It’s been a while, so it’s obviously time for me to complain about the gym.
Sadly, this entry isn’t about any fun gym characters. I have been at LA Fitness so long that I’m well-acquainted with everyone, and anyone new who comes in is remarkably banal.
There was a fun revelation about this man that I thought was gay. (Like, 98% thought was gay—he was too well-groomed to be straight. Yes, he was well-groomed at the gym…somehow?) He and I were always on the stair steppers together, but he really didn’t talk to anyone and despite his really great hair, there was no clear sign that he was a friend of Dorothy. Then, one day, he brought a friend in with him during a gay festival weekend and it all made sense. The “friend” looked exactly like him but was a fabulous as they come. He literally said, “Let’s pump some muscles!” when he walked onto the gym floor. (Honestly, was a very big fan and would have traded him for my stair-stepper friend in an instant.)
Anyway, turns out this blog does have characters!
But, the big revelation in this post is that I switched gyms. It was time. And LA Fitness had gotten absolutely bonkers.
To be fair, the LA Fitness I went to was very nice. Like VERY nice. But, I don’t know how that equated to it being a magnet for early gym goers.
For context, I’ve always been a morning person. Even in high school, I had a 0-hour class, so I had to be up at 6 and in my jazz band seat at 7:15am. This has usually been great for me and my fitness life. There just aren’t a lot of morning gym people.
For instance, I love telling people that I go to the gym in the morning, because, often, they act like I just said I killed someone.
“I went to the gym this morning and—”
“YOU WENT TO THE GYM?! THIS MORNING?! MY GOD.”
So, while being a morning person does cause disdain in many, it’s been great to get a workout in and be left alone.
But, for some reason, this LA Fitness in Chicago is the mecca of early risers. I had to keep getting up earlier and earlier to not be bothered by people. Like…how do I wake up at 5am and go to a gym with 6 squat racks and some days NEVER FIND AN OPEN ONE.
Also, why is someone always on the calf raise machine? ALWAYS. And there is also a literal line for the leg curl machine. You can tell a lot of women and gay men go to the gym because people are working glutes 24/7.
I tried to think creatively about it. Like, “How can I avoid crowds?” A couple days I experimented going in at 10am, but…you guessed it…it was also FULL. In my old gym, I could roll in anytime between 5:30-7 and not have to take a ticket and wait in a queue to get a dumbbell.
To be honest, the other times are even worse. Morning folks tend to get in and get’er done. The reason they’re in early is to get it out of the way and get to work (probably). But once you go later in the day, people have nothing but time. The amount of people setting up elaborate filming apparatuses is honestly shocking. This one man had two bicep curl barbells stacked on each other so he could film himself doing lunges. One morning, a woman was using two free-standing benches so she could film herself doing thrusts. THOSE ARE HIGHLY COVETED LADY. GET YOUR TICKET AND GET IN LINE!
I know that this is all a me problem. When I’m at the gym I have unnecessary anxiety about who is there, what machine they are on, what I need to get on next, and why people are talking so much. But, as it is a me problem, I have tried everything at LA Fitness to fix it.
Alas.
It was wearing on me to the point where I would unnecessarily bring it up to complain.
“Did you guys see the game last night?”
“Don’t even get me started on the gym!!!”
“I said ‘game’…”
“It’s always busy! And this one guy was filming his lunges and he…”
It did always make me feel better, though, because if I brought it up with someone who had been to this LA Fitness, there was an immediate moment of bonding.
“THAT PLACE IS THE WORST!”
One of my buddies fled the gym, but then got an insurance break for LA Fitnesses (Fitnessi?) so had to return. When I talked to him about it, it was like he was returning to the front in WWI.
“I…I’m going back, Tedd.”
“It’s just not fair. IT’S NOT FAIR! You had a life out here! Don’t let them take it away from you!”
Finally, I brought it up with a guy on my bowling team. (Correct. I now bowl. That may be a whole other blog post.) Anyway, I was complaining, and he said his gym was close to where we lived and there were less than 500 people there in the morning. The next day he sent me a video of the gym floor and it was abandoned.
Serendipitously, when Ernesto had to get a new gym membership, we discovered this same gym offered a couple’s discount, so I finally moved on.
I think the most bizarre thing was the weird sense of nostalgia I had leaving LA Fitness. I wondered if I should say good-bye to the classic gym characters that I saw every day.
“Good-bye ambiguous-sexuality-well-groomed-man! Farewell terrifying woman who barked at me when I tried to use her tricep extension attachment! Sayonara man with 300 Instagram followers who considers himself an influencer and films everything! Hasta la vista bald guy who shares looks of mutual respect with me every so often!”
As of last week, I started at the new gym. Aside from the surging body image issues I have now (there…are a lot of people on performance-enhancing drugs there in the morning), everything is going pretty great. I can actually use machines and there isn’t a lottery to use the squat rack. I did get yelled at for trying to use a rack that some guy had evidently claimed, but, you know what? After he yelled at me, I went to another one…which was open!
In the end, I think I learned a couple valuable lessons: One, if a man is very well-groomed, it’s an inevitability that he will bring his flamboyant, gay lover into contact with you sooner or later, and two, when something makes you miserable, you should just leave it. So, good-bye LA Fitness. This song’s for you.*
*This song is explicit. Do not play with sensitive ears present. But definitely play it as you drive by an LA Fitness. Tysm.