7.30pm: East Coast Park, Starbucks

The writer takes a bite off his raspberry brulee cheesecake... mmmm....
This is how every Saturday evening should be - creamy, savory and with a hint of cheese. I've been looking forward to this quite evening for a long time now. As I sit here in Starbucks, East Coast Park, I thought about my KFC dinner earlier and contrasted it with the Remedial Training I had about an hour before that.

Remedial Training my dear friends, is what we Singaporean men have to go through should we fail our Individual Physical Proficiency Test (or lovingly called "IPPT" for short). Depending on your age, an IPPT test consists of meeting 13 mins in a 2.4 km run, snuffing 40 sit ups in a minute, polishing off 5 pull-ups, sprinting 100m in 9 seconds and clearing a 180cm jump (or thereabouts). Should you fail to achieve this, you receive 20 sessions of Remedial Training (or RT for short). An RT session lasts about an hour and a half, and the festivities almost always include a bout of running and two bouts of static training. You're paid a daily allowance for coming down and, well...it sure beats paying for gym membership.

I'll let you in on a secret: I love to eavesdrop on the little conversations that my fellow soldiers have. Once I heard two chaps who (probably) also are going for Japanese language lessons, I hung around them trying hard not to laugh too hard when they started translating exercise commands into Jap.

But almost always, you're guaranteed that someone will be bitching about RT. "Aiyah, f**ing waste time leh!" would be one of the more gentle remarks you hear. Man, I totally agree. I try to convince myself that I need this exercise, usually that makes me feel better. And all I need to do to convince myself further, is palm my hands around my tummy. Oh yeah, that my friend, is the ultimate motivator.

I'll share with you some dark things from my life: I was an obese kid. Shhh... yes... today, my waistline is about 33 inches. Up until I was 13 years old, my tummy was also that size. I've always kept my size/weight in check up until before I left for London, when I arrived in England, I measured 36 inches and my cheeks look like a hamster who's keeping food in his mouth. However, I was not one to sit around to complain. I chanced upon this magazine insert sponsored by this company called "MaxiMuscle". Boy, that was a life changer (ok, waist changer). I learnt little tricks about how to keep fat intake to less than 15 grams a day, put myself on a 4 times a week exercise regime and went for little jogs even in the deepest of winter. The squirrels living outside my room looked curiously inside as I huffed and puffed and jumped and groaned on my workouts. My housemate in the next room wasn't amused.

In China, I continued my running. Worried that breathing in too much industrial pollution would cause my lungs to evolve, I kept up my regime on the treadmill.

So I ran and I ran...but I still cannot, for f**%s sakes pass my IPPT!During my last test, I failed my 2.4km timing by 30 seconds! As I wobbled my way back to the car, I was so infuriated I could have set a bomb at the test center. My friend, you won't know how sad it feels when you're getting gold standard for every other station only to walk away a failure 30 seconds too late :(

Now, your dearest writer sips his coffee and munches on raspberry brulee cheesecake. The window for my IPPT will open once again, will I pass it? Will I not? We shall see...