Maggot

The wedding diet has meant drastic measures for the ol’ tum tum. We’ve taken to doing the Territorial Army’s fitness programme on their website. All nationalism and boot camp mentality aside, we thought it’d be the ultimate fighting fit challenge to do like the marines do. Initially, neither of us had noticed this wasn’t marine corps training. This was TA manoeuvres, amateur army training. I scoffed and giggled. This’ll be piss-easy. We’ll fart our way through this and move on to something more challenging next week, I mused. One of us was appointed Sergeant Major- our job was to motivate the ‘maggot’ into pushing harder, giving it all they had and do it for ‘queen and country, otherwise them A-rabis’ll gitcha.’

Last night was our inaugural TA training challenge.

Frak me it was hard.

I’ll never joke about the pretend army ever again.

They play tough. We started with two minute bursts of jogging interspersed with stretches. However, seeing as it was sleeting outside, we thought, like the TA, we’ll stay in, which resulted in relays up and down the corridor of our long and winding flat, trying not to run into the bedding hamper or the kitchen by accident, skipping when you were off-relay and writhing in time to Daft Punk on the stereo. The post-warm-up push-ups were hard because we had to do full ones not sissy kneeling and halfway down attempts. All the way down and all the way up, slowly, maggot. What is your major malfunction Gomer Pile. The heel raises were fine. The bench drop thingies were okay. Then we had to do two sets of chin-ups lifting our entire body weight up from the ground. This was when the motivational speeches came in.

‘DO IT.’
‘START AGAIN.’
‘SH*T LIKE THAT’LL GET YOU KILLED.’
‘YOU WORTHLESS MAGGOT.’
‘AGAIN.’
‘NOT GOOD ENOUGH.’
‘CONGRATULATIONS... you just killed your entire platoon.’

By the time the cool-down flat-relays were back, we were shells of ourselves, shell-shocked by the aggressive ‘motivational’ language used to push us to be the best we can be. A friend sent me a link to where wannabe TAs meet up in a park to be trained by the military... for fun. I’m not sure my pretty delicate ears could take the abuse from a stranger. From my intended betrothed it was disturbing enough.

All hail the Territorial Army. Keeping our woodlands safe.