I went to the gym yesterday and realised that sportswear is to style what landmines are to hopscotch - and no amount Wu Wear will persuade me otherwise. Like so many women I am no more likely to throw on a tracksuit than anarchists are likely to crush The City of London, and so, for us, a new gymwear is born: a kind of nightwear-lingerie-dancing-builder combo that makes us all look like we’re being taken out for a walk from our day centres, every time we hit the gym.

My sportswear phobia all stems from a childhood being tortured by lesbians in thick tennis socks who cattle-prodded me into doing humiliating things with medicine balls and something called a ‘vault horse’ during those unending PE lessons. It’s no wonder so many of us developed magical bi-weekly periods, twisted ligaments and slipped discs; it was a choice of sitting on the bench, or getting our delicate teenage pride worked over with a bleep test in front of crowd of baying bitches.

The early tears I shed in shapeless leggings, greying t-shirts and Hi-Tecs (my parents refused to buy Nike) encouraged me to hide in hessian sacks for years. So, as soon as I became old enough to respond to vicious humiliation with injunctions, I decided that never again would I don single piece of sportswear.

This was fine, until I had to admit that I was smoking, drinking and sitting my way into death. Without exercise to combat my lifestyle, I was probably going to die at 26, sitting on the toilet, eating a burger, without even a hit single to my name. And so, like so many before me, I joined a gym.

And like so many before me I still refused to wear so much as an Adidas T-shirt. Me and my generation of fat hipsters, by a monumental effort of will over sanity, have convinced ourselves that if we just wear pyjama bottoms, an old t-shirt or dad got free from the builder’s merchants and some pumps, nobody at the gym will know the difference between us and Fabio beside us. There are hundreds of us out there. Hundreds of people too traumatised or too vain to wear a tracksuit.

I have seen women in tights, women in those monkey-faced Paul Frank pyjama bottoms (because, you know, no-one knows they’re nightwear), women in swimming costumes (well, without a sports bra you’ve got to strap them down with something) and most brilliantly of all, a woman in a an all-in-one that was most definitely intended as underwear; all sweating away like this is the most normal gym get-up in the world.

NELL FRIZZELL

ILLUSTRATION: NARCSVILLE