Sunday seems to be Couples Morning in the gym. I always see my plumber (a serious lifter) with his lady friend (bottle blonde and dithery), Pro and Trophy (they are serious about their workout, but drip with arriviste pretentiousness: think designer warmups and gold chains), and… well, there’s me and the Cute Engineer. The Dear knows what people say about us.
So far I can only get him in there on Sundays and I make the most of it. We spend about two hours what with punishing the bikes, going through some eclectic calisthenics, heavy leg sets and medium-hard upper body routines. Through most of this we park things like knee wraps, pocket notebooks and water bottles on a spot platform that hardly anyone uses. The cool down is abs for him and the Bat Woman routine for me. Lately I have augmented the hanging-by-my-insteps blowoff with an attempt at a flying dismount. It’s ticklish, and only when I had completed it today did I notice that our other Sunday morning pair, Chubby and Creepy, were in the free weight area and Creepy was advancing in our direction, grinning like a pig in shit.
Chubby — who after at least a couple years in the gym still looks like she swallowed a beach ball, one which disagreed severely with her judging from her expression — stood glaring at us from a distance. Creepy bobbed up close to me with his bandy-legged, unstretched runner’s gait — and I mean right in my personal space, at the distance you would select to say something that you didn’t want to share around, like “Nice ta-ta’s” or “Your tampon is leaking.”
Leering zestfully, he exhaled a reek of stale cigarette smoke and periodontal neglect:
Shamelessly lifted from DICKS by Garth Ennis and John McCrea
“Can you move your stuff off the spot platform? We need to use it.”
Cute Engineer leapt up like a Boy Scout in search of a good deed. “I’ll get it!” he said — for him, very loudly.
“Did Creepy need to get that close to me to ask that?” I said on our way to the locker room entrances.
“Yes, he did,” said Cute Engineer with slightly sour humor. “I could tell it was very important to him.”
I got all worn out just reading about your fitness routine. And then I chuckled, as it’s not often that someone capable of Batwoman hanging would use the word “arriviste” in a post about her gym.
At least, I don’t know anyone else who would do such a thing.
You should have been a fly on the plate loaded press when the engineer and I paused to try to remember if the guy in Greek legend that lifted the calf every day until he was lifting a bull was Milo of Kroton, or who.
I’m just puzzled that more people don’t go from Beowulf and Atalanta to Combat Conditioning and seven-minute splits. Well, Joseph Campbell ran track.
Which was the important: the asking, or the getting close?
I wager the latter.
Yes. Ewww.
Oy. See, this is one of the perils of being a hardbody. The creeps need to get close to get their jollies. Eeewww. Nobody ever felt like they needed to get close to me when I attended the gym on a regular basis.
My beach ball is more like a small soft pillow now. I’ve gotten down to 181 and it has been such an easy spate of weight loss I’m starting to fantasize about getting to the weight I was at when I was in college. For the first time, I actually think I can do it.
You are so inspiring, I firmly believe that reading your blog has kept me focused on the fact that being fit and “thin” is a very good thing and manageable. You are largely responsible for me considering (in passing, I admit) joining the gym again. What is keeping me from it is the fact that work is pretty slow and we are economizing rather than finding new things to spend money on. But it isn’t keeping me from actually doing some ab work in the evenings. Hell, I might even get out my free weights. Maybe that’s why my beach ball is going away.
Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there is a middle-aged rather shapeless woman in Missouri that is quite inspired by your example and you are definitely having a positive effect here. Thank you.
Wow! That was better than a big hug!
Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning and Combat Abs, ignoring for a moment the gruff macho come-on, are terrific for people who are not near or up for a gym. You can sometimes score the books used on Amazon (Furey charges top dollar for his DVDs and texts). All about using your bodyweight and doing unconventional types of multiple joint exercises — I swipe my calisthenics from his roster. Twenty yards of bear crawls or twenty Hindu Squats will have you huffing more than a whole “cardio” workout.
I have little bulges that come and go too — some day I’ll find an amusing way to tell the story of the “life-threatening ass injury” that crapped up my hill runs for three years. It’s just about perseverance and not being put off by the panting, sweating and roaring that comes with pushing strength limits, so you get the muscle your metabolism needs to function.
That’s great advice. I’m pretty good about cardio, but not about resistance/strength training type stuff; I can’t stand being observed while exercising (old trigger stuff from school) so going to a gym isn’t ever going to happen, and I don’t have room for equipment. Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check that out.
I will look for these items as I am pretty serious about getting a different shape going here.
Hmmm… I wonder if you could set me up with a workout routine some day, Sled. Something using hand weights at home and some toning stuff. I’ve got an exercise bike for cardio. I could start off doing it on non-yoga days when I finish chemo. What do you think?
As for Creepy … ewww.
Now that would be fun! Transatlantic coaching!!!!
I’ll work on ideas.
David — OK, I have to trot this out now.
I flunked gym.
Because I am a klutz. I could always hoist up my classmates to shoulder level — essentially, deep-squat them like a caber thrower — but on two occasions, I got failed a semester because I refused to do gymnastics, knowing I would try to balance on the beam or flip off the bars and break my everloving neck. Hilarity was great. I cannot run fast enough to be anything but the can tied to the cow’s tail in any competitive race, until I took up speedwalking, which uses strength more efficiently. You can imagine the derision. Girls were supposed to do girly stuff — dance, be agile, fleet of foot and dainty of movement.
And it was great fun, especially in a county full of the kinds of people who wear little gold chains, for gradeschool classmates to slam the half-blind, not-so-agile kid in the face with a dodgeball or volleyball… twice, hard enough to knock me out for a moment.
I knew the better part of valor, did my Yoga at home or in the corner of the gym, and practiced things like hanging upside down from trees or doing planks or sustaining my whole weight on my hands “sitting” in mid air just above the crossbar of a pipe fence. (We’ll discuss the spontaneous orgasms that can cause another time, since the subject came up before…)
Repeat after me: THEY DON’T GET TO WIN.
In my case, the punks and rich-bitches who slammed me with the volleyballs — and stole my clothes out of the locker, and taunted me until one of them found her fucking head hitting same locker very very hard at close to lightspeed — probably look like the Before pictures in the Nutrisystem ad about now. Living well is the best revenge.
As I’ve said elsewhere, anyone who matters in a gym is judging only one thing: are you working or poncing around?
I saw my hero again today, by the way — the gal who’s gone from 400 to, I’m thinking now about 280 in the past year. For the first time I heard her go RAWRRR as she hauled on a back stack.
“I love hearing that!” I called from the locker room door.
“You mean me?” she said.
Yup.
Do I know Chubby and Creepy?
I only ever see them weekend mornings. He is small, desiccated and gnomelike, she is bloated and weirdly misshapen in a way that suggests a melted pillar candle — pastel-polyester-clad, with a set expression that would turn new milk. She allows him to direct the whole workout but glares at him when he checks out the other chicks. They look like a particularly festerous pair of suburban zombies.