By Hannah Ellis-Petersen — February 2, 2012

Republican nominee and everyone’s favourite philanderer, Newt Gingrich, recently proposed that, if elected, he intends to “arm space with lasers”. Now that, my friends, is what I call a real new year’s resolution. Forget losing those nightmare love handles or finally stroking a giraffe (apparently more common a desire than you would think), 2012 is apparently the year for thinking big. Galactically big.

Whilst I cannot advocate following the example of a man who thinks volleyball is an appropriate analogy for freedom, and believes America’s greatest threat are the “homosexual fascists”, it certainly seems he is not alone in his ambition. I mean, you just have to look at the facts. Croydon recently launched a bid to become a city in its own right (God forbid). Liam Neeson is converting to Islam. And I have joined the gym.

I will concede it is hardly the most revelatory of resolutions. Indeed, to those insufferable people who do things like play squash on Sunday mornings before a casual 15km power walk across the Yorkshire moors, this may seem like an innocuous and frankly necessary move. But to me, it is the equivalent of building an entire galactic missile system, by hand, out of Morrisons value tin foil.
After all, I am the person who feigned a sprained ankle for 14 years in order to get out of P.E., and who was banned from playing tennis at school after a miss-aimed ball led my teacher to term me a ‘hazard’ to my fellow students. Yes, the relationship between me and exercise has always been turbulent (think Sonny and Cher in their twilight years), but as Dylan so wisely said, the times they are a’changing. After all, if Adrian Chiles can hold the world record for the greatest number of kisses received in 60 seconds (78- true fact), I sure as hell can do ten minutes on the cross trainer.

Yet whilst there were certain things I promised myself not even my new-found athletic enthusiasm could ever entice me to do (wear Lycra, buy Ryan Giggs’ new fitness DVD), I found myself having something of an existential crisis last week. Whilst walking past the gym reception, I casually picked up an exercise class timetable. Harmless enough you might think, but the rush of excitement I got from the prospect of Aerobics classes on Wednesday evenings was unfathomable. Since when have I become a person who’s heart is sent racing at the prospect of a workout with York’s bulging middle-aged? I can scarcely recognise myself.

But my main qualm lies in the fact that by joining the exercising masses, I am somehow becoming incorporated into the Olympics hysteria gripping the nation this year; a subject on which I am struggling to raise any kind of emotional response. But despite a friend’s recent assertion, I feel I must contest this makes me “dead inside”. It’s not the ever-expanding budget which would now happily feed a small country and all their livestock , or the fact that people have convinced themselves that synchronised swimming and ping pong will simultaneously rescue the economy and the East End from the seventh level of Dante’s Inferno; it simply boils down to my general failure in the realm of sports. Indeed, aside from an embarrassing aesthetic affinity with Carlos Valderrama, my emotional involvement whilst watching football is similarly sadly lacking. And don’t even get me started on darts. In fact, my gym membership may be the first investment I’ve made in sporting activity ever.

Yet I can console myself in the fact that I have not become a Davina McCall-esque exercise dick just yet. I do not own any kind of yoga mat, or Pilates ball-come-space hopper. The first and only time I went into Sports Direct, I ended up buying the first pair of trainers I came across (a horrendous concoction of purple and silver stripes that would be at home in Carol Thatcher’s wardrobe) in order to end the ordeal as soon as possible. And I would rather strangle myself with a feather boa than take part in any of the ‘burlesquercise’ classes.

Have I become who I’ve always despised? Well, maybe. But at least I don’t do Zumba