The Gym

First up, I do not go to a gym.  I am not a member of a gym, I am not affiliated to a gym, I do not like gyms, I have no association with gyms whatsoever.

All of the above I knew, but now that I have, for the first and possibly last time in my life been to a gym, I feel it’s finally been confirmed by a little empirical evidence.  To explain…

My mobile phone exists for two purposes.  1.  So that friends and family can call me up and arrange to eat food with me and talk in person, because frankly, that’s the best way to do it.  (I don’t mind email.  I’m sure you can imagine that I write… liberally long emails, shall we say?  I also have a habit of writing in the syntax of whoever I’m writing a novel about at the time, which obviously caused confusion back in the day when Satan was my main POV.)  2.  So that when I get seriously, seriously lost, I can phone up someone else and bleet.  My phone does NOT exist, please note phone provider, it does NOT exist so I can be sent endless amounts of crap spam!  Arrgghhh!

Yet I am.  And 99% of the time I delete said spam while cursing fluently.  But just every now and then with my finger poised to delete, I get something that vaguely interests me, and when a spam text message offered me 5 days free access to my local gym I thought well… why not?  I’m not hugely bothered about my health.  I walk pretty much everywhere, I weigh what I should, and every now and then I’m even caught eating salad, in as much as it is but a vehicle for dressing.  But I will concede that as a lighting designer/writer my lifestyle isn’t exactly full of jogs up Mount Everest before breakfast, so every now and then I indulge in sport, just for the hell of it.

I like badminton; my initial belief being that having inherited my father’s excess height, I could essentially stand in the middle of the court and hit any shot that happened to come my way.  (But oh no.)  I enjoy swimming – although did have to endure 4 years of shame at primary school down the shallow end with the plastic paddling toes, owing to a combination of asthma and a failure to do butterfly stroke.  (My backstroke – excellent!  Front crawl – no worries.  Butterfly stroke – uh-uh.  Some might think that the years had tempered my resentment.  Wrongly.)  At secondary school I was complimented by my hockey teacher on knowing exactly where I needed to be on the pitch but never quite making it there on time.  Again, I would argue in my defense that it’s hard to be a really good Right Inner in hockey when you’re scared of the Left Back smashing your knees in.  Thus demonstrating survival skills over sporting ones.  At university I did karate for a little while, followed by a stint doing jiu jitsu.  (Wax on… and wax off.  For those of you who haven’t done martial arts that was a profoundly confusing thing just expressed.  For those of you who have… greetings.)

But a gym has none of these qualities.  There’s no thinking about catching the ball, running, dodging, occasionally yielding up the ball with a cry of ‘you know, you want it that badly, its yours, take it….’  A gym is pure soulless attack.  As I see it, there are four reasons to go to a gym.  1.  You’ve been given a five day free membership and figured ‘ah hell why not.’  2.  You have genuine medical concerns – overweight, blood pressure, joints etc. – that you need a regular exercise regime to address.  3.  You enjoy it.  4.  You’re concerned about your physical appearance.  Okay, option 1., that’s me covered.  Option 3. I guess might apply to some in the sense that hard physical exercise can, so they say (whoever they are) trigger the production of chemicals in the brains that simulate pleasure and frankly, someone’s gotta have a reason to go.  But let’s not get confused here – a gym is not fun.  Badminton is fun, cluedo is fun, the Simpsons is fun – running on a treadmill while being blasted by the highly tabloid journalism of a cheap TV news station in a sweaty basement – this is not fun.  What’s left?

Option 2. – genuine medical reason for being in a gym – is something that I feel adds an air of depression to the whole experience.  I don’t know if you’re supposed to, but I looked around at the other people in the gym while I was there for my free sessions, and there were a lot of people in pain.  Pure and simple pain; red faces and sweat, grunts and groans and eyes crinkled up, heavy breathing and clutching at agonized muscles.  This is essentially the gym as an extension of the hospital, a place of suffering and misery, and Christ knows I neither want to share in that, nor do others particularly need my sharing.

Finally Option 4. – going to the gym to achieve a physical shape.  I used to have serious problems with this, until I met a makeup specialist (I kid you not) in a theatrical wardrobe who made a very convincing argument about the needs of people to look good which essentially boiled down to ‘look, it doesn’t hurt others, and it makes the one who does it feel good about themselves and these two being so, who are you to get in the way or judge?’  I think the American declaration of independence put it another way with the pursuit of happiness bit, but whether the founding fathers had fully considered the implication of that sentence in the long-run, who can say?  For my part, I’m usually rather distressed when I see people who have clearly spent long, painful hours of their lives attempting to achieve extra-muscly arms or chests made of carved granite steel; I can’t help but wonder whether time might not have been spent on better activities, like learning how to cook or speak Italian or something, but again, that’s just me.  Certainly in my limited time at the gym there seemed to be a clear line between myself – casual bumbling passer by interested in occassionally pushing the heart rate into triple figures – and the genuine hard-core gym buffs, who exuded an air of physical capability that bordered on smugness, and actually rather put me off indulging in any areas which I didn’t already feel confident in.  Because let’s not beat about the bush, the gym is a place to feel smug.  Christ knows I did.  But since this is potentially a contentious issue I will leave it open to debate, but take this opportunity myself, to shut up.

To be honest, a large part of my problem with the gym may do with my innate aversion to too much sincerity being applied too thinly to a wide area.  Take for example, my afore-mentioned dabbling with jiu jitsu.  I cheer entirely for learning how to defend myself, and for kicking and punching and keeping healthy and all that jazz.  I cheer to a certain degree with the idea of the mind and body often being dependent on each other – thus if you’re going to cultivate one, it might well be a good idea to keep an eye out on the other.  I have a lot of time for keeping respect inside the dojo and cultivating a degree of hierarchy, simply to prevent idiots going martial-arts crazy and punching things without control.  However!  At the point where I am kowtowing before my sensei and drawing an imaginary samurai sword across my body in a show of respect and openness, all the time while maintaining a serene poker face (that has served me well in many a card game, in its defense) … and I begin to question whether this may not be an exercise of sincerity too far.  Likewise at the gym, and an hour here or there of working out and keeping yourself in shape, fair enough.  But relentless dedication to the gym, continual self-scrutiny, protein drinks, pills and skin-tight latex clothes drenched in sweat, and I start to wonder whether the metaphorical samurai sword has not been drawn in vain.

I also have a massive problem with being inspired.  Don’t get me wrong – I get inspired, and it’s a great feeling.  But I get inspired by things around me.  London inspires me; the Red Cross in Rwanda inspires me, the fall of the Berlin Wall, man landing on the Moon inspires me.  A stranger telling me to believe in myself, that I can do it (go, go, GO!)… well, no.  I have been informed many times that this is because I’m a negative individual lacking in various qualities beginning with ‘self-‘ and an adjective, not always the one you might expect.  I would refer you back to the things I find inspiring… a city that has thrived for 2000 years, with 4 million people living side by side with occasional flares of peace and brotherhood… an organisation that stayed behind during one of the savagest bits of modern history to help all and sundry, regardless of risk to life and limb, and when the rest of the world had fled… the collapse of a system of government that had repressed millions for nearly fifty years… man journeying out into the stars… this is the level we’re talking at.  That, and Shakespeare.

So, if there’s any gym out there which feels that it can induce in me the same sort of sentiment as all of the above, then feel free to drop me a line!  But you might have to try me on a free pass first…