Nigeria for beginners…#001 — Fitfam
I’ve started a dance aerobic fitness class because I enjoy dancing but not -please God not- in the club any more. I’m just a tad too old for dropping it like it’s hot among young strangers. I’m aware a lot of people much older than me will be reading this and saying aloud in outrage ‘You’re never too old!’. These are usually the people I see making complete twits of themselves on the dancefloor after one too many. There are some things you’re truly never too old for and most of them are bad like, getting acne, getting your heartbroken and storming out of McDonald’s when they run out of vanilla milkshake, but all the good things like making out in public, wearing cropped tops and spending your whole paycheck on designer shoes you sadly do get too old for. And dancing like a dervish in the club. For a start you look older. Young people can tell when there’s an oldie in their midst. They find it at best disomfiting. They worry about you fitting in and at worst frightening, you could be an agent, reporting back to a relative. But more on that in another post.
I didn’t really need to start a class. I could just go to a class, some pretty good ones on the Islands where I live, but I can’t deal with the zumba muzak. If you like zumba music and can’t get enough of latin rhythms then you should definitely do zumba. I like zumba moves but find the boredom I experience after a while as soul destroying as the guff they play in department stores hence I have dipped a somewhat untoned big toe into the fitness world here in Lagos myself.
I noticed during the Lagos Marathon which I didn’t run but supported and observed, all classes and ages participating a fervour I certainly didn’t anticipate. Running feels new in Lagos. People didn’t use to run, or only a few nutty expats with a deathwish. Of course it may just seem new to me but running didn’t become a thing until the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge opened in 2013 linking the old money with new but look out for more on that in another post. This was the first Lagos Marathon for a couple of generations, the last one was back in the 1983. West Africa is not known for it’s distance running champions but the streets were full of runnners.. — some without shoes, some in flip flops (dear God), and some obviously were in a better condition than their cheap sneakers which lay scattered about the road like bad omens on the way to the finish line.
This is such a sporty country if the Saturday Soccer dads berating their young from the sidelines are anything to go by. It’s a young country and many schools are quite big on sports. Sports as a whole is woefully underfunded but football is wildly popular while basketball and American football also have their fanbase. Nigerian athletes, whether they play football for Nigeria in the world cup or shot putt somewhere as transparently desperate as Fiji, are venerated.
Gyms and personal trainers are popular with those who can afford them. Gyms have become as much places to see and be seen for singletons as churches.
And it’s not just physical exercise, even ‘clean eating’ is beginning to pierce the jollof rice consciousness thru baby steps.
The enthusiasm should partly be explained by the fact health care is appalling here in Nigeria even if you’re rich but actually most people here are cavalier about their health. It’s not that they don’t care — they just don’t think in Daily Mail terms about their life prospects. And a lot of people leave their health and life expectancy to their Abrahamic Gods.
Prayer clubs are even more popular than gym clubs but once again that is a post for another day.
