The five minutes in the car

Catherine sat in her car outside the studio for five minutes before her first session.

She was certain she would feel stupid. Certain she would not fit in. Certain this was not going to be for her. She had already decided how it was going to go, and she had decided it was going to go badly.

I did not know any of that at the time. From the inside it just looked like somebody arriving a few minutes after her session started.

She is in her seventies. She is a grandmother. She has trained here every week since that day.

What she thought she was deciding

She thought she was deciding whether she was the kind of person who goes to a gym.

That is almost always the wrong question, and it is the one nearly every woman sits in the car park asking herself. It sounds like a question about her. It is actually a question about the room she is about to walk into, and she has no way of answering it from outside.

Catherine had no evidence about this room. She had evidence about other rooms. Rooms where the music was loud and everybody already knew the equipment and nobody looked up. So she used that, because it was all she had.

What actually happened

She came in. I introduced myself. We talked for a while and then I watched her move.

That was it. That was the whole first session. No workout, no being pushed, nothing she had to survive. I was looking at how her joints and her muscles were working and where her range of motion actually was, so that I could go away afterwards and write her something built for the body she has.

Nobody stood around watching her. The other women there were each on their own program. Her first session was at one of the quiet times, for exactly that reason.

Where she is now

She has gone from barely being able to lunge to lunging with twenty four kilograms. Roman chair with twenty. Rowing sixty.

Recently she stopped in the middle of a set to tell me something. The first time she had done that exact exercise, with nothing at all in her hands, she had been sure she would never finish it.

She had just done it holding twenty kilograms.

I cannot believe how far I have come.

She goes from one milestone to the next. She turns up with a smile on her face, she does the work, and she is a joy to have in the room.

The bit worth taking from this

The five minutes in the car were the hardest part of the whole thing.

Not the lunges. Not the twenty four kilograms, which at the time would have sounded ridiculous to her. The hardest rep was the one she did before she had picked anything up at all, sitting in a car park talking herself out of it.

If you are somewhere near that point right now, you are not being unreasonable and you are not being weak. You are doing what Catherine did, which is trying to answer a question about a room you have not been in yet.

The fourteen days exist so you do not have to answer it from the car park.