Yesterday, I put down a foot. Specifically, a foot in a brand-new, still white, Saucony cross training sneaker. We were going to the
gym. “We” being me and Paul, of course. Now that we’re living together, we can go to the gym together!
“Won’t that be fun?” I chirped.
Paul didn’t say anything to that, just looked at me from under his eyebrows. Which had lowered slightly. But he went. “It isn’t that I don’t like exercise,” he said, “I just hate dealing with gym people.”
We went downtown, to the Golds’ at the 7th & Fig complex. Which was ridiculous in itself. It took twenty minutes to:
– find the parking lot entrance
– get through the mall
– get into the gym
Finally, we were in front of a gym employee. I explained the situation. I needed to transfer my Venice membership, and my
boyfriend needed a membership of his own. We were told that we could go work out while Venice faxed my paperwork.
Golds Downtown Los Angeles is the diametric opposite of Gold’s Muscle Beach. It’s in an uppity mall complex instead of in a converted warehouse. It’s full of the mirrors and faux-cherry trim that you’d expect in a luxury hotel gym, something decorated to match the lobby, instead of being in what’s basically a giant garage. It’s deep inside the shopping center, instead of having one wall open to the Venice ocean breeze. There’s a pool and a boxing ring, and the change rooms don’t look like they were cut/pasted out of a high school. But they still have the same basic equipment, so I spent some quality time on an ellipitical trainer, while Paul attempted to recapture his track and field abilities on a treadmill.
Forty-five minutes (and a couple chunks of Clerks II on my video MP3 player later), we returned to the desk and asked if my paperwork had come through. Sure enough, the guy told me he couldn’t give me the same rate I was paying in Venice. I’d been getting a corporate discount there for three years, after all, through DDB, and now, well, I wasn’t. But he did hook both of us up with discounts, in exchange for paying both memberships in full, so it didn’t work out to much more than I paid in Venice anyways. AND he didn’t try to hard-sell me on a membership. We were happy. No typical gym-people dealing had to take place.
Now, we just have to get to the gym. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions – I find them too easy to break by February. But getting
back into my pre-boyfriend shape is a big deal to me. I haven’t gained weight, but I haven’t lost it, either, and a lot of my
bike-related muscle has gone to fat that can’t be crammed into jeans anymore. And without the bike-related muscle, I can’t keep up with
the hardcore mass rides. This is my shame, that I, Jillian, who was perfectly capable of biking from Venice to Glendale and back over the course of a night, can no longer even bike up a major hill without gasping, or bike ten miles without getting tired.
So I’ll call it a move resolution instead, to get my ass back into the condition it needs to be in order to keep up with, say, the IAAL-MAF. It’s time to get back the midriff that can pull off a cropped PVC top, and time to get back the ass and thighs of a girl who rocks a car-lite lifestyle. Mix one part bike with two parts gym and those body parts may emerge from under the layer of flesh that accumulated when I was trapped in inertia. I will practice biking to the Observatory on weekends. I will do crunches on the ball while watching TIVO. Those sort of phrases need to be actions, not good intentions. There’s a perfectly good PVC hobble skirt in my closet that I can’t wear because it’s too tight. I’ll have to start looking at it every time I forget to move.
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