We’ve been open a good eighteen months now and as the quiet background music drifts down from the gym I can’t help but cast my mind back to when I opened the office and learnt exactly how it felt to be in the room below 15 people simultaneously dropping weights.

It’s 07.30 on day 1 of running my new business: Project Co.Working. The kettle is full, the plants are watered… And the cross-fit gym above me has a weights session going in full swing. Dear Lord, the ceiling is going to collapse. Surely. The huge concrete lintel above my desk doesn’t move, but everything is the room shakes and one of the freshly watered plants jumps from a shelf and cascades across the new sofa, sprinkling its compost as far as it possibly can without looking like it did it on purpose.

It’s OK, they stop at 08.00. Don’t they? They must. Surely. 08.00 rolls around and the weights keep dropping. 08.30, my first customer arrives and asks what is going on, I jokingly let him know and assure him that they are just overrunning today, it won’t happen again. At 09.05 they finally run out of puff. Phew.

10.25, a man starts skipping. It sounds likes he’s going for the world record in both speed and endurance. He stops and we hear nothing for a while. Once we’re settled again into the serene calm of this new, light office we can hear the distant call of seagulls over the Purbeck Hills, it’s lovely. The Cross-Fitter above us hits play on ACDC.

I venture up the stairs; I am a small woman, 25 years old and the last person in the world to tell someone to keep the noise down, but I have my new customers to look after. The music in the ‘box’ is so loud that the man doesn’t hear me enter or say ‘excuse me’, or shout ‘HELLO’. I wait until he’s done with his set. He looks perturbed that I am in his gym, he’s booked a private session, he doesn’t want to turn his music down, he always works out at 11.00 on Mondays to ACDC. I pull out the puppy eyes and he agrees to tone it down. Back in the office we can still hear Brian Johnson’s every word, but at least his bass is no longer causing ripples across my now cold cup of tea.

The rest of the day passes with relative ease and when my first customers leave a feel a weight lift from my shoulders, only to have a weight dropped on my head moments later. The evening class, apparently, has twice the number of participants than the morning class. So that’s double the weights, double the footsteps, double the skipping, double the shouting, double the ACDC.

Breathe.

So, the lessons I’ve learnt from living under a cross-fit gym are:

1… Don’t do it.

Open your business anywhere else. Not under a cross-fit gym. Literally anywhere else.

2… The Lyrics to ACDC’s greatest hits. And their worst.

Which, actually, has turned me from really not liking them very much to an undercover fan. They fill me with the confidence to take on (verbally and with the employ of puppy eyes) a beefy cross-fitter.

3… People run out of puff

The solace: it will come to an end. Like all good things, all bad things, and everything in between, the relentless and gratuitous dropping of weights will - eventually - come to an end.