It was Mother's Day and we were having breakfast with my parents on my father's back patio when I remarked on the set of barbells lying in the corner. "How goes the gym?" I asked, noting that as I did, mum's eyes rolled skywards.

As he told it, he was doing circuit training with some old workmates, being urged from one machine to the next by a professional sadist and was lagging a little, which caused him to lose concentration. Abandoning one exercise machine, he went to leap onto another and in so doing lost his footing and became airborne, flying across the gym still clutching his water bottle and landing in a crumpled heap in the corner. "I was so terrified that I shrieked and squeezed the water bottle all at the same time," he said. "A few people got squirted with water as I flew overhead. It caused quite a commotion."

It must have been my expression that gave me away.

   "You too?" he asked.
   "Well it wasn't my fault," I said, a sentence that prefaces a remarkably high percentage of the conversations started by my father and me.

It had been at another gym on the same day. Headphones in place, I was trotting (Okay, walking fast.) on the treadmill when I became aware of a blonde presence on the machine beside me. The unwritten etiquette of the gym states that you never look at anyone, but I felt compelled to risk a quick glance.

Ever since I got involved in an unfortunate incident in the gym car park with a middle-aged Amazon sporting an inappropriate attitude, I'd taken to swivelling my head whenever a blonde female ranged into my peripheral vision.

I glanced left and for one awful, heart-stopping moment I thought it was her. A nanosecond later I realised I was mistaken and that it was, in fact, a pleasant-faced woman exhibiting none of the homicidal tendencies of the Amazon. Like my father, however, my concentration had been broken.

The treadmill was running at 7km/h and in that one shocked moment when I thought I had been cornered by the Amazon, my right foot had wandered from it and come to rest on the stationary frame. My left foot, however, was still travelling at 7km/h. I screamed as one side of my body came to an abrupt halt while the other continued at speed, the laws of physics spinning me through 180 degrees and bringing me face-to-face with the blonde.

Noticing the terror register in her eyes as they met mine, I managed a quick "aaarrrggghhh!" before the inertia threw me off the back of the machine and tossed me against the back wall of the gym.

And then there was the matter of the barbells. I'd asked one of the gym's disturbingly fit female trainers for some extra advice on weight training. She promptly stretched me out on a bench, handed me some weights and told me to lift them.

   "What happened?" asked my father.
   "Absolutely nothing," I replied. "I just lay on my back on the bench with my arms pinned to the floor by two sets of weights like a butterfly on a display board. I couldn't move. She picked them up like they were made of paper and I couldn't lift them off the ground. I lay there for three minutes pretending to catch my breath before I was forced to confess I couldn't budge them. It was very embarrassing."
   "I know," my father said. "People don't realise how mentally and physically scarring gyms can be.