 | ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
Big Perspirations
You guys are in luck this week. Just as I remembered that I was overdue to write one of my “lifestyle” articles, the beginning of the year rolled around and it suddenly turned into a Sisyphean ordeal to secure equipment usage at the gym. Add a bunch of chicks who can’t fit into their pants after pigging out over the holidays and Voila! Instant topic! You can set your watch by it – all the fat fucks you know suddenly become fitness demons just because it’s January.
I’m a long-term gym-goer. I was a fat kid and have gone out of my way to do the work required to avoid being a fat adult. So, I’ve seen about twenty Januarys come and go at my local gym, along with scores of flabby-assed bitches who hog and sweat all over the equipment for about three weeks before disappearing into a bag of Cheetos and a fifth of Jose Cuervo for the remainder of the year. Every once in a while one will surprise me, turn it around, and join me and a few paranoid others like me in permanent gym purgatory. We get to the gym, nod at each other and promptly begin to run our beautifully-conditioned little hearts out on the treadmill, reflexively glancing over our shoulders while actually picturing the big fat thighs we’re trying to outrun chasing us.
But it’s pretty rare to find someone who is willing to permanently indoctrinate herself into the Thrill Kardio Kult. Most women are lazier – and truthfully, probably smarter – than that. Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that not all gym dropouts are created equal either. They come in a few different varieties, each one doomed to fail at her gym endeavor in her own unique way.
Take, for instance, the “Peggy Sues”. Peggy Sues are the women you went to high school with who were smoking hot as teenagers – cheerleaders and homecoming queens. But every once in a while you’d see them out with their families and could tell by looking at their big assed mothers that the shelf-life of their attractiveness was perilously limited. Time passed and the inevitable happened – marriage, kids, an overextended daily life – and the prophecy was fulfilled. Peggy Sue’s pert little cheerleader ass became a broad, saggy, tired quadruplicate of itself. Which is actually not that big of a deal for her, because she’s still married to the star athlete or student council president she hooked up with in high school, who sports a permanent gestational-looking gut himself, and their life together is as fine as can be expected. But every time a five year increment goes by, it becomes a big deal for a few weeks. Class reunion is coming up and she doesn’t want her old friends to catch her being bovine, so she minces down to the gym a few times a week in full makeup and expensive gear. She’ll set the treadmill to stroll and spend an hour on it, never breaking a sweat. I’ve had a few Peggy Sues from my school come through the gym and not recognize me without my high school outfit of three chins and two belly rolls. I don’t identify myself to them; I hear them blabbing with the trainers about reunions and I wonder why they care so much about impressing people with whom they were simply forced to grow up. The occasional Peggy Sue will actually still be in more or less good shape and will make a point of coming with a fat friend, sometimes the same fat friend they may have had in high school. (I wasn’t the kind of fat kid who made a good “fat friend”.)
Some Peggy Sues can cross over into being one of A Twins, two workout buddies who show up in January to work out together two or three times a week. A Twins are usually two younger women who don’t have any aesthetic need to work out because they have really nice bodies but for some reason they’ve decided they require the monotonous low-grade torture that is a “workout program”. They talk to one another loudly, use equipment at busy times without signing up for it, monopolize the stereo and hog both of the privacy stalls in the shower. Infuriatingly, they will also get into even better shape very rapidly, stroll around the locker room naked and STILL take fifteen minute showers in those fucking stalls. A Twins will have inevitably moved onto another, less tedious tandem activity and stopped coming to the gym by the beginning of February, at which time some of my fellow gym warhorses will loudly and repeatedly express relief.
I feel sort of guilty for how harshly I judge the Gigantors – the really, really big women who have decided that this is the year they’re FINALLY gonna do something about their morbid obesity. Having to share gym space with a Gigantor is like being stuck behind a very slow-moving truck on the highway when you’re running late to work. She’ll lumber onto the treadmill and sweat profusely while moving along at a tortoise pace, becoming gray-faced and soaking wet after twenty minutes. She’s far too spent at the end of a workout to mop up after herself, so her puddles of sweat are usually hosed off by the hapless trainer on duty, who is also frequently pressed into service of repeatedly showing her how the equipment works. She seems to require a refresher course every time she comes, causing more delays. She sprawls across the weight area to swing tiny hand weights around, very slowly. As impatient as I get with Gigantors, I always find myself hoping that they’ll stay. And actually, out of all the different zealots who crowd the gym this month, more Gigantors actually continue coming to the gym than any other group. Most of them never really stop being fat, but at least they’re doing something.
The gym is Darwinian at any time of year, but January is the cruelest month; hopes are so high and the endeavor so new, it’s difficult even for a gym veteran like me to imagine that failure is an option. But the old 85% failure/dropout rate remains depressingly consistent. As much as I dislike having to share space with new, incompetent gym-goers, I’m always heartened by those few who end up staying and joining the ranks of us: the few, the proud, the ridiculously vain and obsessive-compulsive.
Will this year be your year to become one of us?
