4 Reasons Going To The Gym Really Sucks

From July of 2009 to July of 2010, I lost 135 pounds through diet and regular exercise. Since then, I’ve kept the weight off, but I’ve discovered a dismaying fact – the only way to keep the weight off is through diet and regular exercise. That sucks, but it’s better than starving to death or morbid obesity.

But I live in Minnesota. And attempting to go running outside in Minnesota in January is asking for a broken ankle. Or death by hypothermia. Or both. Like, come April, some dude will be raking his yard, and find my half-defrosted corpse in his bushes, and no one wants to find a dead guy in running shorts in their shrubberies.

So running outdoors in a Minnesota winter is not an option. That leaves going to the gym. Now, going to the gym has its upsides – you don’t have to worry about getting hit by a car, the treadmill keeps you honest, and there’s usually attractive women in spandex. However, there are numerous downsides. Let’s take a look at some of the horrors that await you in the gym.

ONE – THE TELEVISIONS

When you arrive at the gym, you probably don’t notice the machines, or the trainers, or the people sweating and grunting atop the machines. No, you probably notice the flat-panel TVs, dozens of them, hanging from the ceiling. And you will quickly realize the one infallible rule of gym TVs:

Whatever is on the TV will be crap, and it will be turned up to the maximum possible volume.

Seriously. It never fails. Come into the gym at 5 in the morning, and one of the TVs will be showing the Country Music Network. (“She done took my pickup, y’all, and ditched it in the junkyard of love!”) Or the Nancy Grace Show, which is the first thing corrupt lawyers see when they arrive in hell. Or reality TV. Or, God forbid, “Jersey Shore”. Someday, when some future Edward Gibbon is penning “The Decline And Fall Of The American Republic”, “Jersey Shore” will be Exhibit A.

But you can’t ever turn down the TVs or change the channel. Oh, no, no. Because someone will be watching Nancy Grace screech at the camera, and if you have the sheer effrontery to turn down the TV, Nancy Grace’s devoted acolyte will take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Or worse, the gym management.

And if you dare to turn down the volume when Toby Keith is on the Country Music Network…well, may God have mercy on your soul.

TWO – THE GRUNTING

Exercise is hard work. If you get a good workout going, you’re going to sweat, and breathe hard, and maybe start wheezing a bit. This is entirely natural.

You do not, however, need to grunt and bellow like a elephant in heat. Especially if you are performing exercises that do not merit those kinds of grunts – it’s like taking the day off from work because you sneezed.

Like, a couple weeks ago, I’m running on the treadmill, and I hear this noise:

“ooooooooooooorrrrrrrrRRRRRRRAAAAAGGHHHHHHHH!”

Then followed by heavy panting.

I looked over, expecting to see someone having a heart attack, or at least a bad bout of constipation. Instead, I only see a guy lifting weights. With that kind of noise, I expected him to be bench-pressing a lot of weight. 300 or 400 pounds. Triple-digits, certainly.

Forty pounds. Bags of potting soil often weight more than that.

There’s another guy who does bicep curls with 10 pound weights, and with every curl, makes a sound like a drunken Viking berserker on uppers. “RAGH! RAGH! RAGH! RAGH!”

I suppose the grunting makes the effort easier – but for a 10 pound weight? Seriously?

Men are mostly guilty of this one, but women aren’t immune from generating gym annoyances. Which brings us to…

THREE – THE CONVERSATIONS

Let’s be clear – I have a strict policy against bothering other people during their workouts. And after losing 135 pounds, I look something like a particularly unkempt Nordic elf, so people tend not to bother me.

No, it’s the things that other people talk about in the gym, things that I have no choice but to overhear.

Women (sorry ladies) are particularly bad with this. Many people come to the gym to exercise. Some, however, come to socialize, and will walk at a leisurely 3 MPH on a treadmill while discussing important affairs of the day. And by important affairs of the day, I mean why their coworkers are evil harridans.

Or their most recent shoe purchases.

Or the sexual inadequacy of their husbands/boyfriends/affair partners.

Or they talk on their cell phones. Seriously? If you’re exercising, and you have enough breath to carry on an extremely complicated conversation on a cell phone, you are not exercising correctly.

You never have this problem running outdoors. Granted, you might get run over by a semi, but at least the truck won’t talk about its relationship problems.

FOUR – THE HOLIDAY CROWDS

November, December, January and February are when winter is at its nastiest in Minnesota, and when it’s the most necessary to run indoors.

Unfortunately, due to scheduling errors, that’s also when the Big Three of American holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s – take place. Why is this a problem? Well, Thanksgiving and Christmas are generally a festival of calories, delivered in the form of delicious, delicious pie. And Christmas cookies. And stuffing. And gravy. And giant roast elephant steaks. (I have some exotic Christmas meals.) And since our metabolism assume that famine is always imminent, all those calories get converted into ample body fat. After Thanksgiving and between Christmas, people panic and start to hit the gym.

And then after New Year’s, the entire population of North America resolves to lose weight, and so hit the gym as well.

It gets a wee bit crowded. In the same way that molten lava is a wee bit warm, or politicians are a wee bit narcissistic.

It is of course good that people want to get into shape and take better care of themselves. Nevertheless, it is immensely frustrating to get up to go running at 5:30 in the morning only to find that every treadmill and every elliptical is full. What’s even more frustrating is that many of these people do not take it seriously. It’s a little annoying to want to run seven miles, only to find all of the gym’s treadmills filled with people walking at 3 MPH. It’s the same reason in college I could never get along with other writers – I wanted to write and finish a novel, and they were going on and on about experimental short-form poetry that almost always ended with a symbolic sex scene. (This is what happens when people read too much Foucault, and too much Foucault is any Foucault.)

But there’s an upside. By the end of February, most of the holiday people will be gone. A lot of people say they want to exercise more, or lose weight, or write a novel, or do whatever – and only a few of them will actually do it.

I hope you are one of the people who will do it.

But quietly.

-JM