Sporty and Over Forty in Portugal

When you move to a golf resort ... you get ... internationally fit?

Dear Reader,

You may find this shocking, but I don’t have a perfect body.

I have an American body.

A body that has consumed too many hamburgers, pizzas, cakes, and ice cream.

A body that likes a good day on the couch.

Maybe you can relate.

My husband, who cooks us dinners, and always adds a salad recently said, “I’m proud of you honey.”

And I said, “Why?” and he said, “For eating your veggies.”

“I actually like veggies,” I told him, trying to feign a deep interest in finishing the steamed broccoli on my plate.

French Yogis

And yet, and yet, it was still a shock to me when I tried a yoga class here in Portugal and it was just me and a room full of French women.

It was like I was the outside Russian doll and they were all the thinner, inner versions of me on mats doing poses that look theoretically possible but are absolutely not possible in this incarnation of this body.

Me doing yoga

Plus, it’s true: The French really are superior to the rest of us.

They just are.

I don’t know how they do it, but walk into a room full of French women and you will instantly understand all of your shortcomings in a nanosecond.

A British friend agreed, “Yeah, they have this secret that they aren’t willing to share.”

This is not the first time I have tried to puzzle out French secrets.

I once spent a whole summer in Montana trying to be French.

I read books with titles like, “Why French women don’t get fat,” which revealed that I don’t eat enough a.) leeks and b.) butter or c.) smoke enough.

Just kidding. I probably eat enough butter.

Also, according to that book if you just eat half of everything on your plate, and then only take half of that the next time you eat, and halve all of the times you eat, you’ll eventually eat … nothing.

And then you’ll look like a real French woman.

But I digress.

My yoga instructor here in Portugal is also impossibly elegant in every way.

In an effort to be inclusive, she is now instructing us on how to complete a downward dog in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Which makes me wonder, how do the French women know what’s going on?

Actually, my first thought was, “How long are we going to have to hold these poses to get through all of these translations?”

So when my new tennis coach (hey look, I live on a golf resort, I’m taking advantage of all the amenities) offered me personal training, I decided that I should at least consider his offer.

I told him confidently, “I like to work out,” and he looked at me as if I could be lying, and then muttered something about the body being lazy.

Personal Training Gets Personal

So, for the first time in my life, I hired a personal trainer.

And … for the first time in my life, I had to admit that I have no abdominal muscles.

As in … none.

We both found this out when he instructed me, “Now I want you to lie on your back, put your feet up in the air and lower your legs all the way to the floor twenty times, slowly.”

He said this as if it was easy, and I had to say, “I really can’t do that,” and then suffer the humiliation of allowing my trainer to “catch” my feet as they fell toward the floor and then fling them back up towards my face twenty times while I thought, “If we were in the U.S. he’d have a strong claim for a workman’s comp lawsuit.”

He recently saw me in regular clothes and said, “Wow! I didn’t even recognize you!” and I thought, “Well, that is not a surprise.”

About halfway through each training session I practically have to take a shower in the gym sink in order to get my face back to a normal color.

And if you do this regularly, you too could tell a Spaniard who looks like he could be on the cover of “50 and Fit Magazine” with confidence that you work out, “At least 2-3 times a week.”

This happened because I had to run on a treadmill mere inches from said Spaniard (who was on the elliptical next to me) while my trainer from India kept inching up the speed until it hit Mission Impossible levels.

At the end of watching me nearly die next to him, the Spaniard said, “Good job,” and I thought, “There’s probably some of my sweat on your body right now and that is making me very uncomfortable but I am too exhausted to apologize.”

Our gym here at the resort consists of two rooms each the size of half of an American master bedroom closet, separated by an uncovered alley, which means that when it’s raining you can get soaked while walking between the weight room and the cardio room.

Added bonus!

I was in the weight room doing “modified” pushups when the Spaniard came in to use the equipment and asked me, “So, how often do you work out?”

Now, what I should have said was (with a French accent), “Well, with a svelte body like this you can’t be out of the gym too long, you know? I’m in here 2-3 hours a day, minimum, just trying to keep all this up.”

But I shrugged and said in an American accent, “Two to three times a week if I can, and then cardio the other days.”

“So pretty much every day then?” he asked.

I almost burst out laughing, and then tried to look serious as I nodded.

He did a few pull-ups and then paused between reps to tell me, “I think we have the same problem.”

I thought, “There is absolutely no way that we have the same problem, but let’s go, let’s hear this one out.”

“We sit at a desk for eight hours a day,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, relieved he didn’t share my real problem, which is trying to find a sports bra that makes five minutes of jumping jacks feel at least somewhat tolerable.

“So hard on the back and shoulders,” I agreed.

He nodded.

At this point, I was floundering around for small talk to say in between doing an impression of someone who works out 2-3 times a week and decided to say, “Yeah, you know, sitting is the new smoking.”

He nodded seriously, and we both agreed with eye contact that this was a serious problem that the world should take more seriously.

I mean, accountants and office workers everywhere are dying right and left from sitting!

It’s absolutely an international tragedy. Someone should DO something!

He left me to do some stretching in the cardio room while I started to do chest presses with the smallest dumbbells I could find in the weight room.

When he came back, I was ready with some more scintillating small talk.

“You know,” I said. “They say that you should get up after 25 minutes of sitting and walk around for 5 minutes when you’re working all day at a desk. Apparently, it helps a lot.”

He looked at me, obviously nonplussed by this little tidbit.

I thought, he’s probably thinking, “Still with this sitting thing? Is that really all we’ve got to go on here?”

And I wanted to say, “Look, when you drive across America to get to Portugal you listen to some weird podcasts for entertainment, okay? I’ll have you know that last point of fact I learned listening to an NPR podcast as we were cresting mountains in Colorado.”

Olympic Tennis Lessons

Tomorrow morning I’ll have to think of something better to say than my brilliant repartee with the Spaniard.

I play tennis once a week with “the beginner’s group” that meets to play 20 minutes away from the tennis academy that is right here at the resort where I live because … because … I’m not good enough yet to play here.

The three other players in this group keep asking me, “Why are you playing here in Obidos with us? Don’t you have a tennis club where you live?”

And I don’t want to say, “After five private lessons, they decided I’m actually quite terrible at tennis, and thought I would fit in better with you,” because that’s not polite, so I say, “I don’t know. I like playing on a hard court next to a playground?”

Unlike the rest of the tennis players, I did not learn to play as a child or a teenager or in college.

My husband taught me how to play, and he taught me in my thirties, and we played just for fun, until I got so upset one time that I injured my shoulder.

But this group of women make me feel like I’m either taking part in the Olympics or alternatively, I’m part of a joke that begins with, “Four women walk into a bar. One’s Australian, one Chinese, one Dutch, and the other an American who could pass for either German or Danish (or a German Danish).”

I finally confessed that the players were too advanced for me at the resort and they nodded sympathetically and told me how a Polish woman once screamed the F word at them repeatedly at a nearby tennis club when she lost.

Plus, she was very racist.

I shook my head in sympathetic outrage, imagining the terror I would feel if a Polish racist screamed the F word at me repeatedly while playing tennis, and then paused before asking, “You know, have you tried doing French yoga yet? I hear its very good.”

Love,

Janelle

P.S. I hope this made you laugh. Do let me know if you have any exercising tips to share. Also, I want to thank my friend Nneka for supporting this newsletter! I very much enjoy her writing over at

Letters from Nneka’s Realm

. It’s an honor to have her as a subscriber. Lots more from Portugal soon!