March 19, 2024

Comfortable numb at the gym

Jan. 3, 2007
’Tis the season to get back in the gym. Some of us have never left it; we’ve been noodling at stairmasters and weights, aerobics and yoga all year long in a lackluster way, waiting for our winter cousins to show up for their annual visit, which tends to run from January through April.
It can get downright lonely in the gym during the heat of the summer, but after the New Year, the place is packed with stinky people once again and it’s hard to find a stray machine in need of company. Every stairmaster, treadmill and exercycle is hammering like an 18-cylinder sports car.
My gym is like an old friend that I visit several times a week, but still don‘t know very well. It seems odd that I’ve been going for nearly 20 years but don’t know many people at my gym. Twenty years, and at best it’s still, “Hey, how ya’ doin’?” to a few familiar faces.
Maybe that‘s because people tend to go to the gym to melt the black ice of stress or to obsess about their thighs or abdomens. There’s not a lot of socializing. Even when I was single, it never seemed like the gym would be a likely place to land a date. In my experience, gym talk tends to be limited to chit-chat about sports or the weather, or gutteral grunts, like what you’d expect from the Neanderthals.
Sample gym conversation: “Hmm, yeah, hey, unh, uh-huh, see-ya.”
Gym rats tend to hold sit-down jobs in the real world. People who do physical work -- like construction workers or farmers -- rarely seem to show up unless they’re training to be body-builders. They get enough exercise already -- I imagine they come home from work exhausted. But for someone like me, whose only exercise involves typing at a computer keyboard, doing something physical after work is a nice alternative to going crazy.
For this reason, I’ve noticed a lot of cops, lawyers and teachers are gym members.After sitting behind the wheel of a car or a desk all day, dealing with a lot of irritating people, they go to the gym to avoid going cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs from all the stress of being stuck in place.
Having some kind of exercise routine is especially important in our cold, dark, northern climate. It‘s a way of pumping endorphins into your blood chemistry: the feel-good hormones that fight depression and things like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Exercise is the antidote for those who hate the winter months.
Here’s what I’ve learned about gym rats and other workout geeks as we slip-slide through the decades:

Teens: Human jackhammers. How do they run so fast? Where do they get all that energy? You don’t see a lot of teenagers at the gym, but when you do, they’re real spark plugs. Take a bow.

20s: This is a tough time in life to exercise because there are so many obligations. Finishing college, launching a career, getting married, raising kids, buying a home, the merry-go-round of jobs... Who’s got time to do much more than go dancing on the weekends (if that)?
I admire people who exercise in their 20s because for me it was a struggle, and yet also the best time to start a lifelong habit. I started running at the age of 22 in order to kick cigarettes, and thought I’d croak just trying to shuffle through two miles the first few times out.

30s: Many people get “exercise religion” in their 30s. You see hordes of 30somethings at gyms, yoga studios, pilates classes, aerobics... Working out becomes a way of life. Suddenly, the idea of competing in marathons, ski races and triathlons sounds like the perfect unpaid part-time job of say, 30 hours a week or so. Party conversations are dominated with talk of shaving 20 seconds off your next 10k, or the joys of doing the Downward Facing Dog posture at yoga class.

40s: You start to lose interest in exercise around the same time your joints go to hell, your metabolism starts to slow down, and the “Kirstie Alley Effect” starts to kick in. But hold on: suddenly, there‘s a donut around your middle where your concave stomach used to be. Exercise becomes a matter of survival to keep the Forces of Fat at bay. And it dawns on you that your daily workout does more to benefit your head than your body, such as it is.

50s and beyond: If you make it this far, exercise has become an irreplaceable habit, like throwing your clothes any which-way in the bedroom instead of putting them neatly away. You’re comfortably numb in a holding pattern for the long haul. Coincidentally, you no longer care if you stuff your face with pie and cheesecake (occasionally, anyway). You’ve earned it.

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