She

The gym: a place where we go to work out, to flex our muscles and get in shape. General population: Between 50 and 125, depending on the time.
The southwest corner: the place where people generally do floor exercises and exercises on the medicine ball. Population: Between 3 and 4, depending on the time.

On may the 13th though, there was an aberration. Here is the story of ‘The Southwest Invasion.’

As any other day, I went to the gym, ran on the treadmill, stretched out and then went to the Southwest corner to do crunches. Imagine my astonishment then, when I saw that my corner, the one place in the gym where I had territorial advantage, was top dog even (OK, thats an exaggeration but then this is fictional remember 😛 ) was invaded.

There were mats spread everywhere. Guys were doing ab-crunches, side stretches and everything in between. Now this was disturbing indeed. Upon further inspection, the reason was clear. This is where we introduce the heroine of the story; we shall simply call her ‘she’.

‘She’ was there. Now I’m not for one moment suggesting that the general gym population suddenly migrated to the southwest corner just because of ‘she”s presence but I was a bit skeptical. Now I am a man not given in to skepticism that easily. I look at further reasoning; after all, logic is something I pride myself on. So of course I stood there and observed. No, not ‘she’ but the others as well (see that I use ‘as well’ and no ‘only’ :D). The more I observed, the more it became evident. ‘She’ was the leader of the invaders.

‘She’ had led her troupe and they were treading the holy soil. They were to be stopped. But how? Yes, the eternal question: How?! Elementary. All I had to do was to lure ‘she’ from the general vicinity and her hoard would follow. But how do I do that? After all, I aint the Pied Piper and they aint no rats. What do I do? While I was pondering over this, one of her army vacated his exercise mat. I think it was the end of his shift. Fatal mistake. Now the door was open; now was my time. The corner was to be mine again.

… and in a blur, I neatly outmaneuvered my opponent, the next in line for the mat, did a somersault, made the perfect three point landing(all captured in hi-def 3d with slow motion to enhance the effect), and took the mat; a territorial advantage gained. Ha! Gotcha! I had just breached ‘She”s legions; I was the true warrior. And then, ‘she’ looked simplyand nonchalantly smiled.

And so that is the story of the southwest invasion; a story of how I got my mat … and then joined her army. If you cant beat ’em, join ’em 😀

Cheers