It is Tuesday night, and Marina, my Zumba instructor, is shouting into her microphone. “I can’t hear you,” she says sternly, as 20 women of all ages stomp across the floor. “Still can’t hear you,” she shouts, lowering the music so that we are forced to turn up the volume of our feet. Watching myself dance in the mirror, I feel a sense of dread and frustration over how different my body looks from how it did when I was 22. But then the track changes from salsa to hip-hop, and my self-criticism is swept away with the music.
I suspect that Marina was an awardwinning choreographer in another life— because her Zumba sessions have none of the stilted, corny, jazz-hands feel that many other dance-based exercise classes suffer from. Instead, the moves are creative and sassy. Marina weaves a sense of narrative, of humour, of playfulness into the routines. Halfway through the class, I’m red-faced with exhaustion but also with exhilaration; even the shy new starters are swinging their hips with abandon.
But afterwards, as I stagger back to my flat with aching legs, my thoughts turn to the complicated relationship I have had with exercise. And a conversation I shared with an OCD psychologist years ago, when I was in my final year at university.