A country-sized gym

I have walked into a country-sized gym. I’ve always considered myself essentially a fit human being, even sporty. I jog, I go to the gym, I play cricket; even if the diet isn’t so well-controlled. But in Johannesburg I am a pygmy blimp of cholesterol and oil, fattened by a lifetime of sloth.

I noticed it first in the South African matches broadcast on TV, in shots of the crowd, a scarily large number of whom looked far too drunk to have ripped, lean biceps and such. Now I see it here, on streets, in stadiums, in malls. People look like they’ve walked fresh out of gyms, glowing, clean, healthy, athletic. Some days everyone looks like a professional sportsperson. It is intimidating, in the way that knowing someone will live longer and healthier than you can be. It is dispiriting also because you know it is a state achieved with great difficulty.

I ask locals about it and they laugh and assure me that there are South Africans unfit enough to think I am fit. I don’t doubt it, but maybe there aren’t as many as in other parts of the world. Some tell me I should go see other areas of Johannesburg. I presume that meant the press box at the Wanderers or Supersport Park, the only public space I have been to so far where I have seen locals without washboard stomachs.

The thing is, why wouldn’t you be? There is such freshness in the air here and if the sky is so blue and the temperature so pleasant (at this time of the year anyway) the only right and proper way to celebrate it, to enjoy it and to fully feel it, is to be outside doing something energetic. The minute you land here you can feel it. It doesn’t seem a constructed thing in any way, or imposed; just a natural, inevitable outcome of the land and climate. Australia I imagine to be much the same.

All this despite the amount of meat that is consumed here; urban Pakistan is big on meat and you can go for days in Lahore and Peshawar without so much as seeing a vegetable. But we’re vegetarians in front of this lot.