Both Jen and I signed up for a gym, since now that I’m a full-time employee with a degree of sustainable income. This development makes me happy, because I have always enjoyed going to the gym when I used to go, and over the span of the last four years of not having a gym to go to, I have grown unsatisfied with the degradation of my physical conditioning. Needless to say, I look forward to the anticipation of improved physical conditioning, the revitalization of muscles that I’ve felt have shrunk a little bit, and the day I realize that pants feel looser around the waist.
As of now, I’ve gone twice, and personally I feel great. It felt good to be in a gym where I can get back to my old routine of running on a treadmill as well as mixing up a combination of free and machine weights. I don’t feel tremendously sore like the first time ever at the gym, which means I’m not in too terribly bad shape, which I suppose is a good thing. I look forward to ironing out a routine and adhering to it in coming weeks and months.
But man, I have to say, the meatheads. Yeah, I know, no gym is without them, but this particular one is, well, wow. I sort of knew it would be like this, considering it’s a gym right in the middle of Atlanta, but I’m still a little astonished, having seen it for myself in person now. It’s amazing just how much posing and fake working out goes on in this place; it’s equally parts amusing, entertaining, creepy and sad.
My old-old gym was kind of out in the suburbs, and I had a little bit of flexibility in my work schedule, to where I could get in, workout, and leave without much overlap of when the after-work meatheads showed up. My old gym was a private gym, on-site to where I was working, so sure, there were a handful of genuine meatheads, but since it was a private gym, and a small one at that, they were fairly negligible, if not avoidable outright.
But this gym, so many meatheads. And the schedule in which I’ve been working out, it’s like prime meathead time. So many ripped gay dudes on steroids who walk around on ten minute breaks in between doing anything, so that everyone can see just how jacked their arms are. You know it’s bad when there’s a disclaimer in the men’s locker room about the detrimental effects of taking too many steroids. Not just any steroids, but too many. Then there are the hardcore failed black professional athletes that scream loudly and slam weights down on their final reps before taking their own ten minute breaks.
But my favorites would have to be the creepy 50-year old meatheads, who sure, are in very muscular shapes, but you know they’re at the gym for reasons other than to get their reps in. There’s one who goes around with a gigantic beer gut who apparently has no idea how to read what machines are for, and bogarts the standing calf raise machine for some bastardized overhead shoulder presses that don’t even allow him to get any degree of adequate extension. Oh, and he takes 10 minute breaks in between everything too, but camps the machines so that nobody else can work in between, while he ogles all the female members in the club. And then there’s Apollo Creed, who literally looks like he could be Carl Weathers back from the Rocky movies, who is sure, in great shape still, but dresses like he came out of the workout montage of Rocky III, and has an unsavory habit of slamming down weights before taking ten minute breaks in between lifts.
Meatheads at the gym are nothing out of the ordinary, but you’ll have to excuse my amusement by them these days. It’s been such a long time since I’ve had any regular repetition at any gym that I can’t help but be fascinated by their amusing and predictable behavior. And being in such a central location for meatheads at a prime time for meatheads, I have a feeling I’ll be accumulating lots of behavioral study during my tenure at this gym. I enjoy watching people, and considering the club’s cable television is really only like 15 channels which 12 of them are news, two are NFL circle-jerking, and the last one being reruns of The Office, I’m sure meathead central will offer up more potential for amusement in the long haul.
