This morning I was up at hideous o’clock (or 6:30am for those of you who care for specifics). I wolfed down a tiny breakfast, donned a pair of scruffy tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt, and left the house with my hair scraped back and not a scrap of makeup on.

The reason behind this act of apparent lunacy is that my brand spanking new gym opened today and realistically, the morning looks like the only time I’ll be able to go without queuing for the machines, or withering into an intimidated heap by a room full of Lycra-clad Bodies Beautiful. The best thing about it is that’s it’s literally one minute’s walk from my office, which means I might actually bother to show up once in a while.

Luckily, I’ve got three upcoming events to sufficiently terrify me into action: I’m doing that Race For Life caper in May, with a group of girls from work. There’s a wedding – no, two - in the summer, which will naturally necessitate the purchasing of new frocks. And best of all, the boy and I are planning a holiday in September and I suspect a degree of beachwear will be involved.

Oddly enough, I think I could come to like morning workouts. I’ve only ever done it in the evening, and it was such a chore to drag myself there, especially since I started my new job, as I work in central London, but my gym was in Tooting. But after I finished this morning, it was only a hop, skip and a jump to my office, and I have to say, I feel quite invigorated.

So anyway, this new gym’s really shiny and lovely, although the machines seem a lot sterner than the ones at my old gym, which let me burn off a pretty respectable amount of calories. These ones make you really work for it. The showers were an experience though – while I’m loving the fact that each individual shower is enclosed in a frosted glass cubicle, the scalding water temperature, that seemingly cannot be changed, left a lot to be desired. And it’s not just me being incompetent (for once) - there were yelps of pain from nearly every cubicle.

So hopefully I’ll be able to stick with the early mornings (assuming my thighs quickly get the hint and start to less resemble sausage meat wedged into a stocking). In fact the only problem I can reasonably foresee is my hair, which is cruelly and unusually thick, frizzy and comical. It requires third degree burns courtesy of my straighteners every morning to get it looking half-decent, and even then it’s not a done deal – the merest droplet of rain or breath of wind, and the whole thing goes to pot. And after working out, all I’ve got time for is a quick shower, and a blast with the hairdryer, which does not make for sleek, glossy locks. It’s currentlyy tied up, and when I take the band out, it’s absolutely gigantic, with a ridiculous kink reaching all the way around my head.

Of course, I could sneak into the office early, and use the pair of hair straighteners in my boss’s drawer, but I fear that would be sinking to a new level of hair vanity I don’t quite fancy admitting to. If the trade-off for firmer flesh and actually getting into most of my clothes again is slightly mad hair ... so be it.

Thank goodness I work on such a normal, chilled-out publication – I’d never get away with this on a fashion or beauty magazine. But then I doubt they’d have hired me in the first place...