Too hot...

I tried to go for a run on the beach in Tel Aviv Last night.

However, after about a mile I realised that despite the heat I wasn’t sweating and that I had started to feel most unwell. It was hardly surprising that I felt unwell as even late in the afternoon the temperature was 35C and people were merrily cooking eggs on the pavement.

After plenty of water and shade I felt recovered enough to hit the gym for my chest work out. I have trained in all kinds of strange places – huge empty hangers in the US, a spa somewhere in deepest Romania where the ex-president was said to take his daily ablutions and even on the beach in Rio but training in Israel is a whole different thing.

Firstly everyone struts around with the utmost attitude. If you put a weight down for a rest between sets someone will swipe it, people regularly come and stand in front of you so that you can see if you are doing the perfect lat raises and no one puts anything back after they have finished using it. The first time I trained in this gym I found it all disturbing but yesterday really annoyed me.

I was doing incline dumbbell press with a decent size pair of dumbbells. Halfway through my set two guys stood purposely in front of me so that I could not see how deep I was pressing, a woman tried to drape her towel over the back of my bench (whilst I was lifting) and then to add insult to injury a little old Jewish guy, complete with skull cap tried to swipe my weights when I dropped them between sets.

He must have been about 70 years old, about 100lbs wet and probably spent every weekend having little kids kick sand in his face at the beach. However, this did not stop him trying to run off with my two 30kg dumbbells.

What followed could have been nasty. I snarled at him, thinking: what on earth are you doing – you can barely lift these….he snarled back and obviously cursed me in Hebrew. I squared up to him and puffed out my chest (which certainly seems to be acceptable in this part of the world) and then he dropped the weights (on my toe) and, after making an obscene gesture, walked to the weight rack, selected a pair of 50kg dumbbells, and then stood right in front of me and banged out set after set of concentration curls.

It was at this stage that I gave up, grabbed my towel and a protein shake and retired to the poolside to lick my wounded ego.

-Philip