Reasons to Workout at Home

So for Christmas dad got me a month-long gym pass to use while I’m visiting him and my mother in Hawaii. He is most definitely more worried about my waistline than I am at this point. Thirty is just around the corner, I’ve got too much loose skin on my abdomen to ever dream of seeing whether muscles do exist there (as a teenager I was convinced that I’d been born without), and I basically workout so that I can eat without feeling too terrible about it.

Yes, I told my father that I wanted to stay in shape while I’m visiting him and my mother, but I meant like running along the beach and doing body weight training and so on because there is assuredly nothing worse than doing weights with your dad as some dude tries to pick you up, “So I noticed your glutes from across the room…”

I had almost forgotten how much I hated the gym. True, it’s not quite as bad as my hometown where the population is sixty percent transient male and going to the gym in the evening by yourself used to make my nineteen-year-old self reach for words that I did not yet know. Though predictive text always tries fill them in for me now.

At my first visit I got on one of a long row of treadmills, all alone, and some old guy decided to hop on right beside me and chat me up. There were enough treadmills that it looked like purgatory, as if you could jump on each one for and hour and by the time you reached the end you’d be able to have waited out Armageddon. So naturally my thought was: really sir, it’s common courtesy to take the next stall over so why are you crowding me when there’s so many other places for you to go?

I get the sense though that because there’s so many young women wandering around with their much older husbands on vacation here that the general population have also gotten confused (the last time dad and I went for beers the hostess asked me where my partner and I would like to sit. At the time I’d thought that he hadn’t heard, but the other day when we were out visiting the volcano he made sure to stress to the couple that offered to take our picture that I was his daughter. It was an uncomfortable enough exchange that I’m thinking of having a shirt made). So the old men usually make a go of asking you out. This often causes me to flash back to my great aunt’s response to a friend who’d asked her some five years after her husband passed if she was thinking about dating, to which she’d replied, “Why? So one day I can change his diapers?”

I find there’s usually some sort of sacrificial lamb at the gym usually anyway and I don’t understand why those of us that are actually just there to work out get targeted. There’s always some broad with full makeup in yoga pants so tight that you can see her outer and inner labia (call me a prude, but if you’re wearing pants I shouldn’t be able to feel like I suddenly have so much in common with your gynecologist), who has the elliptical on its lowest setting. Meanwhile I’ve committed to the double sports bra una-boob look and my facial expression is likely akin to Dr. Timothy Leary on acid because I’m actually here to halt my ass in its constant quest to settle somewhere around the backs of my knees.  

After a spin on the treadmill I’d gone in search of a quiet place to do some floor work. I was told that the upstairs used to be an area designated for women but that it was no longer so. When I’m moving back and fourth between cat cow the last thing I want is some muscle junkie staring into my asshole—which is precisely what happened.

Why must I always get stuck alone in a room with the men who assuredly would’ve picked on me in high school? In elevators, on flights and now in gyms. I almost long for the days when I was one big gangly pimple.

“So what are you doing later?” he’d asked me.

“Having flashbacks.”

This guy grunted so loud even over my music I couldn’t help but think This is the sound that you make right before you roll off of some poor girl isn’t it? I’m all for proper breathing, but there comes a point where it just looks like you’re faking it, which is like an odd way of looking into your future with someone like that.

He kept trying to talk to me, something about the impressive nature of my form (which I feel is nearly as creepy as telling me how easy my eyeballs look to scoop out of my skull with his lucky spoon or commenting on my bone structure), while the sunlight glinted off his tribal tattoos and I kept turning up the music. I think I may have to invest in some of those noise-cancelling headphones. One pair to wear and another to wrap around a brick to throw at meatheads when they just won’t leave me alone.