I was doing schoolwork at my desk. I had just finished eating three off my famous Bronson Burritos: monstrous bean-filled tortillas each, complete with sour cream, salsa and shredded cheese. I leaned forward in my chair to grab a book I’d left on the floor, and froze. I leaned back slightly and ventured forward again, knowing the sensation I’d just felt was not going to go away.
My stomach was resting on my legs. At the tender age of 23, I had finally developed a beer gut. Not a big one, but there it was, and I could no longer ignore it. Sure, I’d been going to the gym sporadically since I enrolled at USM. I’ve also pretty much crammed all the food I laid hands on into my gullet, often before going to bed. You might say this new routine was dropped in my lap!
People often speak of their defining moments in terms of vivid recollections of the moment in question, frozen forever in their memories. I remember the moment I realized I wanted to go to college and become a writer. Most of us know where we were on 9/11. More to the point, I remember the moment I decided to start working out every day.
“Eff this,” I muttered to myself.
That day, fleeting impulses to lift weights and eat better crystallized into an iron resolution. Over the intervening 30 days, I’ve cut my food intake in half, and I’ve managed to get into the gym almost every day. The only days I’ve missed are snow days that closed down the gym. I even get down there the mornings after I’ve had too much to drink and I sweat out my hangovers. I’ve lost 15 pounds since Christmas! Tie a ribbon around me.
Being a college student with a college schedule though, it is always hard to get into the gym before it closes. On the weekdays, Portland’s Sullivan gym closes at 10 p.m. and on the weekend, it closes even sooner. I thought it closed at 6 p.m. today (Saturday), but the friendly person that answers their phone just told me that they close at 5:30 today. What gym closes at 5:30, even on a weekend? Many gyms stay open until midnight. It’s hard to find a treadmill in the Portland gym during peak hours in the afternoon, and I’m not a morning person.
Even if a gym isn’t full of people late at night, it fills an important role for those that are there – we don’t have time to get down there during the day. Most of the school year occurs during winter months, so the gym is one of few good options for staying active. There are psychological and social barriers to using a gym to keep your body healthy and strong as well.
Like abstaining from alcohol, eating vegan-only food, and reading books in your spare time, working out is one of those lifestyle choices that everybody knows is good for you, but that people seem to resent when you actually go and do it. If you’re na?ve or vain enough to tell a lot of people about your decision to work out – particularly if you’re lifting weights – you will often be rewarded with uneasy breaks in conversation, or worse, boring discussions on the relative importance of “toning” muscle versus “building” it (“toning” is just another word for “I don’t want to work too hard”).
Okay, there is a narcissism inherent in lifting weights that I can understand. There’s also the apparent futility in hefting heavy objects and putting them back down again for no real material gain, especially in an age where we’ve finally gotten machines to do most of that for us. A lot of people get embarrassed if they’re not lifting the biggest weight in the gym too, which I’ve never understood. I don’t really have any response to these sentiments that haven’t been made themselves a million times at the water cooler. I will say this: given the choice to be issued a gym body or one that’s been sitting on the couch watching CSI all day, without having to do any of the intervening work, anyone would choose the gym body. It’s more of a question of personal conviction than of time restraints, nursing injuries or any number of reasons people toss around for their low energy, high blood pressure and bulbous asses. And it’s not a question of whether you were born with a body that can look like Chuck Norris’s; everyone looks and feels better if they exercise regularly.
So I encourage everyone to get over their bashfulness and their inertia and get into the gym. If it’s open.