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.
