Free Lizzy Harrison Loses Control by Pippa Wright Page B

regime!’
    ‘New exercise regime? Are you calling me unfit?’ I protested with all the defensiveness of one who was always picked last for teams at school. I might have been useless at anything involving balls flying at my face, as Lulu used to say, but since school I’d learned to love exercise. Especially the calming, meditative qualities of yoga, where you can feel the knots in your mind unravel and smooth themselves out over the course of a session. My slightly bonkers spiritual journeying mother had to be right about some things. The fact that it keeps my stomach flat is just a bonus.
    ‘We’ve already discussed this, or are you going to tell me your yoga class was miraculously full of attractive non-patchouli’d men tonight, Harrison?’
    ‘No,’ I said, feeling my post-yoga glow dissipating. ‘So what kind of man-attracting exercise are you going to have me take up instead? Football? Rugby? I mean, I see your logic – what man can resist a girl in a gum shield?’
    ‘You, Lizzy Harrison, have been signed up for a free trial class with British Army Bootcamp,’ said Lulu, triumphantly. ‘Wednesday night, Hyde Park, seven-thirty. You can’t say you’re not free because I know you’re supposed to be seeing me, but I am officially blowing you out. Don’t be late or they’ll make you suffer.’
    Well, I wasn’t late (this is me we’re talking about), but I’m suffering all the same.
    The half-man, half-bulldog has been making us run from tree to tree to tree in some kind of appalling competition – surely my first actual race since I was at school. I was wheezing by the third circuit and feeling distinctly nauseous by the fifth. The constant shouts of ‘Faster, number 72!’ are less encouraging than infuriating. So now I’m slowing myself down almost to a walk – I mean, respect your body’s limitations, right? – when suddenly Bulldog Man shouts ‘ Stoooooop !’ Oh, thank God.
    ‘Blue Team, one of our number has stopped running. And that number is 72.’
    The twenty other blue vest wearers groan and look at me with loathing. I have clearly done something very, very wrong.
    ‘What does it mean when someone stops following instructions?’ the instructor shouts, and I flinch away from the flecks of spittle.
    My team members mutter something about burping; what are they on about?
    ‘You have it. Twenty burpees, right now, courtesy of number 72,’ barks Bulldog Man, the tendons on his neck standing out in fury.
    Twenty what? Everyone around me throws themselves to the ground and starts doing an odd combination of squats and star-jumps.
    ‘Number 72! Get down there NOW or I’m making it fifty burpees for everyone!’ The instructor’s voice has gone so furiously high that the end of his sentence can probably only be heard by his canine brethren. I expect to see them come bounding out from behind the trees in response to his call.
    Number 47, who’s leaping about next to me, grabs the leg of my tracksuit bottoms and physically drags me to the ground. ‘Do you want to kill us all?’ he groans. ‘Just do the fucking burpees, 72!’
    My previous memories of Hyde Park are all sunshine and the Serpentine Gallery, lazing with Lulu in the deckchairs until being chased out by the attendants for not paying; watching the rollerbladers on a Sunday afternoon; feeding the ducks with my two-year-old nephew. The usual London park activities. I never imagined that I’d find myself voluntarily face down in the mud, hauling my own body weight from horizontal to vertical and back again more times than seems possible. I’m sure I remember hearing about two women who were struck by lightning in Hyde Park once, and I glance hopefully at the sky for deliverance, but it threatens no more than a gentle mist.
    The instructor divides us into two groups and the man next to me pointedly moves himself into the group in which I am not. Well, screw you, number 84. Number 28 smiles at me sweetly. ‘First session?’