Guest Post - Rhiannon from Vintage Extraordinaire

This weeks guest post is by Rhiannon from Vintage Extraordinaire.

Exercise is horrible, isn’t it? Ugh - all the sweating, all that moving about, and if you’re a lucky gal like me, your face turns a special shade of maroon - just to make sure that everyone around you knows that you haven’t done it in a while. Not since PE at school anyway, and you didn’t even do it at GCSE’s - why would you? It wasn’t mandatory. Plus the sweet shop was open, and in the middle of the day there was hardly any queue. See where I’m coming from? EXERCISE SUX. 

This has been my stance towards it since about two or three months ago. I’ll bring it back to the whole ‘P.E at school’ issue. They don’t really make it an appealing prospect, do they? 

“RIGHT! Run seven laps around the field”

Of course you didn’t want to run seven laps, you’ve just had five hours of lessons and are pretty sure that you just failed your physics test. Still, there were no attempts to spice it up. It just seems as though it was a constant slog of effort and not much reward. I really thought all there was to exercise was running around in your shorts in a frosted field, feeling like your lung’s collapsed and dry heaving, whilst someone in a toasty warm tracksuit blows a whistle at you and repeatedly shouts “Oh come ooon, it’s not that cold!” 

It wasn’t until I started going for walks with my best friend, Amber that I realized that it was possible to get fit, have a laugh and have a decent excuse to over-indulge later that evening - “well I did climb a mountain this morning, I’m morally allowed that third slice of carrot cake.” 

Let me be clear here - we don’t actually climb mountains. The most we’ve done is go up a path that was “a bit hilly”, but I’ve come to realize that the simplest, easiest form of exercise still counts as “working out”.

Walking isn’t that strenuous, it’s free, and it’s a great way of chattering away with your bestie without wasting your money in various branches of Starbucks. You don’t even have to wear shorts! Luckily for me, Amber is of the same “let’s not over-stretch ourselves” attitude. We treat our walks as some sort of FBI project - they’re held in secret locations, we don’t go anywhere we might be spotted and we go make-up free in order to shield our identities. Our routes are in the hills on the outskirts of town, because our stance is very much “ugh gawd, but there are people in the park, they might see us.” 

My advice is to chose a walking buddy on the same level as you - in fitness, attitude and sense of humour. It will come in handy when you’re lying on the floor in the middle of a pedestrian path, wailing “my legs! MY LEGS!”. At that point of the two-hour walk you’re going to need someone who’s going to lie down with you, saying “I know, I know”, and who will say encouraging things like “THINK OF THE BACON SARNIE AT HOME” and “Your arse will thank you for this.”

Then we go home, have cake, and watch Desperate housewives on catch up tv and feel like better humans than everyone else for the remainder of the day, because as the law states, “she who does some exercise, is allowed to be smug and eat cake.”

(and if you like, you can even call it ‘hiking’, that’s what Americans do.)