Wednesday after work is my gym night with my trainer. He’s doing an excellent job of seeing just how far he can push me every week without actually breaking me. After almost a year in a small, private gym, today was our first day at a much larger, much newer gym nearby.
The old gym was small, and rarely had more than four or six other people there at the same time. (Usually in pairs, a client and a trainer.) Almost everyone was thus involved and minding their own business, either counting painful reps or performing them.
The new gym is much larger (not as large as a 24 Fitness or something like that), at least three or four times the size. It also had maybe a dozen pairs of client/trainers working out. No worries.
But about a quarter of the space is a bit partitioned off (-ish!) and was used for karate classes for grade school kids. They were making a ton of noise, as pre-teens kicking pads will do. No worries.
My favorite part was the holding pen for the moms and nannies. An open air waiting room of sorts for those who had brought their tykes and were simply killing time, waiting for them to sweat and scream so they could go home in a half hour.
When I say “moms and nannies,” I’m being exact. There were no dads. There were very obviously nannies and housekeepers, whose duties included getting the small ones to karate practice and back safely, along with all of the other cooking, cleaning, and domesstic work around the McMansion. This was an EXTREMELY Woodland Hills crowd, every car in the parking lot an SUV from either BWM, Mercedes, Lexus, Land Rover, Jaguar, or Tesla. My decades old Volvo convertible was definitely the poor man’s vehicle of the collection.
In the holding pen were three types of women:
The nannies, bored to tears, watching something or the other on their phones.
The business moms, on their Mac laptops, answering emails or writing legal briefs in their $5,000 Armani pantsuits.
The adult Valley Girls, makeup and hair perfect, figures toned and sculpted, every molecule of Botox in place, chatting for social karma points like their lives depended on it.
There were several times when I made eye contact with a member of this third group. I never spoke to any of them, but every time I saw one of them looking out of their pit of despair into the rest of the gym, at the late-sixties, bald, chunky guy lifting weights and sweating like he was gonna die (i.e., me) there was a wave of contempt and quiet bemusement that swept across the room like that pyroclastic flow from Mt. Saint Helens forty-five years ago. Well, maybe not completely quiet. I know that I heard one woman snort in derision as she looked at me and then instinctively flipped her unnaturally blonde hair over her ear and looked away.
Being sore and having trouble moving around after a tough workout may suck, but it beats ennui!!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 