Can't look away...

Had a lovely sleep in this morning, well as much sleep in as is possible with small children, at least the sun got up before I did this morning.

I spent the morning in the front yard playing with my daughter and watching boot campers. As a past-time I am not sure boot camp watching is likely to catch on, but I couldn't help myself, bit like watching a lava lamp.


I will come out straight and say I don't like boot camps. At the same time I feel guilty for my dislike. Anything that gets people active and exercising is a great thing and so I feel guilty for disliking something that is successfully getting lots of people doing just that. The idea of paying somebody a lot of money to boss me around in the name of exercise is also completely foreign to me. But I get that for some, the highly structured, group environment of a boot camp is exactly what they need. I am pretty lucky in that I have never really struggled for motivation to exercise, but I know that not everybody functions the same way as I do. So I can appreciate what boot camps are achieving, but do they have to do it across the road in my local park. I guess that is my biggest issue. In Darwin it seemed like every time I turned around a nice recreational public space was suddenly becoming a gym. If anything the problem is even more extreme now that I am in Perth.

When it comes down to it I am really just having a whinge. The boot camps around here aren't loud, they don't take up the entire park etc, so in the end it is not as if they are really hurting anyone. I gather over in Cottesloe (a beach in Perth) the public areas along the foreshore had become so loud and crowded with boot camps that they have now made local laws to control them. It is not like that around here. However, that doesn't stop me cringing every time I get to one of my local parks and see that it has become a cross fit class. I said I didn't like them, I didn't say it was a rational dislike.