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Letter of Recommendation: Gyms – The New York Times

Mar 19th, 2020

The gym I now belong to has codified this clarity. It describes itself as a Judgement Free Zone, and there are not only signs everywhere dissuading boorishness but also an actual Lunk Alarm that goes off like an air-raid siren if the level of testosterone rises too high. Ive heard it only once, and the poor Samson who set it off (by dropping his weights with a roar) seemed close to tears when he realized why all eyes were on him. (I have no idea who sets it off, probably God.)

Every gym has its own elaborate taxonomy, and there was a time when this fascinated and enlivened me. The queens and the drones, the whippets and the peacocks. Nothing like decline to erode ones belief in distinctions. Its no wonder Ive ended up in a gym thats mostly a lumpen mass of humanity, a gym that does not simply tolerate debacle and decrepitude but actively celebrates it. We are encouraged to enjoy a free piece of candy as we leave, and once a month a large table is piled high with bagels and pizza.

For a brief time, though, a god dwelt among us. Tall, provocatively bald (you suspected a mane, I mean), chiseled as a cliff, he performed only two exercises. The first involved a pull-up bar and is beyond my powers of description. He alternated this with standing leaps onto an adjustable platform. That is to say, one minute he stood with an air of intense concentration, and then, with just a ripple in his skin like a breeze passing over still water, he materialized some five feet higher in the air. Without a wobble. Ive never seen anything like it, and judging from the way he disrupted others, no one else had, either. How I loved watching him; he made a whole different relation to exercise and, somehow, to life seem possible. And how glad I was when he was gone, for the same reason. Predictability, anonymity, oblivion again, these are the elements of a good gym. No epiphanies, please.

Which brings me face to face, as it were, with my final point: mirrors. These are, of course, ubiquitous in gyms, and for years I used them as everyone does, pretending to check out my form while checking out other unattainable things. Only lately have I realized the true focus and genius of this dcor choice as well as how much money it has saved me. If a man stands before a mirror, the novelist Flann OBrien writes, and sees in it his reflections, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. This is, in my experience, correct. (And I suspect the specificity of the gender is damningly accurate.) But of late, the self that has been ghosting the glass in front of me is not a man with pecs and purpose, nor even a man with, say, a bit of hair and decent knees.

Hes not a man at all, in fact, but a little boy of 10, back in 1976 when my daily exercise regimen began. I am certain of the date because Rocky came out that year, and one morning I downed (like Rocky) and later upped (unlike Rocky) a tall glass full of raw eggs as part of my training. I have forgotten the house we lived in at the time, cant recall a meal or a holiday or even one word we said. Yet I remember every scent and sight of the predawn runs I began taking around the neighborhood, and the exact heft of my first plastic-coated dumbbells. A therapist would make much of this, no doubt, but obviously I dont need a therapist. I have a gym.

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Letter of Recommendation: Gyms - The New York Times

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