The Argonauts Train on Treadmills
A quick sketch of a college gym // In my headphones: Junior M.A.F.I.A.—Get Money (1995)
The gym is a tumble-down place, filled with gawkers and mirrors and students and retirees. At five past five in the evening, it seemed the entire academic community filed into the center of the windowed warehouse. All of the cardio machines were occupied. Students ran on their hamster wheels until they were weak in the knees, or until the handsome man on the treadmill next door to theirs got off to leave. There were nineteen treadmills and sixteen other cardio machines: ellipticals, stair masters, and stationary bikes. The stair masters towered over the other machines, bringing up the rear (literally). These siege towers were followed by a barrier of jogging ground troops. The troops were led by the Peloton cavalry. On either flank of the central army were people operating heavy lifting machinery, and behind them, along the same column, trained acrobats and wounded soldiers in recovery.
In the air cavalry above, boys rowed in a play-pretend Argo. Their golden fleece lay in the harvest they would reap with the muscles they built rowing. The lifters in their two-by-fours stayed tight within their preordained rectangles, never venturing outside them lest they be disqualified for distractions. They hefted barbells above their heads and then put them down. They raised them again and then lowered them once more. Once the lifters finished lifting, they looked at their competitors on the adjacent mats, triumphant in the way cavemen were when they lifted a boulder and threw it away.
People in the back of the gym spread out their mats and got down on their backs. From this position (the first of many), they pressed their hips into the air with even, repetitive motions, or they’d flip onto their stomachs and hike their backsides in the air in the name of Downward Dog. For the first-time gym-goer, certain erotic undertones of particular athletic endeavors are clear.
Sometimes, people are so grateful to themselves for having made it to the gym in the first place that they spend the entire hour or so they’ve designated for fitness walking between various capability machines and flaunting their athletic intentions.
Today, after I walked up an interminably staircased hill and ran in mobile figure eights, I lay on a yoga mat. I lifted my right leg twenty times, and then I lifted my left leg twenty times. I then pondered what would happen if the entire floor of the gym started moving and conveyed everybody running on it off the edge of some giant treadmill and into empty space. I figured they would probably keep jogging once they realized they were exercising mid-air and that their machine had fallen out from under them.
And now for some of my favorite gym quotes, courtesy of the internet: For the fiesta-loving few, “Cardio? I thought you said margarito!” Or for the woman accustomed to living in a city, “Run like there’s a hot guy in front of you and a creepy one behind you!” There’s also always a line for the man who needs to connect with his children: “I don’t sweat. I sparkle.” Or, for the college student who’s avoiding her girlfriends, “Oh I’m sorry I can’t make it tonight. I have a date with Gym and it’s gonna be hot and steamy and I probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow!” For my sister, “I workout to burn off the crazy.” And finally, the classic: “I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when I’m done.” Personally, I prefer the reverse: “I don’t stop when I’m done. I stop when I’m tired.”
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📍The evergreen college gymnasium
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