A friend convinced me that I should start working out in the morning, so earlier this week I arrived at the gym at about 6:30 in-the-insanely-early- a.m. I jam my giant bag of stuff into the skinny locker that makes me wonder if the person who created it knows women at all. Anyway, upstairs I go and wait in line to sign up for an upright bike. Yep, there’s a line up to write on the board.
The workout
I cycle for 20 mins, then attempt to do some weights. I don’t like the machines they have because I’m not sure how some of them work. But, I don’t want to LOOK like I don’t know how they work, so I casually stretch by a machine and look covertly out of the corners of my eyes at the useless pictogram instructions. When I think I’ve got it I jump on and give it a go.
It goes well for the most part until I try some pulley machine. I do one set of exercises but when I want to try the other, the bar doesn’t move up like it should. So I woman-up and ask the attendant about it. She says it should just slide up and as she tries it, she sees that it’s stuck. I mumble something about going to try something else while she works on it.
I go to the leg press. It’s the one where you sit down and put your legs up against a big flat piece of metal and push up. Only problem is that the big flat panel is too far away for me to reach and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to adjust it.
I must have been walking around it and staring at it like it was something from mars because some guy came and asked if I needed help. When I explained the problem he told me to, “SIT DOWN!” Quite rude until I realized he had ear buds in and probably didn’t realize he’d yelled it. Once I was seated, he showed me how to flip out the bars with the teeth that were holding the plate and, voila, I was set.
Then, because I probably looked like I was a little slow, or maybe it’s just the blonde hair, he says, “Those big round things are weights that you add to the bar”. That I knew.
As I’m doing my leg presses I can see the attendant still trying to fix that other machine. She’s got a cloth and oil and is lubing everything in sight. She’s pulling on things and grunting…it’s like low budget porn, but with clothing.
The shower room
After my workout, I head downstairs and practically dislocate my shoulder trying to rescue my bag from the locker. I notice there are a lot of people here and hurry along because I’m worried there will be a lineup for the showers.
I pull out my flip flops, very proud of myself for remembering them, and then I dig through the bag in search of my towel. Then my pride turns to slight panic when I realize that I forgot to pack one. Damn. Damn.
I run out to the front desk thinking that because there’s a swimming pool at the community centre that they might rent towels. Nope. So I end up spending $22 on a “sport towel”, which I learn is really just a slightly wet (that’s how they’re supposed to be), tiny (size of a sheet of paper) shammy.
Well, I’ve got no choice I walk to the edge of the shower room, strip down and chuck my sweaty clothes on the bench and walk into one of the single stalls. I try to hang my, um, towel on the hook outside the shower stall, but it’s so small it just falls to the ground and immediately sucks up all the water in the vicinity – I think even some of the water out of the pool got absorbed. Cursing, I pick it up and delicately balance it on the hook.
I shower quickly and then “dry” myself with the postage stamp. I have to work small… a forearm here, upper thigh there, calf here. All the while I fondly reminisce about the days I had a woolly towel that covered most of my body. But, I keep going and surprisingly enough, I get mostly dry. Then it hits me. I have to walk back to where my bag is and my “towel” really only covers one boob and half an arm.
I’m not as shy as I was when I was younger, but I don’t love the idea of walking pretty much naked through a room with a bunch of women I don’t know. Yet, again, I have no choice.
Just as I open the curtain to my stall and steel myself for the nerve-wracking walk, an elderly, large, in-need-of-an-iron naked lady walks in front of me and across the room without even batting an eye.
Well, I think,” I got this,” and I saunter across the room like the emperor in his new clothes.
One of my regular towels compared to the sport towel
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