With no audience: A new facet of training (or now, often, not training) in a domestic environment is the pronounced lack of audience – or, the people that come to the same place to do the same thing as me, at the same time. Accidently and politely we learn each other’s routines, just as well as we know our own – the gym becomes clockwork maintaining each other’s rotas of particular machines, at particular times and small or silent acknowledgements.

My motivation is slipping without those who casually looked, watched and noted how I was doing, those who witnessed and supported what my body or attitude revealed. Each rotation of clockwork is a marker, another small check-in where we become intuitively aware of how each other is progressing. 

Sometimes motivation forms from jealously or aspiration, it can come from a need to escape – or to get to somewhere else. But without the people that come to the same place to do the same thing as me, at the same time – I seem to have lost a reflection that kept me locked in.