It’s time to face it: I simply must start exercising. My back is permanently sore. The elastic in my pants has given up. I am barely able to carry my shopping bags home. My bosom is ample. This is not what 30 should look or sound like. I creak, I puff, I wheeze, I groan, I curse, I swear, I sweat, I think “I will go to the gym tomorrow”. But then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow sleeps in this lazy git from day to day.
The crux of the thing is this: I don’t like exercising. It does nothing for me. I have run, I have lifted weights, I have stretched, I have kicked, I have hiked, I have done all manner of humiliating thing in pursuit of the endorphin, the promised reward for physical exertion. I’m told it’s a wondrous thing, a chemical congratulation that dulls aches and fills you with a sort of smug self-satisfied confidence. But endorphins are a lie. A conspiracy invented by Big Exercise, dreamed up by shady execs of sportswear companies to sell comfortable shoes and uncomfortable shorts to rubes. I’m evidence of this – I am such a rube. I have running shoes and moisture-wicking t-shirts and an Apple Watch and resistance bands and a yoga mat and a pilates playlist and none of it has ever tempted even the slightest secretion, pituitary or otherwise.
But the possibility exists that they’re in there, buried deep below layers of brain that have long ago been ruined by mental disorder or Star Wars trivia. Perhaps if I can just find the right exercise, find my exercise, I can frack the endorphins out and become a gymfluencer. At the very least, I could tackle my voluptuousity head on. But what’s it to be? All the existing options seem terrible. I can’t join a running club because I’m already disliked enough without having to rub my athleticism in everyone’s stupid faces when they’re just trying to get home from the office of an evening. Cycling would be better, but I’ve got nowhere to put a bike and anyway, it hurts my perineum. Football’s a no, obviously. I’m not posh or thuggish enough for rugby. Golf isn’t exercise, and even if it was it’s exclusively for people who’ve forgotten what their genitals are for. I do like swimming, but people will see me shirtless and I’ll cry into my goggles. No, none of the established sports seem to do it for me.
Perhaps then I need to pick a newborn sport and get in on the ground floor. But even that’s not especially promising. Recently there’s been a massive uptake in a thing called Hyrox, the Cala homes of exercise. Exclusively appealing to the dull and insane, hyrox is sort of like Instagram but in real life, in that it’s just full of the worst people you’ve ever met and they all have their shirts off. Doing exercise alone is now unfashionable. Instead, you book out a Saturday to do laps of a conference centre with hundreds of other like-mindless athletes, make sure someone takes plenty of photos of you in situ, and drive home in your Audi. It is an activity for people who think decoration is framed prints of trite slogans. Who think that artificial grass is better than actual grass. Who have “not political” in their Hinge description. Who hold up signs reading “I said yes to the dress”. Who call you “bro”.
But the dull and insane are legion. Hyrox is big business, running sold-out sessions in cities all over the world. TikTok is abuzz with overexposed photographs of sweaty hyroxers. Scroll through your Instagram feed and it won’t take long to find evidence that someone you once respected has caved in and attended one. People openly confess to attending these sessions, giving pre-match interviews for social media like they’re a Formula 1 driver. If they’d any decency at all they’d embarrassedly cover their faces on arrival, like a minor celebrity turning up to court on account of their shoplifting. The name alone, an insufferable portmanteau of “hybrid” and “rockstar”, ought to be enough to coax some shame out of most. And yet.
So no, new sports don’t hold any allure either. Based on the above, I doubt the hyroxers will grieve the loss much. People generally don’t like it when you turn up to their party and tell them how stupid the party is and why they shouldn’t have bothered attending. And that’s… fair, actually. If I’m so dead set against hyrox, the solution is just not to take part, I suppose. And undeniably, these hyroxers work hard, both at the event itself and in the run-up to it. They train really bloody hard for it, like it’s actually a real sport they’re doing. Perhaps then they’ve earned the right to be a bit insufferable about it.
So hyrox is out, and something else is needed to take its place. As I write this, I’m in the dying hours of 2025, and around this time is when people generally tend to re-resolve to be fitter. I won’t do that; it’s pretty unlikely to happen. This anger isn’t really for hyrox, it’s more anger that I will never be able to do hyrox. Maybe instead, I’ll consider focussing the energy saved by not doing hyrox into something more productive, like writing about how much hyrox annoys me.
Oh, would you look at that? I’m already one step ahead on my resolutions.
Matthew Weldon's Dangerous Thoughts 