I almost didn't lift weights yesterday. I had just spent 45 minutes on an elliptical--my first time since surgery--and was feeling pretty triumphant and already a little sore in the legs. Why not just come back tomorrow and lift with gf when she's in town? But I was there, and it wasn't crowded and my ipod still had a strong charge, since I had spent the whole time on the elliptical talking to one of my favorite colleagues/gym buddies who hadn't been around all summer. So I did my full weight routine and even threw in some extra shoulder exercises and went home feeling happy and tired.
I love working out at my gym. I love how it looks like a loft, with exposed brick walls and huge vaulting ceilings and tons of windows. I love that I know, or at least recognize, many of the people who work out there, because we've all been going there for years. I love how gay the gym is, and not in a cliquish, Chelsea kind of way: everyone is nice to everyone there. There's not pressure to be thin or pretty or hip. Purists, who remember the neighborhood before the gym arrived would scoff at this, but I think it's made the neighborhood a friendlier, more accessible place, an impossibly cheerful queer community. In a city where you mostly have to spend money to get community, usually at gay bars, this place offered an inclusive, social, healthy, relatively cheap alternative. Not that there aren't plenty of gay bars nearby where you can go for a post-workout drink, or five.
I have belonged to many gyms in my adult life, more than I can probably even remember, since I've moved around a lot and joined a gym every place I've lived. I've never felt so attached to a gym, felt such a sense of belonging and happiness to be there. Because, really, you're supposed to spend most of your time as a gym member feeling guilty about
not going, right?
Today the gym was closed. Forever. A rambling note on the door, from the owner, claimed he had to close the gym (along with his two other locations) because of employee theft, which nobody believes. GF and I walked by on our way home from a bar tonight, where everyone had been talking about the sudden closing, and there were news vans lining the street and swarms of people milling about, reading the sign, and swapping stories about their run-ins with the owner, who has a reputation as kind of a, let's say, troubled soul. There was lots of talk of how he lost the gym up his nose.
GF and I are pretty bummed. We can join another gym--employees from rival gyms spent the day passing out fliers with offers of waived memberships for Gone Gym's members--but we don't
want to. We realized, talking with people on the street tonight, how much we'd built our lives around the gym, and how it tied us to the neighborhood. You're supposed to flake on the gym; it's not supposed to flake on you. I'm glad I lifted yesterday.
