I’m not the world’s most unfit person, but turning the pages of a book is enough exertion on an average day. It’s not that I hate exercise, more that it doesn’t agree with me. I’ve been known to cycle from my house to the DIVA office for meetings, but the 20-minute ride leaves me with a bad knee for the rest of the week. I like swimming, but the chlorine from the pool brings me out in a rash.

My girlfriend goes to the gym round the corner nearly every day, but the only time I entered its doors was when our water was cut off and they offered us the use of their showers.

Working out, working up a sweat, deliberately exhausting myself – these aren’t concepts that appeal. In fact, when I was set this fitness challenge with a personal trainer, I broke out in a sweat for the first time in months, before she even came near me. Maybe I’m scared to get fit.

My refusal to enter a gym doesn’t stop the fitness and lifestyle coach, Steph Rice, who tells me, to my horror, that she can train me equally well in my local park – which is what she proceeds to do.

Steph is a lively, likeable character who bounds into my house in her sports gear. She knows I don’t want to get fit, yet she’s optimistic that I may actually enjoy it. I try to respond with more enthusiasm than I feel, but my heart’s heavy as we make our way to the park and, among the dog-walkers and joggers, start the workout with some ‘jump jacks’. Jumping in the air and spreading my arms and legs is fun for the first three or four, then it becomes clear that we’re going to do it many more times – 40 times, to be precise.

By the end of that, I’m breathless and dizzy… and Steph asks me to do 40 squat thrusts. At the end of that, I’m puffing and panting, expecting a break, but Steph pulls a pair of boxing gloves out of her bag for me. I don them slowly to gain breathing time. She holds up a pair of pads and encourages me to punch them again and again.

‘Come on! Harder!’ she cries. ‘Imagine you’re really angry with someone and you’re punching them.’ She’d get a lot further asking me to be very sarcastic.

But worse is yet to come: the walking lunges. Carol the photographer captures some amusing moments, judging by the look on her face, as Steph and I take long, low strides on bent legs to the next bench and back. The muscles in my thighs (which I’ve never noticed before, but later learn are called quads) are screaming, but Steph is making encouraging noises and somehow I make it back to base. Tricep dips, more squat thrusts… the list goes on, and I can only marvel that we get about a quarter of the way down it before I reach my limit.

The plea ‘I feel really weird’ is enough to get me permission to sit down briefly, but breaks aren’t part of the plan, and we’re quickly back with the programme. I grow light-headed, wobbly-legged, red-faced, achy and inarticulate… and we cut short the workout when even Steph agrees that I can’t go on.

As she explains later, ‘The first time, it’ll have been a complete shock to your system.’ The principle behind her training programme is to alternate upper- and lower-body resistance exercise with short bursts of cardio exercises. ‘Your heart rate remains elevated throughout the session, which conditions the heart, while the resistance exercises tone and strengthen the body,’ she says. This type of training should improve anyone’s all-round conditioning, whatever their level of fitness. And Steph says lesbians are taking much better care of themselves than ever before.

That’s all very well, but two days later my thighs are aching so badly that lowering myself on to the toilet is accompanied by loud groans. Steph sends me a cheery email: ‘I hope you enjoyed our session and don’t hurt too much today.’

I reply: ‘I can’t bend down to get stuff from the fridge. My legs hurt. Owww.’

She responds at length, encouraging me to keep bending down to the fridge, as it’s good exercise. If this is a joke, it’s a cruel one. She suggests that I go for fast walks between sessions. Also; ‘When your muscles ache it means they’re growing stronger through the activity you’ve done.’ Steph is a very positive person. I’m not.

Apparently, my body’s unused to movement. This is backed up by a trip to the osteopath where I’m told, to my amazement, that I have limited movement in my upper body. So I am seizing up, and I’m not yet 40.

But the weird thing is, I don’t really care. I realise I’m starting to sound like that guy in the Guardian who’s against everything he tries – Jon Ronson. But he’s usually doing things like joining the Moonies, whereas I’m only being asked to jump up and down in the park.

Over the next few days I start to see the funny side. I also start to wonder why I offered to do something I really didn’t want to do. But the night before our next session, I become desperate. At three o’clock in the morning I’m awake with asthma, panicking about having to train again. I’m supposed to go to the seaside at the weekend. What if I can’t walk? Self-pity engulfs me as if I had a diagnosis of some degenerative illness rather than hope for better all-round health and fitness. Eventually, I fall asleep and dream of war.

In the morning, Steph comes round as cheery as ever. She admits that she’d been expecting me to cancel the session. Damn, why didn’t I? Instead, I’ve been asking around for good arguments in favour of fitness. My editor says she keeps fit partly out of vanity but mainly to avoid being a physical wreck in her old age or getting osteoporosis. My mother, on the other hand, claims she’s never done any exercise in her life and she hasn’t got osteoporosis.

It doesn’t help that I don’t care whether I have muscles or not. It seems odd to me that people who work with their brains should need to have muscles or be admired for having them. When did this start? I can’t imagine the Brontës being teased for their lack of definition.

I ask Steph why people come to her. Mainly it’s to increase their fitness levels or to train for an event, such as a marathon or triathlon. I’ve also identified a reason of my own for hiring a personal trainer: she can help you work around your own particular aches and pains. For instance, Steph has told me that the reason I get pains in my knees after cycling is that I don’t stretch afterwards. She shows me how to stretch my legs and explains that this’ll prevent long-term damage. It seems obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me, especially as my cycle rides are fairly leisurely. I just thought there was something wrong with my knees.

Steph’s found that her clients keep on training with her, whereas people who join a gym often go a few times before giving up, wasting the rest of the year’s membership fee. ‘They could have hired someone like myself to shout at them a couple of times a week,’ she jokes. In my case she doesn’t shout – she sort of calls, like a cheerleader. ‘That’s it! Come on! Just a few more!’ and so on. And it does help.

At the start of our second session, I find things a lot easier than the previous week. It seems I’ve loosened up. But it doesn’t last long.

‘How are you feeling?’ Steph asks after a while. I tell her I’m feeling weak and my legs are wobbly.

‘Yeah? Ok, 25 jump jacks and then we’ll stop.’ I start to cry.

Afterwards I try to analyse why I cried. Was I sad? Was I scared? Was I in pain? Was it a deliberate ploy to get the ‘teacher’ to let me off? Probably a bit of each. I just didn’t want to do the nasty exercises any longer.

‘Oh no!’ Steph is sorry to see me in tears. ‘I’ve only made one person cry before,’ she says, ‘and she found out later she was pregnant.’ She considers this while I blow my nose. ‘Mind you, I have had three people throw up.’

I go home and have a hot bath to avoid getting the muscle aches of the previous week but I needn’t have worried. Even though we did far more exercises than the first time, there are no drastic after-effects this time, and I realise that I must be fitter than a week ago. I didn’t expect this. Steph has said it doesn’t take long to get a bit fitter, but I hadn’t believed her. Still, there’s no way I want to do another session. I mean, it made me cry!

I’ve been commissioned to write about a month of fitness training and I’ve only had two weeks. I phone my editor and tell her that I hate it. She says, ‘Ok, that’s good copy.’

‘I’m going to stop.’

‘No, you have to do it for a month.’

‘There isn’t time,’ I say cunningly, ‘unless you extend my deadline.’

‘Ok, three weeks,’ she snaps back. ‘You’re supposed to be fitter at the end of it. Carol has to take photos of you in a vest, with muscles.’ She sounds like she’s stifling a laugh.

‘But I don’t want to do it any more.’

‘I want you to carry on.’

It’s starting to remind me of the experiment where people are told to administer electric shocks by remote control to someone in another room, and when they protest the supervisor says simply, ‘Continue the experiment’.

I play my trump card, despite the humiliation of it. ‘Jane, the thing is, I wasn’t going to say this but… I cried.’

‘Ok,’ she says, and I sense reprieve for a brief second. Then; ‘I want you to carry on.’

I confirm my next session with Steph. But when it comes around, I’m tired after a late night and also have RSI. She makes the sensible diagnosis that going full pelt will do more harm than good. Then my girlfriend wanders in to tell Steph that I have a floppy body and don’t hold tension (whatever that means). Steph diplomatically says she tailors each session to the individual’s needs. ‘I like to find out what people like. Otherwise they’ll get bored.’

My girlfriend goes to the gym, leaving us alone. It’s now clear to both Steph and me that no-one would know whether we worked out or not. But I’m a very bad liar, so we compromise with 20 minutes of ‘ab work’. For most of this, I’m lying on the floor. Suddenly, exercise isn’t so bad. I lie on my back with my hips up, doing a ‘reverse crunch’. I lie on my back with bent knees and bring alternate elbows to opposite knees in the ‘bicycle crunch’. It’s still hard work, but it isn’t horrible – and I don’t even have to leave the house. Maybe I’ll do it again on my own. But probably not.

Two weeks later, I’ve got a lot of laughs out of this assignment. Whenever there’s a lull in a conversation with a friend or relative, I only have to say, ‘I’ve got a personal fitness trainer,’ and their mouths drop open in astonishment. But have I kept training? Well, no. For that to happen, Steph would definitely have to come back every week and force me to go on. And lovely though she is, that just ain’t going to happen. Now, where’s that book?

Contact Steph Rice at info@srpersonaltraining.com

www.srpersonaltraining.com