What's My Motivation?

Sometimes going to the gym is torture. It is all you can do to make it through your workout, and you barely feel better for having gone. Other times, it is perfection. I don’t know what makes a perfect day for you, but for me, it’s the total experience. It isn’t just the work out or the motivation or achieving the optimal level of endorphins. It is more about getting your fitness on while being totally entertained, exercising with so many good distractions that the time flies by, that you don’t even realize you were working out.

Last Saturday was that day.

I went to spin class at an earlier time than I usually do, and I had an instructor that honestly is not my favorite. He has been teaching the early Saturday class for over ten years, and other than an occasional change in music, he hasn’t really mixed up that workout in over a decade. He speaks in a monotone voice for fifty-nine and a half of the sixty minutes of class, and only a handful of his words are clear enough to be understood. The rest of them are garbled like an airline pilot’s.

He likes to sprinkle his commentary with motivational things like “this is you” and “this is what you can do.” After hearing him say that for ten years, it’s more depressing than inspiring. I imagine him saying it in the form of a question, “this is you?” or “this is all you can do?” The rest of the time, I pretend he is making comments about our altitude or how long the flight will be or when it is safe to take off our seatbelts and move about the cabin freely. He takes a break in the narration every so often to exhale loudly into his microphone.

He also uses his words to paint a little picture to distract us from the fact that we are in a smelly dark dirty spin room. Normally his imagery revolves around climbing a mountain on a last leg of an intense bike race, where we try to fool the riders in the front to think we have lost our mojo until we barrel past them with a burst of energy no one expected from us.

Saturday, he took it old school. We were steam engines. We were shoveling coal, chugging along the tracks, and releasing hot clouds of sooty smoke into the air, until suddenly, we transformed back into racing, sprinting hard core cyclists. I was so confused. Am I the little train that could or Lance Armstrong? How relevant is a steam engine to today’s workout? Is it too soon to use train imagery following the latest Amtrak tragedy? I recall at one point thinking, wait a minute, I’m winning a bike race? What happened to my coal shoveling?

It was awesome.

During the cool down, he recapped whatever the fuck he talked about for the whole class, with our levels three, four, and five, our switchbacks, our hammering, our patting ourselves on the back, all while mopping the sweat from his face and his laminated workout cheat sheet he parks on his handlebars.

As fascinating and distracting as his teaching style is, it doesn’t even compare to some of the spin class regulars. There was the German man who sits near the door, the one who looks remarkably like Robin Williams.  I love when he is there. He wears a mock turtleneck shirt in that spandex wicking material which accentuates his aging man breasts and brings a gym bag that is more like an old-fashioned salesman sample case, square and bulky. He unloads three large water bottles and balances them on the water cage of his bike, because he takes his hydration very seriously for an hour class. Then he puts on a head covering made from the same material as his shirt, which I believe it is referred to as a “do-rag.” Halfway through class, he takes off his long sleeved mock turtleneck fitness shirt to reveal another mock turtleneck shirt made out of the same material, only with short sleeves. I never see that part coming.

About forty minutes into class, German Robin Williams takes off his do rag and swabs his balding skull with a hand towel provided by the gym. Then he holds the do rag in his fist and squeezes all of his sweat into one of those complimentary hand towels before putting it back on his head. It is a whole process, and he does it every time.

It was also awesome.

Who showed up next but the weird woman who loves exercising. She doesn’t just love to exercise, she LOVES to exercise. She came in halfway through spin class, hair long and flowing, big smile on her face. She saddled up on her bike, and after a brief warm up, which I think for her might be foreplay, she was ripe and ready to go. She began to make those whoop sounds. She closed her eyes and felt the music. She bounced on her bike. Chances are better than not that she was experiencing multiple orgasms. Some people might think she is extremely enthusiastic. They are wrong.

It isn’t just awesome, it is also an uncomfortable sight to see, and you don’t even need internet access or verification that you aren’t a minor.

After spinning with the airline pilot, the German sweater, and the spinner who gets off in public places, I cooled down by walking a few laps on the track. In the work out area was a man doing the most awkward squats ever. He squeezed his eyes and knees shut and sat back like he was going to fall in a toilet. I have no doubt he was at the very least holding in a fart, but based on his facial expression, he might have been holding in more or failed to do so. His form was terrible either way.

Next I walked past the man who wasn’t just balancing on an inflatable fitness ball, he was actually humping it. I have never seen anyone else violate one of those balls like that, but it seemed to be working for him.

Awesomeness.

As I completed my last lap, the creepy old guy who wears long camo pants, Birkenstocks, sunglasses, and a really unfortunate wig came in to “work out.” Usually his work out consists of walking around the gym, scouting out any prospects. Sometimes he parks himself on the abductor machine so he can scan the entire square footage while demonstrating his inner thigh flexibility. He apparently doesn’t let his seventy plus years stop him from using the gym as his own personal Tinder because he can’t use apps on his jitterbug phone.

In a word, awesome.

A perfect gym day like that may only come once in a lifetime, but the chance that it might happen again is what gets me there every day.