Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta exercise. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta exercise. Mostrar todas las entradas

martes, 12 de enero de 2016

Him and the gym

   It was very annoying, but it was more and more frequent that, in the middle of the night, he had to wake up to a cramp or some other time of pain. It would normally be in his feet or legs but sometimes it was his waist that felt the pain or even his face. He had gone to the doctor several times and to many different ones but none of them was able to tell him why that happened. He hated when it was obvious they were inventing what to say instead of giving him a science based and objective point of view. They just shot in the dark, trying to get it right.

 Many had told him it was the lack of exercise so he tried to jog in the mornings. Soon, he changed it to the afternoons, and then the nights. All of this happening in the same week, as he realized he hated to reorganize his life around such a menial activity. He didn’t understand how some people dared to say they loved to exercise often and for many hours. He didn’t tell this to anyone, but for him all those persons in the gyms and the parks exercising every single hour of the day, were just insane people without any real talent in them.

 Of course, he didn’t tell this to anyone when he signed on for a year at a big gym near his house. A perky girl showed him all the machines, explained the courses he could take (as if he was entering Harvard) and told him about the trainers that helped people there. Some even had experience in the military, which assured quality but also inspired some fear. In his first week he avoided the trainers and the courses and the dancing lessons, in order to focus only in the machines. It was a failure anyway but at least he wasn’t getting yelled at.

 The screams were constant in that place and everyone behaved as if it was extremely normal that a man build like a house would scream a bunch of skinny short women about how they couldn’t meet his extremely bizarre quotas of exercise. The man was clearly deranged somehow, always screaming and never really doing any exercise himself, only when he needed to demonstrate something he wanted all of them to do. Even then it was strange, because he would do the exercise so fast and in such a bizarre way, none of the women would get it fast and the screaming would ensue.

 He wasn’t the only insane one in the place. For a spinning class, there was a lot of yelling there too. The “teacher” there was a woman. She was very beautiful and her body was testament to her prowess in the exercise area but she was another one that yelled a lot. And he could never hold his laughter when looking at the spinning class because it was simply ridiculous. That woman yelling others to accelerate on bikes going nowhere, in a closed room with the concentrated heat that everyone was releasing, without the refreshing sight of the actual world.

 He exercised independently as long as he could but in every area of that place, there was a man or a woman kind of supervising that everyone make good use of the machines, normally looking after the cleanliness of everyone in the gym and to see that everyone was using the machines in the right way. To him, it was amazing how little sense of humor people in a gym could have. He saw a young man once trying to do a choreography he had clearly taken away from the TV on some of the running machines and they simply expelled them for that because they deemed his behavior “irresponsible” and “dangerous”.

 No one laughed there unless it was hypocritical laughter or if the person was talking on the phone. Besides that, the sound that ruled was heavy breathing and the eternal sounds of the machines and the one of the stupid music the put every single day. Every day it was the same playlist, from beginning to end and he already knew it by heart. And what was so annoying about it, is that it was there to make you feel you could always do more, like the music they put on shops and so on.

 Basically, the place was a laboratory, and every stupid person that paid to be there was a mouse or a hamster forever turning in their little wheel like an idiot, not ever thinking twice about anything. It was easy to see how brainwashed some of them are and the scary thing was that the results they had made them even more prone to stay there and keep on going and just obsess about the whole thing. He had hated to rearrange his life around exercise but many others were happy to do it, dedicating even more and more time per week to what they called “the art of exercise”.

 “Horseshit”. That’s what he told his doctor after a couple of months going to the gym. They did a lot of exams and tests and it was revealed that the exercise had nothing to do with whatever was happening to him. The cramps would even get worse some nights and he had slowly became a person that slept on his chest, as it was impossible to him sleeping in any other way. His legs always hurt and his body was still as bad as it was months ago.

 When he saw the results of the test, he decided to quit the gym. He had paid for a year but he didn’t mind “loosing” that money because in any case he had already paid it and new that the people in the gym had already spend it in some stupid machine. So he decided to only exercise in the weekends and on the park and maybe doing something he would enjoy, for a change. He played football with friends sometimes, or with a Frisbee or he could even buy a dog and play with him. The possibilities were endless.

 Yes, he wasn’t ripped like those nutbags from the gym but he started feeling better once he decided to relax about the whole thing and when he decided to get massages and eat better. All of those decisions made him happier than going to an enclosed space to run like a lunatic. Now he enjoyed his life and, even without the killer body, he felt better and that’s all he ever wanted. He had always been happy with who he was and had been depressed the whole time being in the gym. With all the pictures and the trainers and the brainwashing, it was hard not get out of there thinking “I have to be like all of this people”.

 He sometimes saw some of them in the park or in the street and they always gave him this look of superiority. But the look wasn’t only at him but at the world around them. For some stupid reason, all of this toolbags that had once decided to go crazy in the exercise, decided they were better than the rest of us and the worst thing was that all the media and the society at large believed that to be true. We have been taken by the balls by a small group of people and now the prototypes of beauty are radically different than what they were a hundred years ago and even more than what they were on the Renaissance or before.

 But people can stand up to that and just move along, living their lives as they may and not thinking every single second about how they look. He laughed alone when recalling some of the conversations he had overheard in the gym while in the machines or in the locker room. It has to be left clear that he didn’t thought they were all stupid but some of them were such idiots, it was a very difficult thing to ignore. They talked about sex in a way it was simply funny to hear about it, as if it was an exhibition of the caliber of a two peacocks showing their feathers to the one female, who also happened to be ripped like them.

 It hadn’t been his thing but he new that some people liked it and he was fine with it. Even some of his friends told him he should have at list used his membership the whole year, at least once a week. But he told them he simply couldn’t stand going there anymore. Seeing the faces of people that claimed they had fun exercising but were there every day stressed out because they didn’t lose as much weight as they had planned or because they wouldn’t meet theirs trainer’s demands. It was a disaster.


 He finally decided to buy that dog and it was the best decision he ever had. Not only he had tons of exercise running after his furry acquisition, the dog also became his best and most loyal friend. And that was something exercising like a lunatic couldn’t offer. It couldn’t give you real feelings, only shallow ones that surfaced because you can’t even think as you kill yourself on those damned machines.

martes, 30 de septiembre de 2014

Breath In, Breath Out

Brenda had been going to the doctor for a year now. She had discovered she suffered anxiety and depression and they told her that she should be medicated and doing special exercises to be calm.

She went to yoga class, two hours every day. There, she tried hard to do the exercises correctly but the truth was that Brenda had never really exercised in her life, at least if you don't count walking the city looking for a job as a sport.

She had been jobless for a year and her health problems, or should we say mental issues, were to blame. Brenda had a crisis one day, punching herself, yelling, screaming and attempting to jump from a balcony. So she was fired.

Her parents, already disappointed that their daughter had not found a suitable husband, found her problems to be the last drop in their glasses. So they just sent her money and try to help her that way.

Besides yoga class, she had to attend a psychiatrist. This, she hated. The woman would only sit there and let her talk for a whole hour, an expensive hour. Brenda would have dropped out if her doctor wasn't like a falcon, watching her every move.

Sometimes, she would only tell the psychiatrist what she had dreamt. She found out that an hour could pass fairly faster if the woman had to decipher dreams, all of which had apparently the same theme: her suicidal thoughts.

Brenda had only thought of that option at that time. She had been cheated on, she was miserable at her job and meeting her friends proved to be a difficult task.

She had only three females friends from school. They would reunite at least once a month to chat about the new and exciting things they were going through. That was precisely what Brenda hated: as she was not banging anyone and her job as assistant archivist was not precisely movie material, she would always spend those meetings in silence or fake smiling and laughing at the precise moments.

It was not that Brenda had not had her share of fun. She had indeed: sleeping with men and going on interesting vacations. But they were anecdotes that one could only repeat once or twice, before they became annoying to others and hurtful to herself.

The psychiatrist once asked about sex. "What about it?", Brenda replied. She hadn't done it in a year and a half and the last time the man she had done it with had cheated. She had enjoyed, during college, the crazy sex nights. It didn't happen often but she had her fun. But when she liked someone for real, Brenda was always honest. But honesty was not a quality most men found appealing, or so it appeared.

Love was this mystical being for her, like a unicorn. Very few people actually see it and there's the strong possibility one would never see it in this lifetime.

Religion? Another fun question. Of course she wasn't religious. She just couldn't. Temples, of all denominations,  made her nervous. It was this overwhelming aura that felt too much to carry on your own and the words were simply not helpful.

After her breakdown, Brenda hid herself in books. Adventure and science fiction, as they were her favorites. They told stories of worlds that didn't existed, that could not exist. And she liked that very much.

Brenda lived alone, only with a dog named Luna who was her only real friend and companion. Luna had licked her wounds of self hatred and would always sleep beside Brenda as she read a book. The dog, ironically, was a gift of a college flirt that she had never had anything with, besides smiling and having small silly talks.

What she liked best was that moment after you put your book down, pull the covers up and wonder about the world in the darkness of your room. She would imagine a life that would make her happy: writing her own stories and becoming famous, sharing her thoughts with people, having a beautiful house with Luna and a special male friend.
He would take her hand often, kiss her in the most unexpected moments and comfort her when she would fall into the pit of her mind.

Brenda would often go to sleep just like that. And then, the next day, she would realize the world is not made of fulfilled wishes but of an almost endless effort to be a bit more happy.