw back some of the fitness I possessed in my younger-years, I invested my annual motivation allowance in a few months’ membership with a local gym.

Yes, after a lock of years of unglamorous hedonism, I decided the time had come to stop desecrating this Holy Temple. I was going to sweep the butts from under the benches, wipe the Guinness off the altar, and, once and for all, I was ready to put my taber back in its nacle.

The first few people who heard about my plans to restore the sacred site responded with a mix of encouragement and incredulity.

For every ‘fair play’, I also got an ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’.

Nothing strange there – given my ‘commitment’ to past new year’s resolutions, I would have regarded anybody who expressed blind faith in my forthcoming reincarnation as easily convinced, gullible, or just plain thick.

Miracles shouldn’t be believed on word alone.

But before long I started hearing doubts that had less to do with my fickle relationship with personal fitness, and everything to do with the ‘gym’ I was joining.

“Ah, so you’ve joined the cult.”

‘The cult?!’ I thought, ‘You mean a sleep-with-the-leader, empty-the-savings, drink-the-deadly-diluting-juice CULT?!’

And I didn’t only hear the ‘C word’ once or twice; it was being said with disconcerting regularity.

I was astonished by the frequency with which straight-faced people were flippantly informing me that I had inadvertently joined a cult – I’d heard people told their shoe-laces were undone with more alarm.

Displeased with the accusation that my positive lifestyle choice was anything but, on one occasion I asked the accuser to explain himself.

“It’s just a cult,” was his first exposing insight.

Still feeling like I hadn’t quite received a comprehensive account of the devious inner-workings of this mysterious organisation, I pressed harder.

“What do you mean ‘it’s JUST a cult’? HOW is it a cult?,” I asked impatiently.

“Like, everyone runs about with their tops off, they all hug each other and apparently they make you train until you collapse.”

I wasn’t sure if this matched all of the criteria to qualify as a cult, but it wasn’t a great start; I’m not overly weird about public toplessness, nor am I agoraphobic, and I’ll bite down on the figurative gumshield to get through a tight session, but none of what had been described to me was exactly getting me pumped for the inaugural workout.

In fact a horrifying picture was beginning to materialise in my mind. I was imagining a room full of sweaty muscle-bound nudists, their limp, ripped bodies slipping through each other’s exhausted arms as they tried to embrace. I was just looking to get in slightly better nick; surely this orgiastic milieu wasn’t absolutely necessary for that, was it?

Well, regardless, I couldn’t back out now. I had told too many people about my impending transformation. Like the water before wine, people were expecting big things from me.

Anything short of transubstantiation would be deemed a clear and obvious failure and I’d be the subject of widespread ridicule.

Besides, on top of the public shaming, there was the financial incentive not to defect before even becoming a disciple.

The sign-up money was out of my bank and in the, presumably, vice-like hands of a very buff Charles Manson. If this brainwasher was going to take my money, he was at least going to have to lift his psychological scrubber.

So I said a few prayers for the benefit of my immortal soul, went on their app and clicked ‘book session’. I wasn’t sure whether to expect an induction or indoctrination.

72 hours later, the Day of Reckoning arrived.

I furtively approached the front door of the unassuming property with the phrase ‘inner sanctums’ knocking about in my mind. I was slightly foggy-headed because I had spent the whole of the previous night forcing myself to watch secretly recorded footage from unethical abattoirs in preparation for whatever animal sacrifice might be part of my welcoming ceremony.

I stepped inside. Everyone was clothed.

‘Looks like they were expecting me’, I said to myself.

Before long we were beckoned to form a circle around a person who I took to be a senior clergyman. He wore only black and smiled a preternatural smile.

“Hi, my name’s Sam and I’m your coach for today,” he announced with what I thought was an affected normality.

But soon all my paranoid thoughts gave way to the blood-drums that beat the rhythms of war in my brain. I was quickly able to perceive almost nothing beyond my immediate physical experience. Mild discomfort grew into acute pain, and eventually became a state of all-out-oblivion.

At one point I think I may have seen a topless man lifting a weight equivalent to the number of bags of sugar it would take to induce diabetes in Finn McCool, but it may have been a mirage.

As I lay crumpled in corner like a discarded schoolbag on the first day of the summer holidays, clenched fists entered my blurry field of vision.

It slowly dawned through my delirium that I was supposed to meet these fists with my own. We communed by knuckle-touch, exchanged words of encouragement, then I staggered out the doors like a critically wounded cowboy; legs locked at the knees, chest clutched, dying eyes.

I made it about 20 steps away from the saloon and boked violently.

Homeward bound, the fugue state I found myself in was comparable only to something brought on by copious amounts of alcohol.

“I haven’t paid so much money to feel so bad since I was last in Sally’s,” went the mantra, that seemed to chant itself, the whole way home.

After what seemed like an decent chunk of eternity, I reached the safe haven of home.

I lay on the floor for a while. The ‘Sally’s loop’ subsided and I regained some autonomy over my thoughts. I remembered that I had just been to my first big day at the cult. I reflected on this.

Rather disappointingly, I found when I combed through the past couple of hours I couldn’t detect a single knit to suggest I had been in the thick of a some malevolent outfit.

Not a titter of tyranny nor a modicum of manipulation did I witness. What the hell?! I’d watched so many documentaries about the wickedness of the Church of Scientology, the horrors of Jonestown, the murderous hypnotism of Manson’s Family, and here I was, on the cusp of becoming part of my own little coerced community and the secret handshake was an insipid knuckle-touch?!

But I reflected further and something more reasonable and hopeful occurred.

It wasn’t a cult people had been trying to say to me, it was community. It had all of the benevolent qualities of togetherness, encouragement and a shared sense of direction of community, without any of the creepy coercion and obedience of a cult.

How people have come to substitute the fair and accurate word ‘community’ with the pejorative, ‘cult’, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m still going and the transformation is on track.

If you pass me on the street in a month’s time you may not recognise me with my Athenian physique, however, you’ll know it’s me when I aggressively shove a flier in your face, look you in the eye and scream, “It’ll change your life, man!”