The first gym that I ever went to was at the JCC in Brighton, my town just outside of Rochester, NY. I used to go swimming with my father. It was the same JCC where my mother played Joanne in a production of Company. So it is forever linked in my mind with the smell of chlorine and my mother singing, “I’ve done it three or four times.”
The next gym I went to was the YMCA in downtown Rochester, which was the biggest Y in the country in its day. It was a brutalist building next to the Eastman school of Music and it was pretty damn big. There was a pool, dual basketball courts, a track, and several racket ball courts. It had resources that far exceeded our fitness needs.
Since moving to New York, I’ve had gym memberships at chain gyms and I’ve rarely gone. They have amounted to what comedian Christian Finnegan called in one of my favorite bits of his, “a monthly fat tax.”
My first New York gym was the New York Sports Club which proved once again that just because something is well branded, it doesn’t make it any good. I remember once asking one of the trainers sitting behind the desk about some exercises. He looked up from his magazine, scoffed, and said, “I don’t know, get a book.” It was really special.
The NYSC was also my introduction to the free intro training session. When you join a gym, you often get a free intro training session. The first time I thought it was just a nice perk. But really it’s a gimmick for a trainer to sell you on their services.
And it’s not free, it costs you your time. And only something as useless as the free intro training session can remind you that you are actually spending some of your life’s valuable time.
The trainer had me do an exercise where I stepped up on a workout bench and did some curls with ten pound weights. I did one or two and she said, “good.” Then she had me jump a few feet, then she said, “good.” All the exercises were similarly strange and without repetition, which I thought was the point of exercise.
When I worked for Comedy Central, there was a deal on memberships to Crunch. So, I had that for a while. It was nicer and friendlier than NYSC but I stopped using it and basically kept it for a few too many years simply because I had been grandfathered in to an inexpensive monthly rate.
Now I have a Blink membership, which I like because it’s cheap. It’s about twenty-five bucks for any Blink in the city. So, my fat taxes have gone way down. I have to bring my own towel but so it goes.
I have no idea how Blink has moved in with all of these new gyms around the city. Whenever I see a chain blow up like that, I always wait it out. It could be like Chipotle – a new fixture in the New York landscape – or it could be like Krispy Kreme – an unsustainable corporate expansion.
When I first joined, I took the free intro training session. The trainer had me do some push-ups to assess my fitness level. I thought, okay, maybe this one will be worth it. Then he asked me how interested I was in training. I said I wasn’t sure. That’s when he decided to run out the clock. “Alright, let’s try some curls.” He gave me ten pound weights and had me do some curls. “Slow down,” he said. “You don’t want to get injured.” Ten pounds is not that heavy to curl. “Okay, let’s rest.” Again, ten pounds is not that heavy. He said he would email to follow up to see if I wanted to train with him. I said the same. We never contacted each other, it was like a bad first date.
I could do exercises in my apartment and I could just run outside. In practical terms, it basically amounts to a treadmill timeshare with crappy pop music and too many people. I guess I need it hanging over my head, like some sort of self-flagellation where I eventually force myself to go exercise. But in the meantime, I just keep with the mantra that most of us who have gym memberships in the city use, “Man, I haven’t been to the gym in a while.”
