Open Writing

Those of you who read my columns will know that of late I’ve obsessed about the bad weather we’ve had this summer in Connecticut – mostly too much rain. Opportunities to go sailing, which is primarily why we’re here, have been hard to come by. So what do you do if you’re living on a boat under monsoon conditions? Well, you eat and sleep a lot, go to the mall and the library; and grocery shop more often than you need to. There are movie houses within reach, but neither my wife nor I are attracted to modern movie houses, preferring to wait until the latest releases are available on DVD.

And then there is the gym. We are summer members at the local establishment, which provides all the usual machines and weights, showers etc., and we try to go three times a week when we’re in our home port. For me at least, it’s a chore. It never gets any easier, and I don’t enjoy any of the exercises, but I continue because I recognize the need to stay strong as one ages and becomes more sedentary. This philosophy stood me in good stead through two knee replacement operations, and a couple of falls that would have left me more seriously hurt if I hadn’t had good muscle tone.

Never before would I have thought of the gym as a welcome distraction – more of a counter irritant, but under these particular summer conditions, that’s what it has become. Normally, my eyes would be glued to the TV monitors the gym provides, or the data displays that tell me how much less I’m achieving than on my last visit; but now I watch people. They come in all shapes and sizes; ages, colors and styles.

I have categorized them into several groups according to what I discern about their dress, body language and appearance, though of course I have no idea how accurate my impressions are, nor do I wish to know. The most noticeable group are the anorexic young women who attack each exercise with a ferocity that is inappropriate given their emaciated physiques. They look unhappy, rarely make eye contact, and their expressions are ones of self-loathing. Are they really anorexic I wonder, or am I just dramatizing.

Yet another, easily spotted group, are the folks recovering from injuries or surgical procedures. They move slowly, grimace a lot and carry the pallor of those too long out of the sun. It’s encouraging to see some of them making progress as the days pass - moving a little more easily and getting the gleam back in their eyes. Separate from those, but connected by medical conditions, are the patients who have been told by their doctors that they’ll die if they don’t exercise and lose weight.

I feel sorry for many of them who have let their bodies get so far out of hand that it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever get back to being healthy again, and I empathize with their feelings of frustration and perhaps even fear. I’m sure many of them are battling eating disorders and other compulsions that most of us don’t have to deal with.

Perhaps the largest and most noticeable group are the jocks, both male and female. Some of them probably are competitive body builders by the look of their rippling and overdeveloped muscles. Yet others are perhaps in training for some of the extreme sports that are a strange new phenomenon in the USA – e.g. the 200-mile marathons and the Iron Man triathlons and decathlons.

Amongst these bulky athletes are a sub-group who I can only imagine are bouncers in nightclubs, or bodyguards. They are heavily muscled like the others, but lack the muscle definition. Their demeanor is by-and-large friendly, but their eyes have seen it all. I speculate that they are probably retired cops or ex-military personnel, and they’d get no argument from me, no siree.

Cops and firefighters are well represented, and I don’t need to conjecture about their identities, especially the cops, because their locker room conversations give them away. They usually come into the gym after completing a night shift, I suspect in an attempt to shed some of the trauma many of them must witness. I believe the firefighters in particular are required to maintain a specified level of fitness in order to stay employed, and it’s clear from their disgruntled attitudes that many of them find this onerous.

I’ve saved my favorite group, and least easy to divine, for last. These are the women, often quite beautiful, that are, for me, pure eye-candy. They range in age, I would guess, from twenty to late forty, and represent global origins from Asia and Africa through the Baltic nations to Europe. Skin colors come in every shade from pale pink to dark chocolate. There are delicate blossoms from Pacific Asia, and statuesque ladies from various parts of Africa, albeit third and fourth generation Americans in some cases.

Why are they in the gym at all, since they are in great physical shape? What employment allows them to be here in the mid-morning hours? My wondering touches on a couple of establishments that cater primarily to the erotic needs of truck drivers who check into a nearby truck stop for the night. Could it be that pole and lap dancers need to work out? Are prostitutes better able to satisfy their clients when they are physically fit? I’ll never know. It’s enough that my conjecturing takes my mind off the rain, at least for a couple of hours.

# # #