Random aches. Mystery scratches. Deep muscle sores threatening to break out by tomorrow. I can hardly wash my back or lift my hands to wash my hair. Hahah..

Guess what, I took up Suanie's offer to her friends for a free boot camp session. Huh? Sign in for a torture session masquerading as a way to get in shape. Most young men in Singapore whinge about being forced to go for BMT, which is roughly what this boot camp thing is, in condensed form. Whyever?

Reason being 1) I am curious and 2) it's FOC. I wanted to experience this kind of torture firsthand, and also to see what kind of people would actually willingly subject themselves to continuous, strenous exertions that introduced them to all those muscles that they never knew existed. For a fee. And of course, in the grand tradition of the freebie monster Malaysian, I wanted to grab this opportunity because I need not pay. Yeah, so it's a kind of torture, but at least you know you're going to keep your limbs and at the end it's only one hour. Unlike the three sessions a week that the paying clients will be committing themselves to doing.

I guess what struck me was that here, in the flesh, was all the sorts of dynamics that I had seen before on any given reality show with physical elements, or anything with military training involved. Frustration at being the losers, frustration for coming in last - and being punished for it - because the team as a whole lost, frustration at the continuous physical activity past the point of tolerance. But just as striking was the capacity of all to deal with the frustrations. Coping mechanisms are not perfect - they never are - but they clearly worked well enough. Either that, or one hour is not enough to bring people to their breaking points haha!

As I said, the process is simple - non-stop movement. From the warm-ups in a circle to the short jogs up and down the field, it's made up mostly of repeating actions that would normally be easy enough to do, to the point where the whole body becomes sore and close to cramping. Jumping jacks, jump and crawl, sit-ups. But the real reason why we got close to cramping was the non-usual exercises in between.

Today's big thing was a big tyre. Basically, most of the exercises involved carrying a large off-road tyre around this small circuit. The weight of the thing made it heavy for a group of four to carry. Any given time, the optimum number of people who could get a handhold were four. We had to take turns carrying loh.

After the group runs, came the individual tyre flip. So we had to queue up to take turns individually flipping the heavy vulcanized rubber up and down a lane. All this was done in competition with another team. Oh, and all the guys waiting for their turn to flip the rubber had to constantly move.

I got scratches on my arms and my shoulder aches from carrying the tyre. Someone else used her knees to help lift the tyres so her knees are red too. After the whole thing was over, we adjourned to mamak. I found out that we were actually supposed to vomit away from the exercise area - if we had to - and that we'd get a punishment if we did not adhere to this rule. Other rules included to drop items - such as the tyre - gently, and not with a thud. Penalties to go if anything that is not supposed to drop, drops. Good thing then that I did not actually vomit, although to be frank I did feel nauseous by the end of the thing.

Okay, tomorrow I am going to be very stiff.