I hadn’t gone to the gym seeking answers to life’s existential dilemmas; I’d gone to work off the Pad Thai I’d scarfed down for lunch. So the questions that blipped in glowing red dots across the screen of the elliptical trainer seemed harmless, even helpful, at first: Weight? 128 (okay, 130). Age? Twenty-six yesterday, thanks for asking. Cardio, manual, or fat-burning mode? That was when the creeping panic set in.
I don’t know! Am I a heart-conscious cardio girl, here to increase my energy and add years to my life, or a superficial fat-burner concerned only with the size of my thighs? Am I a woman in charge of my own destiny, or a slave to the programmers of the Precor? Suddenly the questions seemed less innocent. Wait a second! This exercise machine didn’t want me to work out harder; it wanted me to reevaluate my life!
There are few everyday experiences that evoke the same psychological cocktail of dread, guilt, and a sense of accomplishment in me as a trip to the gym. The elliptical machine that seems to be channeling my mother is only one of the hazards that haunts me when I really, really want to work out, when I really, really mean to work out, but I just can’t handle …
The dimpled ass in the face. Locker rooms are scary. There are limited places to avert your eyes, and many definitions of “modesty.” I applaud women of all shapes, ages, and sizes who are comfortable in their bodies. I aspire to be one of them. And yet it boggles my mind that it will invariably be the most … shall we say, “unlikely” woman in the bathroom who unabashedly lounges in her birthday suit. It is an unwritten cosmic law, and I have had multiple confirmations from reliable sources that this also holds true for the men’s room.
The ass in the face leaves me with two choices. I can 1) applaud this woman’s bravery and check it out to see what my ass may look like in fifty years, or 2) shield my eyes. The first makes me feel like a voyeur and the second a sissy. I’d like to think I’m beyond the grammar school days of dislocating my shoulder in order to change my bra under my T-shirt, but I was raised in a household where “private parts” were called that for a reason.
The girl in the sportsbra. On the days I do manage to make it to the Stairmaster (after slipping home to change in the privacy of my own bathroom), I’m reminded by someone I like to simply call “the girl in the sports bra.” The only people who need to wear skin-skimming Lycra are Cat Woman and Lance Armstrong. No one needs to be aerodynamic at the gym. No one. Puzzling then, to see this vixen in a bra that juggles her goods rather than contains them and a pair of leggings so tight she can’t even wear a thong. This woman is not at the gym in order to look good, she’s at the gym because she looks good. Feel sorry for her that she has had to resort to parading in glorified sausage casing for self-affirmation, I tell myself and pump my iPod to George Michael.
Without a doubt, the iPod is the single greatest thing that has happened to the workout since sweatbands. I’m reminded of a commercial for fitness water on television right now. A woman jams to Mary J. Blige as she powerwalks, turning heads down Rodeo Drive. Of course, the woman isn’t on Rodeo Drive, any more than she is eye candy for Taye Diggs—but don’t tell her that. This is much like my own relationship with the iPod: spinning next to the girl in the sportsbra is much more tolerable when I have a personal soundtrack reaffirming the fact that I am, indeed, the hottest woman in the room.
