The Death of Aerobics

Fitness, morosity and all that crap.

Fresh faced and eager, at 21 years old, I enlisted the help of a Personal Trainer to give me the superstar body I envisaged for my first music video. To his amusement, I showed up without training shoes (I couldn’t conceive of having to wear something as ugly as that) and did the session in ballet flats. Prior to this, exercise and health had been a moot point. I was concerned with matters of the heart, art and philosophy. Sex appeal (if you valued that, which I did) was an attitude; something I knew exuded from the brain as opposed to a finely chiseled and glowing physique. I loathed beach culture and sport (the two defining cultural characteristic of Australians) and desperately wanted to be a European vampire drowning in literature and misery. I wore black crepe funereal dresses from Greek Orthodox ladies estate collections (RIP), with fascinator hats and RBG style fishnet gloves. I played a home organ in my spare time and spent hours staring at the ceiling pondering the meaning of life. I suffered a literally blinding Vitamin D deficiency. In Australia. That’s when you know you’re morbidly agoraphobic. 

As a young child I was thrilled to join ballet class. We couldn’t afford the Royal Academy of Ballet's strict uniform requirement of soft pink cotton and chiffon, and my mother thought a second-hand shiny black spandex number would pass. I was expelled for the blunder. I discovered that Jazz Ballet was more my scene and I thrived; sliding, clicking and slapping my ass in glittery tops and flared black pants with a red lip and a tightly pulled bun complete with crispy gel-combed hair. I mastered the body roll. My pride was being chosen for a solo during Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ and from then on I spent all my time choreographing the latest bubblegum pop songs -very literal movements (heart-shaped hands for “love”, two hands pointing ahead for “you”). I would often put on a show in the living room as a precursor to dinner, singing for my supper so to speak. We had a red velvet curtain hung in the doorway between the kitchen and lounge that posed as the perfect theatre backdrop. I fancied myself a Shirley Temple in the making and whenever my mother had shows singing in pubs, I would proudly order the sickly sweet grenadine soda named after her. Sometimes I’d do my hair in rags overnight for those authentic Shirley Temple curls.

I think at about 10 years old is when you start to notice boys, and that’s when I decided to choose Rugby League over Netball for school sport, purely so I could spend time flirting with the boys without the competition of the other girls and their gossipy high-pitched squeals and chatter. Also because I could hang out with my beloved, bald Mr Pascoe (who wore a Kangol hat, round tortoiseshell glasses, a turtle neck teamed with a tweed sports coat and took leave to go to the New Orleans Jazz Festival every year). Sometimes I’d stay in class during lunch break so I could listen to jazz with him while he marked papers. So I liked to stick with him. He understood me. I was the only girl bar an Aboriginal girl named Anne (who was legitimately an excellent athlete and sportswoman breaking boundaries here). I made a deal with the boys and Anne to never EVER pass the ball to me. They broke it and I found myself sandwiched between the grass and the most enormous boy-child I’ve ever seen, gasping for air. It was a disaster. 

I’ve never been competitive, never understood sports and I suck at board games. Seriously, if you played Monopoly with me, my only property gain would be dirt cheap Old Street (ironically, I actually ended up living on this exact street when I first moved to London). I would offer other players what little money I had in the bank because I suppose I’m anti-capitalist and well, if I have money I feel the need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. So, we’ve established I’m a contented loser, but once I became a cool (in a Courtney Love kind of way) teenager, it also meant I was too cool to exert any physical energy whatsoever and I wouldn’t be caught dead sweating. 

In high school I clocked my Phys-Ed teacher staring at my double D cup teen boobs while I did jumping jacks and saw an opportunity. I was unintimidated but uncomfortable and unimpressed and told him as much. I bargained a deal with him in exchange for my silence and said I would like to sit out class from now on and read my books instead (I was on a mission to make my way through all “The Classics” before I turned 18). He agreed to my T&Cs. When the time came for elective sports I chose Lawn Balls (a popular seniors game in Australia mostly devoid of physical exertion). The hosting club happened to be in short walking distance of an ice cream factory, which I factored in to my decision making, and the escorting teacher was my English teacher, Mr. Fischer with the underbite (who took a shining to me and gifted me new novels every week). I had it made and I made it to the state championships surprisingly, which really said more about the popularity of the sport among the youth, than my abilities. I thought of myself like a Winona Ryder in Heathers or a Matilda. Misunderstood. Tortured. Smart. I watched Jules et Jim and read Albert Camus. I eventually forged letters from my mother to get out of sport altogether and would wander up to the local art house cinema. My Step-Mother once told me I was “like a black hole sucking up all the positive energy of the house”. You get the picture right?

…cue the London Olympics of 2012, I’ve “snogged” (as they say in England) a newly Gold Medallist rower at a Nike party, I’m jazzed about the whole affair and athleticism in general and soon after, my very skilled (but entirely unprofessional) personal trainer became my lover and partner. I felt like Madonna with Carlos Leon and it fit the stereotype I was gunning for. He ran his own fitness studio and when his business partner left, I filled the void, and played my hand at running a business I knew nothing about but definitely had a colourful vision for -to right all the wrongs fitness had done by me aesthetically and philosophically. 

I remember when I was 14 (the very brief moment before I had breasts and depression, read Dolly Magazine, and still aspired to being a popular girl who looked good in a bikini) I went to a commercial gym at the behest of my best friend Rosie. Twice. There were mirrors everywhere, which struck me as a miserable idea. The treadmill seemed equally bizarre, like a hamster on a wheel getting nowhere. It was sad, shallow, robotic and full of suffering in my eyes. I didn’t get it, I didn’t go back and I kept on buying giant choc-chip cookies the circumference of my face from the school canteen with my “emergency money”. So I’m literally the last person anyone ever expected to be running a gym.

My boyfriend’s gym had a clientele that was roughly 70% female. In part because he was so handsome and charming, I believed, and also because of something else. There were no mirrors, no machines and a general void of judgement or posturing, and no beefcake muscle men looking at you like they wanted to eat you for dinner or mansplain technique. It was safe. (If you’re a man you will simply struggle to understand the general underlying existential threat your gender poses us and how that possesses our imagination and motivates our choices). 

The studio was also so cheap and ratchet that no one really bothered to be fashionably fit -no Lululemon or Ivy Park here, just trashy pyjama tops and pilling tracksuits. Even some purple three quarter length flared yoga pants this woman must’ve loyally held on to since Sliding Doors was in cinemas. Three quarter length AND flared really is a step too far in my opinion- revealing your pale and prickly calf with a funky finishing like that- I can suddenly recall the smell of Nag Champa incense and worn out Havaianas. Forest trance music is thudding in the distance. Shudder…

Our gym was also full of physically awkward right-cortex heavy people, hipsters and creatives like me, who had reluctantly capitulated to the idea that exercise would perhaps stop them from falling into the deeper depths of despair artists are prone to, and that their heroin-chic malnutrition or alternatively, doughy renaissance body was starting to become something other than that on a multitude of levels. They had the regrettable realisation that their metabolisms, livers and skin elasticity didn’t work quite the same way anymore, that hangovers made you suffer longer these days, and even worse, you finally believed that the “Summer-Ready Body” every powdered protein ad on the tube shoved down your eyeballs might actually help your career at this point. Or maybe that was just me. 

Plagued by mental health woes, a fear and innate distrust of big Pharma and their ‘long term use may cause renal failure’ schtick, I knew what I had to do but I needed it to fit in with my ego and who I was as a person. I needed it to be fashionable, joyful and glamorous. I needed music that was undeniably motivational and simultaneously entertaining. I needed to laugh and feel hot, cultured and weird at the same time. I wanted it to be feminine and I wanted to be transported to another time and place, and through the internet’s gross virality, camel-toes in tact, I discovered  Aerobics, Jazzercise and Prancersize. 

The latter, founded by the wacky and wonderful Joanna Rohrback, is based on a “springy, rhythmic way of moving forward, similar to a horse's gait and ideally induced by elation”. Jazzercise, created by the even weirder, out-of-this-world Judi Sheppard Missett, is a dance based workout with lots of “smell the coffee!”, “we’re gonna get jazzy, Sugar!”, alongside appalling bouts of scatting to songs like Sweet Georgia Brown and Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’. I went on to Discogs and immediately bought the Vinyl LP which included a poster of the illustrated sequence. That’s how extremely pretentious exercise-averse people approach such matters. I then revisited Oz Style Aerobics (a morning television staple in Australia), Denise Austin and all the celebrity workouts (Jane Fonda, Cher, Heather Locklear, Cindy Crawford)… heck, I even tried Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves DVD (she will always be Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote to me). 

I understood the phenomenon of Aerobics; appealing to house wives wanting to be elegant, lady-like and fabulous while they broke a sweat; embracing the internalised patriarchal vision of ourselves as purely beings of beauty in a never-ending pursuit of perfection. Original Jane Fonda Workout instructor Molly Fox told the NY Times “For the first time, millions of people started exercising together and many of them were women. Women were liberated in a new way. Suddenly it was all right to leave the house in tights and leotards, wear thongs and sweat in public.” That’s a hot take. I related and connected with it for whatever reason and besides, Aerobics gave you lean dancers arms instead of the muscly yoga arms Madonna was crucified by gossip mags for. 

I realised that certain physiques came and went with the tide like a fashion trend. We saw our bodies as malleable accessories rather than a god-given reality we had to accept. At first white women wanted smaller butts like 90s supermodels and a straight androgynous frame to fit into sample size garments designed by gay men who made clothes for women as if they were built like effeminate waifish Twinks with flat chest plates. Suddenly, they wanted bigger butts, breasts and audacious beige curves like Kim Kardashian to go with their newfound love of anal sex, because of the proliferation and normalisation of porn and the new status quo. Men who once thought they had to look like the Old Spice Man to pick-up chicks (“chicks love muscles”) suddenly realised the modern metrosexual lean and fit streamline look made you seem more intelligent and loving, more approachable and refined perhaps. A Ryan Gosling, instead of a Bruce Willis. 

I thought a lot about these things. I watched Perfect with Jamie Lee Curtis (playing an Aerobics instructor) and John Travolta (a journalist covering this new craze, “health clubs- more sex than sweat?”). I swear, you can never un-see the scene of him grinning, gyrating his crotch with an epic sweat patch across his shorts. Simply magic. I’m inspired. We rebrand and re-do the interiors of the studio like a high school gym from the 80s, complete with framed Farah Fawcett and Grace Jones posters. I want exercise to be hot and fun again. We buy a boom box for the spin room, and I start searching for Aerobics teachers. Alas, I couldn’t find one instructor or class anywhere. In London. One of the biggest cities in the world. I get that it was passé, but what happened to the millions of fanatics who practised it like religion for over a decade? They just changed their minds and got bored? How could this regime (invented by military wife Jacki Sorensen) explode across Hollywood and the western world, complete with yearly championships and a theme song, have just vanished along with Richard Simmons and Quaaludes on Wall St? 

On a trip back home to Sydney I join a gym called Hiscoes full of beautiful “Swolle” Bears (both terms you can search the urban dictionary for), which hosts a tongue-in-cheek (and way up my alley) legit aerobics class called Retrosweat. It was as fabulous as you could hope, the real deal; wigs, leotards, leg warmers and Bananarama. I fell in love with the instructor. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to date her or be her. Either way, it was fucking great and I felt strong and lean. A few weeks later she told the class she was recovering from a knee injury and couldn’t perform along with us as vigorously as usual. That same week, I had my own knee injury. I was hobbling around like an old lady who had been thrown down a flight of stairs. It was painful and crap. It occurred to me that maybe aerobics was just really bad for your knees? All that compression, kicking and jumping. Lo and behold with a little research along these lines, I found my answer, the definitive autopsy of Aerobics. Thanks to an excellent NY Times piece by David Sheff called “Whatever happened to Jane Fonda in tights?”, I discovered that many practitioners and instructors (including the founder) ended up with double knee reconstruction surgery among other injuries and it just kind of petered out. Mystery solved. 

Circuits and High Intensity Interval Training just doesn’t cut it for me though, its not sexy enough. So my boyfriend (who’s name in Hindi translates to “Dream Little King”), his publicist and I invent an exercise class for singles to meet called Lovercise. To this day, the only incorporated company I own. All of the exercises are tactile and in pairs -opportunities to connect, littered with cheeky quips courtesy of my beau. I sit on the sidelines in a baby pink unitard serving aphrodisiacs -strawberries dipped in a chocolate fountain, red wine, and the most expensive oysters in London. I got professional shucking lessons. Oysters are one of those meats without a mother or a face, something as a vegetarian, I can get down with. Sounds counterintuitive to getting fit, queasy even, but it was a hoot! We screened noughties rom-coms afterward with blow-up bubble furniture. The marketing video we made went viral, we were inundated with applications, booked slots for major music festivals and got invited to appear on Dragon’s Den (the equivalent of Shark Tank in America). It was a raging success, until we started getting a little protective and suspicious of male applicants. Dream King wanted to vet them so there was no creeps (something I explained was virtually impossible and kind of unethical to do). He wanted to protect his female clientele. Which I appreciated. They were the lifeblood of the gym, and of course. 

I went to Los Angeles at this time, doing Pop Pilates videos and hiking Runyon Canyon everyday, eavesdropping on the most inane conversations and petting every. god. damn. dog, eating puffed rice for breakfast and CBD drinks for lunch. You know, LA Style. After a cycling accident on those quake-ridden roads went south, I found myself in the back of an Uber XL with a broken wrist, pink bicycle and matching helmet. I didn’t see a doctor, because America is a hell-hole like that. Dosed up on pain killers and vodka, my wrist in a carpel tunnel brace, I went a little crazy, returned to London and my relationship with the dreamy personal trainer ended. The dream was over. Lovercise was dead and so was Aerobics.