THEORY OF GYM RELATIVITY
My trainer tells me I've been doing it all wrong. I'm losing my mind-muscle connection, he yells. He comes with all sorts of accolades so I'm supposed to be listening to his dissertation on physiology. He explains the muscle fibers of intelligent people are smoother than the not-so-smart and he says my muscle fibers are extremely smooth, like butter. I think it's a lie to get me to pay attention and its working because I want to be smart. "Look in the mirror and focus on the muscle and flex." It feels so egotistical and contrived. Check me out, flexin' my guns. All this narcissism makes me want to throw up. He's trained the LA Kings and Denver Broncos so there's hope I'll be a linebacker or hockey player one day. Shit, how do I tell him I can't even ice skate.
We're mice in a giant maze in this gym. I look around at all these silly contraptions and gadgets. So many people just wasting time. Everyone making up artificial things to do so that they're bodies don't go sedentary. Take these huge ropes, jump on this box...no a bigger box, here's a giant heavy ball, take this bar and pull it up like this, now get on this hamster wheel and go nowhere for 6 miles. If only they knew the luxury. Everywhere I travel around the world it seems like people are lean and ripped. Shredded. Not out of choice but necessity from a combination of hard labor and lack of food. The Developing World is plagued with deficiencies while the First World is brimming with excess and gluttony.
We're all in this gym because we're bitches and whiners. We're not enough of who we want to be. It will never be enough. Everyone in here wants to be something else. We want to be thinner. We want more muscle mass. We want to build and tone. We want a lower body fat percentage. Hours go by. Countless repetitions are done. I just did 155 lbs of 5 sets and 15 reps of something I'll never remember. What the hell does it all mean? It feels like the physics I haven't used since college. And am I really ever going to lift 60 lbs above my head in this fashion, with just one leg in the air while balancing on a bosu ball? Maybe...if I have to outrun a tiger and my only escape will be a floating beach ball in a pond which I'll have to carefully perch myself atop with the one good leg that the tiger didn't chew off, all the while carrying a 60 lbs baby gazelle above my head that I need for food later. Everything is relative and anything is possible.
I think about all the families I've passed on my morning run in foreign lands. They're pulling rickshaws and pushing heavy carts and I distract them with my bright annoying shoes. Nike screams look at me. I run for luxury. What an asshole! Every time I get on a Stairmaster, I think of the families I've seen carrying heavy bushels of food on their heads through treacherous steep mountainscapes. And here I am, just struggling on these pretend stairs to get the look of emaciated hard labor. I feel like Sisyphus...rolling the boulder uphill every day for eternity. I'm trying my damnedest to build a sweat but the fan is blowing on me and I'm bitching again. It's too cold. I can't perspire. I'll deal with it while I watch this television in front of me. Good god, there's a television in front of me; a carrot dangling from a string and I'm just a rabbit. But it's not very enticing if the carrot is Fox News. Now I have to pause from the sweat I can't work up to get a gym employee to turn the channel because watching Fox News on a Stairmaster elongates the passage of time. My 30 mins on stairs will feel like 6 hours. Special Relativity. Amazing, I get to use relativity theory after all.
I look at all these people wandering aimlessly while proselytizing on to the next new thing. It should be noted that anyone working out with Beats headphone is immediately disqualified from the intelligentsia. Beats cans to the gym are what leg warmers were to 1982. This bewildered herd persuaded to look silly with ill-fitting earmuffs, jumping on the bandwagon of propaganda from their favorite athletes in slow motion put to the sound of a heavy kick drum in some random commercial. At least when I wore leg warmers, I was 7. I'm going to deduce that people who wear Beats cans in the gym have really rough, coarse muscle fibers.
All hope is not lost. I always finish a workout with 15 minutes in the steam room. We've concocted a room to emulate what I feel when I'm entering the edge of the jungle. That stifling air that's like breathing pea soup while sweat drips from every pore in my body. In the jungle we say "it's hot today" or as I like to refer to it... “103 degrees with 91% humidity." This manufactured room was built as a replica of something that occurs naturally and it's my favorite time in here. It feels like my other home in the Philippines. That 120 minute stretch of time where every muscle in my body is screaming for help as I'm carrying a 40 lbs sack of provisions through the jungle and up to my uncle's mountaintop as I carefully try not to swat the bee whose 5 ft. tall hive will devour me if I piss him off. It's where I fear disrupting the macaques in the treetops and I'm hoping that cobra I once ran into is busy doing something else elsewhere. It reminds me of the birds of paradise whose song echoes through the jungle near dusk. It reminds me that my uncle is probably hungry. It reminds me of purpose.
This gym is so much of everything I diametrically oppose ethically...vanity, superficiality, self-admiration, ego and yet I come nearly every day like clockwork, alongside Sisyphus and Narcissus and much like the sheepdog who relieves Wile E. Coyote from his shift. It just comes with the territory. But I do it because I have the fortune and misfortune of being born on the part of the globe that doesn't require me to hunt and gather. This is how I lead my daily fight against superabundance and an insatiable sweet tooth. Unfortunately, it also means I must endure the vanity and conceit of Los Angeles gym life. It is based on the fear of becoming the American standard of type II diabetes heart disease. While I struggle for the look of poverty, I never forget that my Third World counterparts are dreaming of a hamburger and wishing they were fat. All things are relative.