On the Gym Break

I’ve never been a gym rat. At my best, I was more of a gym possum or like some kind of gym echidna. I was there sometimes and if you looked at me too much I’d hiss and run away. Nevertheless, I went! I wasn’t super-efficient, I didn’t push myself to the limits of what a human can achieve, I wasn’t even that consistent, but I’d go. I’d do my dumb little runs on the treadmills and I’d lift my dumb little weights and then I’d go home and feel like I was entitled to eat an entire bag of Hot Cheetos or a tub of ice cream…and thus, I preserved my own beautiful piece of homeostasis.

All of the above was true from the time I graduated college and no longer had a world-class workout facility at my fingertips (with my membership already paid for by insanely overpriced tuition) until March of 2020 when the oft-mentioned Pandemic took all the gyms and dunked them directly in the trashcan. Some parts of having my normal workouts disrupted were pretty alright. Before then, I never went for outdoor runs which became a saving grace of mine during the pandemic. But, the other parts of it were pretty shitty like losing any and all access to weights and machines and having one of my more dependable physical outlets taken away.

I know a lot of people took this opportunity to build their home gyms into perfectly peaceful palaces of pump…but I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that barely had room for two yoga mats carefully arranged on the floor, so a Peloton and a squat rack were juuuust out of the realm of possibilities for me. So, I kept running through the neighborhood, I started buying a few dumbbells, and I invested in an Apple Fitness + membership.

That program was almost exactly what I needed. It had tons of workouts you could do at home with nothing but body weight, a mat, and a set of dumbbells or two… but there was something missing. It just wasn’t the same working out in the living room, there wasn’t enough time to psych myself up when all I had to do was walk into the other room. I realized how much I needed a short drive or a walk to a gym to get myself into the headspace to sit around on my phone for 45 minutes, occasionally picking up a weight, before going home.

Well, I finally did it. After scouring the internet for gyms around my neighborhood and picking myself up off the floor after seeing the staggering price of most of our local workout spots (seriously who is paying $300 PER MONTH to work out? Unless the gym works out for me it can’t possibly be worth that) I finally found a place with old equipment, broken lights, and the back-yard-cinderblocks-and-cement-bucket-aesthetic I was looking for. After my first day back in a real gym in almost 4 years, I can confidently say: I’m still incredibly intimidated by the big scary guys and gals who could pick me up like a baby and crush me like a peanut…but I’m working on it!

Did the pandemic change how you work out? Have you returned to your previous methods or are you still living your new normal?