More Than Living

Four years till 2012: get your kit on

This summer’s Olympics was pretty inspir­ing stuff. I’m not ashamed to admit that I welled up with pride at Britain’s unex­pec­ted suc­cess on a number of occasions.

While I have also been known to become tear­ful at BBC1’s Last Choir Stand­ing and even X-​​Factor during times of heightened emo­tional fra­gil­ity, sport doesn’t usu­ally do it for me. But even I, habitual school PE class ‘messer-​​arounder’, became tem­por­ar­ily over­whelmed with fantas­ies of ded­ic­at­ing my time to phys­ical excel­lence and making my coun­try proud – all in Rocky-​​style mont­age sequence of course.

These moments lasted at tops an hour before the vicari­ous euphoria gave way to the com­fort of my usual even­ing activ­it­ies, which gen­er­ally involve eating, drink­ing and sit­ting down.

But it seems that many Brits got a little bit car­ried away with Olympic fever. Recent research by a nutri­tion com­pany claims that 34% of Brits have been inspired to exer­cise by the country’s suc­cess in Beijing, spend­ing over £930 mil­lion on new fit­ness items since the games. How­ever, only a third of those sur­veyed expec­ted that their new found enthu­si­asm for fit­ness would last longer than three months.

The biggest expendit­ure of this new national fit­ness fix­a­tion was home exer­cise equip­ment, with gym mem­ber­ship and sports cloth­ing making up the rest of the top three. So when stay­ing with the family this Christ­mas, be pre­pared to share the spare room with a rowing machine, and don’t be offen­ded if you receive keep-​​fit paraphernalia in your stocking.

But even if you’re not enthralled by the idea of pran­cing around in Lycra, Olympic glory could still be yours. “There are four whole years until 2012,” an unem­ployed friend of mine recently enthused, “plenty of time to get good at one of the more rub­bish sports. Arch­ery, for example, was full of fat blokes in glasses this year. And then there’s table tennis and darts. The gov­ern­ment are so con­cerned with get­ting medals that they’ll be throw­ing money at you.”

So con­sider your options before giving up on gold.

IMAGE by Flickr

Sister72 & moonjazz

Sim­ilar Posts:

• How to spot a Wax­win­gUK Waxwing invasion
• Saving energy: the second hand challenge
• Smoking ban leads to rise in litter and noise complaints
• A guide to the top five sport­ing events on TV this January.
• Flood plan­ning? What flood planning?

Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​09-​​30 23:19:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Posted in Uncategorized | View Comments