"I entered a race with a bunch of fit people. It didn't go well."

Lead image: Alyx (far right) with her much, much fitter competition at the end of the challenge.

I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly fit person, which is why it didn’t come as a shock when I had my rear end served up to me on a silver platter by a man in his mid 60s.

While I huffed and whinged and almost vomited, he ran very literal rings around me.

This all went down at the Damien Kelly x Lululemon Fitness Challenge, an event which pitted the fittest members of a gym whose tag-line is ‘Serious Fitness’ against each other in a battle to win Lululemon vouchers.

It certainly wasn’t meant to be a fight to the death, but boy did I come close to dying.

Part one of the challenge consisted of rowing 500 metres, then doing 25 ‘jacks’ on an ab dolly, which look like this:

and burns like the fire in the centre of the sun. Then we had to jump onto a box 25 times (after almost slipping once, I stepped instead of jumped), then do 25 more ‘jacks’, then sprint around the block.

There were 10 of us completing this challenge – four men, six women –  and everyone except me managed to get it done in well under seven minutes. I was too winded to ask for my time.

It might sound obvious, but you can’t always tell a fit person just from looking at them. Sure, there are signs – a tell-tale indent on the upper arm, a terribly shapely calf – but aside from gentlemen of the spectacularly built variety and elite athletes, incredible strength and endurance is not something you can judge at a glance.

In my black tights and tank, my body didn’t look particularly different from the rest of the women in the challenge, but when it came to actually doing the work, we were worlds apart.

Part two of the challenge saw us leaving the gym in the pouring rain to run laps around Waverley Park. These laps included 100 or so stairs , taken as singles, then two at a time.

I completed the circuit in over five minutes, a full minute and half slower than the next slowest person. The whole experience gave me flashbacks to mid-winter asthma attacks on a chilly primary school oval. At one point I thought I might cry. Then I got a cheery “Having fun yet?” from my puffed but chuffed fellow challengers. Their joviality was enough to lift my despair, but it made me realise, they were very different people from me.

Later, Damien Kelly, the man behind the whole event confirmed this to me. “About 80% of the people at my gym won’t do the outdoor running classes. They don’t like them either.” I felt good to know I wasn’t alone.

The final part of the challenge involved us jogging another 500 metres, to Westfield Bondi Junction, then strolling dripping wet from rain and sweat through the shopping mall, to the Lululemon store front.

There were two yellow hurdles and two calf-height exercise balls positioned in the shop window. Next to this tableaux was a sign that read 25 squats + 8 under hurdles; 20 squats + 6 under hurdles; 15 squats + 4 under hurdles; 10 squats + 2 under hurdles. The idea was, we’d compete in groups of two in this countdown challenge, and the person with the fastest time would win.

I baulked. It turns out, I can (barely) get through jacks and jumps, I can (kind of) run in the pouring rain, but I cannot do squats in a shop window. I just cannot.

Everyone else not only could, but liked it. I watched the competitors, hurl themselves on their hands underneath the hurdles, then spring up again. I was told about how several of the people I was watching compete had once struggled with their weight. Now they were training with Damien between three and four times a week.

The reason they kept coming back? With Damien Kelly’s particular brand of training, you never know what you’re going to get. As well as being a trainer, he's an exercise scientist, and his gym runs in batches of small classes. Every workout focuses on a different area of fitness - strength, cardio, endurance - and workouts are very rarely repeated. Damien tells me that most of the time, his members don’t even know how hard they’ll be working until they’ve already finished the workout. He thinks ignorance is bliss when it comes to hitting the gym.

By keeping his clients guessing, Damien also keeps them coming back. He tells me that, while today I trained with the fittest of the fittest, almost all of his members work out between two and three times a week.

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of participating in the fitness face off  - and coming very, very last - was that two of the three challenges, the running and the squats and under hurdle races, were won by women. Women who didn’t look all that different from me.

Their bodies are able to do amazing things, things that mine just can’t, because they work hard. But they also train using a huge variety of techniques. They train consistently, but they do different things every time. Not just gym workouts but sprints, rock climbing, boxing and more.

The fitness challenge taught me that fit people work their bodies differently. That with the right level of dedication, and the right trainer, anyone can be different -  it’s just a matter of wanting to change.

Who knew losing could be so motivating.

Do you switch up your exercise routine?