Back To The Clanging Of Weights, Or, Saturday Morning at 8:37am

I’ve started going to a gym again for the first time in 15 years. It’s crowded, prone to broken equipment, cheap, with really nice staff. I love it. And this is not a post to exhort you to do the same.

Backstory. I think I started using weight machines when I was in college. Sporadically. Then I joined a gym when I lived in New York, it was perhaps called the New York Athletic club but that might be my imagination running wild. Someone stole my step-grandfather’s old Rolex out of my locker there.

When I moved back to California it was a solid decade plus before I tried weights again. Sun Microsystems, my first full-time job after time off with young children, had a little gym on campus. They offered free bagels and doughnuts on Wednesday, so, win-win. After Sun I joined a gym in San Francisco near my dot.com; after Y2K I had a personal trainer for a while.

And then life kind of blew up. I got divorced, I swirled, I remarried, I learned that people you love can die, my tendons one-by-one kept forcing me to Lie Down, the world forced us all to Lie Down with COVID, you know the story.

I’ve never been able to run, so prone to muscle that my calf muscles give me shin splints. Swimming bores me. I am far too easily bored, true. But group exercise is perpetually interesting because of the other people. Man, I just love people. Yoga classes, low impact aerobics, and, yes, sitting on a machine whose fake leather has split open while I clank weights up and down with my quadriceps, watching people. Not to mention the exhilaration of muscle exhaustion.

All of which is solely to say, what feels right for you probably is. One of the fittest people in my family hates lifting weights and yoga, and only does Pilates because it’s good for her. But she’ll walk every day, and loves a good dance class. The other fit one walks 19,000 steps a day at, a pace close to running, with the same force of will that characterizes everything else he does.

Me, I think I’m good at two things in this life, rapid verbal processing, for better or worse, and lifting heavy things in the company of others. Metaphorically as well as physically, perhaps. This barebones gym, full of men punching each other’s tattooed shoulders, and young women who leave the machines on such a high weight I struggle to pull the pin out and change it, makes me feel like myself again. A certain take-life-in-my-teeth affect, if that makes sense.

It’s probably testosterone, right? Might be the last thing in this world that you want for yourself. But if you’re trying to keep moving, I do recommend diving into your long-lived nature as a way to find joy in exercise.

One final thought. The one thing that can be tricky about doing this at my age is that I never know if pain is good or bad. The part of my legs above my knees is sore: injury or a good soreness? Aging doesn’t come with a manual. On the other hand, neither do most adventures.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.

P.S. if you want to try resistance/weight training and recoil at the thought of a gym, a fantastic start can be made with just little dumbbells and some resistance bands. These links may result in commissions but also they take you to the Target website which is not too chaotic for  a Saturday morning. If you need non-latex bands you can go directly to Therabands, or, Walmart has them.