No Pain No Gain:
Northampton Athletic Center

t is 5:00 pm. A woman in her forties comes out of the Club, dressed in a yellow parka. She presses a button on her key chain and a Saab at the far end of the lot lights up and calls her name, ‘bleep-bleep’. I hit the gas and follow her; as she gets into her hatchback, I put on my blinker. The lot is full of spotless Audis and new SUV's. I'm driving a ten year old Volvo with rust spots. Rule #1: Fitness and health go hand in hand with economics. Sixty dollars a month is two dollars a day is a Whopper dinner. I watch people in suits and dresses shuffle into the Club with their ultra clean trainers and their downy fresh sweats under their arms.  4:30 until 6:30 is rush hour no matter where you are in town. Whether you are stuck on Rt.9, in line at Stop and Shop, or here, in the parking lot of Northampton Athletic Center, mustering up the last drops of energy after a long day in your sedentary life.

     I left my apartment at 4:45. I promised myself I’d walk this time. As soon as I was outside, I reached for my car keys. Rule #2: Complain about American apathy, then dive. Getting there is not the hard part-- getting home is.     

     At 5:05 the Saab pulls out and I pull in. As I go to take the space I am almost cut off by an Integra, entering from the other side. The minute the car pulls forward I honk my horn and wave my arms. I watch as the driver sighs, backs up and passes me. Rule #3: Under no circumstances should you steal a parking spot from someone at the gym. Doing so always results in serious social harm. Such actions not only invoke the hatred of the individual whom you have robbed of a 75 square foot piece of pavement, but render you an object of scorn for every staff member, class member, and sauna buddy with whom the injured inevitably shares the indignation of her great parking lot misfortune. At 5:10 I am in the door. 5:11, card swiped. 5:11:30, lock obtained, hellos all said. 5:12, welcome to the women’s locker room.

     Moving through a sea of naked bodies, I find it hard not to look. Everyone’s imperfections fold into each other and back into my own. No female body is without ripples, a fact all at once comforting and disturbing. Thank God none of us look like the cover girl on Elle. Why the fuck don’t any of us look like the cover girl on Elle? I move through the crowd of nude bottoms, careful not to touch them or rub up against them with the hem of my coat. Rule#4: If you look, don’t make it obvious. If you touch, apologize quietly and move on. I cram my bag into a locker adjacent to the punishing corner where, as I tie up my shoes, I watch three women step onto the scale, hunch around the numbers, push the markers back to zero, and stand before the mirror directly to their left. Rule #5: Numbers are numbers are numbers. We are all keeping track. If you look, don’t make it obvious.

     I pin my key to my pants and observe the particular smells. Sweaty palms, sweaty pits, clean towels, vanilla body cream, hair dryers and the ever-so-faint stench of a bowel movement somewhere in the distance. When the room is this full there are always at least two audible conversations. A woman to my right is talking to a woman by the sink about the new hot bar at Bread and Circus.

     “They have everything. Indian food, Chinese food, breakfast. I go there on my lunch break. They’ve got a great little café where you can go and sit down.”

     “I’m on the Atkins Diet.”

     “They have a wonderful beef and broccoli dish.”

     My mouth starts salivating over the thought of broccoli; my stomach does flips as it thinks of greasy red meat. Who in hell devised a diet based on pork rinds? I remember a video I once watched about a slaughterhouse. My head becomes consumed with images of cows and pigs bound and hung by their ankles, their insides cut out and their blood splattered on the walls. Dr. Atkins was an evil villain whose great idea was to kill off the entire planet in the name of size two. Whose body is designed to ingest unlimited amounts of animal fat? What ever happened to the apple a day? Rule#6: If you don’t want to be judged, then keep the locker room conversations down in volume and closer in range. If it is mostly quiet and you are the only one speaking, chances are everybody is listening to you.

     It’s 5:25. I leave the locker room and head to the small door adjacent to the two-tiered weight area. Inside the room are twenty stationary bicycles – they are arranged in a circle and bear the name Reebok. There are four empty bikes by the time I come in. The rest are occupied either by bodies, or by towels and water bottles which people have used to mark their space. Spinning classes are like college classrooms: Seating is not assigned and yet people not only sit in the same place every time, but become significantly attached to particular areas of the room. Rule#7: Never take the bike in the back center. It belongs to the nice British man. Never take the bike right beside the door. It belongs to Darlene. She is always late, but always there. Never take the bike in either rear corner – one goes to Betsy and the other goes to the man whose name I can’t remember but whose muscles are so great in size that they are impossible to forget. I take a bike with my back to the gym, the instructor to my left, and the parking lot before my eyes. I measure the seat so it reaches my hip and adjust the handlebars as high as they will go. I mount the bike and start to pedal lightly, feeling the blood rush into my knees and warm up my legs. The room is filled with small talk. I look at Mario who is three bikes away, clad in bright red spandex shorts and shirt so yellow and blue it looks like the primary colors have slimed him.

     “You really got my heart meter going there last week,” he says

     “Yeah, you got mine goin’ too,” I say.

     Last Wednesday, Mario and I were competitors when one of the instructors, Deb, paired us off and made us race. From the minute she said go we both began pedaling so hard that by the time the thirty seconds were up our lungs had begun to seize and my arteries felt as if they might explode. Mario is more in shape than me, but I am younger than him and so it was a battle of will. Mario is in his fifties. He eats, breaths and sleeps cardiovascular activity.  He has an overabundance of energy which drives him to incorporate cardiovascular activity into any part of the day he can. I imagine he shifts often in his sleep just so his blood won’t settle and his BPM won’t fall beneath 110. 

     “How’s school going?” he asks.

     “It’s going.” I say.

     We are all waiting for Lindy – the ultimate spinning instructor. She is so popular that the Monday 5:30 class is now followed by a Monday 6:45 class. Two sessions of this back to back is enough to break almost any normal individual. It was Lindy’s idea. People had begun to complain that her class was always full and so, instead of apologizing for her own popularity, she chose to accommodate.

     Lindy comes in with a smile. She acknowledges everyone in the room individually, checking for any newcomers as she changes into her cycling shoes, the ones with the bottoms which clip into the pedals. All I can imagine is falling over on a hill and not being able to unclip. She says hello to one of the regulars, a woman in her thirties who comes every week, but missed the last class.

     “We missed you last week.”

     “It was my birthday and so Peter and I and some friends went out to dinner. Believe me, I would rather have been here. I could’ve used it.”

     “Ohhh, stop. Did you have fun?” Laurie asks.

     “Yeah. Fun.”

     Lindy measures the seat so it reaches her hip. She adjusts the handlebars. Taking her auburn hair and collecting it at the base of her neck, she twists it around and pins it up with a big plastic claw. She squats, knees wide apart, in front of the large stereo system and puts in the CD she has brought.

     “How’s everyone doin’ today?” she asks casually.

     A handful of people in the room yell out, “Great!” Their enthusiasm is infectious and so I smile really big even though my day was just another day. Lindy looks at me and she winks. I wink back. She is 5’2”. She is my hero. As she mounts her bike, I notice how nothing on her frame jiggles or settles even slightly. Head to toe she is muscle. The only part of her body which moves without consent is her left earlobe when she puts on the headset, wraps the contraption around her face, and blows into the microphone for a sound check.

     This is what I know about Lindy : She designs military training programs; she is a mom; she is about to raise money for breast cancer by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, and she loves pop-tarts. Rule #8: If you want to be 1999 WNBF Worlds Lightweight Runner Up, 1997 6th Overall, Ms. International 3rd Lightweight, and 1994 winner of the Muscle Showdown and be able to climb the 19,340 foot Mt. Kilimanjaro, fuck the Wheaties and eat some Pop-Tarts.

     The music comes up loud. It’s techno. I recognize the song immediately as one of my favorite club tracks from 1999. As we begin the ride I try to exorcise the memories of piling into a bathroom stall, snorting Ketamine and eating Ectasy at the age of seventeen. "The song will be given new meaning," I think, pushing the tension down so that my quads start to burn and my palms begin to sweat. Nobody looks at each other as the ride begins. Everybody bows their heads and gets ready for the first seated climb.

     Lindy’s workouts are--- intense. Like every other 60-minute cycling class, the time is divided into parts. Warm up, light stretching, climbs, sprints, and recoveries. Lindy gets us to work extra hard by lying to us constantly. I have come to notice that 30 more seconds means 45 and that when she says, “This is the meat and bones of the workout,” it means it is only going to get harder.

     Her routine is usually about resistance as opposed to speed. Such heavy pedaling causes the body to sweat obscenely as it travels into fat burning mode and hangs out there for 40 minutes. The only way to deal with the heat of the room is to succumb. Feel your shirt as it sticks to your sternum, your hair as it dangles onto your neck releasing tiny drops of water down your back. I look up 30 minutes into the workout and notice that the mirror is entirely steamed. What used to be pretty normal faces are now puffy and red, dripping onto the floor beneath each bike at the rate of a leaky kitchen faucet. I am the only one not wearing shorts and I am regretting it.

     In the 45th minute, Lindy has us stand and crank up the tension as high as it will go while still allowing us to pedal. Suddenly her voice becomes ethereal, and my vision goes from normal to feeling like I just had my pupils dilated by an optometrist. “Holy Shit,” I think, as my body shifts from 150 pounds to thirty, the room melts away and I am somewhere very soft, very luscious, very much like my own heaven. “Lindy is a spiritual leader disguised as a body builder,” I think. She is the American athlete equivalent of a Peruvian shaman who feeds people Iowasca and guides them through visions in the Amazon. If you look up Beta Endorphins it says that exercise, sex, eating spicy food,and chocolate are the four most common ways to release such an intoxicating analgesic.  Chocolate and hot peppers satisfy me immensely, but only sex has ever produced a  euphoria comparable to this Lindy work out . Rule #9: Amazing lovers are hard to find and so people spin between five and seven days a week . Contraception may cost less than a membership, but…

     At the end of class everybody looks at each other and smiles, exhausted. We have all been through the same great thing--together.

     It’s Tuesday. I get to the gym at one o’clock. There are parking spots everywhere; three people with briefcases rush out the door, trying to make it back to work on time. I walk in and go straight, directly towards the Northampton Athletic Center Café.  ‘NAC Café – ENERGIZE AND EXERCISE – A UNIQUE MENU OF FRESH AND HEALTHY OPTIONS.’ I stand in front of the cold case and observe. Salads, wraps, meats, a big bowl of hard-boiled eggs. A plump woman in her late thirties is baking in the back. Her hair is graying. She has on purple sweatpants and an apron tied snug about her rounded middle and generous thighs. She steps out to greet me, a large industrial sized mixing bowl cradled in her right arm and a spatula full of cookie dough in her left. She greets me in a kind and lovely voice “Hi,” She tilts her head a little to the side as her lips stretch from ear to ear. She is the calmest person in the gym. Mother hen to a bunch of frantic chickens. Her name is Anne.

     I say hello and make sure it is a good time to talk. She offers me a small pile of raw cookie dough in a paper cup.

     “It’s just the best, isn’t it?” she says.

     I take the dough and use my fingers to pick out a big hunk of chocolate. “Mmm, hmm,” I say.

     “Want some cookie dough?” she asks a man who approaches the counter. I recognize him as one of the gym junkies, there every day, always doing free weights and the stair master.

     He takes a cup and thanks her. He orders a smoothie.

     “Salmonella, whatever,” she says.

     He and I both laugh. Raw cookie dough is worth the risk.

     After he walks away, Anne grabs a large sheet pan and sets it up on the counter. I take a stool opposite. There is no one in the café except for us. I watch as she scoops out the dough in large heaps and flattens it onto the wax paper with the palm of her hand.

      “This woman, ya know, she came today and was ordering food, and she kept commenting on how healthy and wonderful the food is. I thanked her for the compliment and she went on to say how she’s on the Atkins Diet and how all we need is a larger low-carb menu.”

     “Yeah, that’s the new ridiculous thing.” I say.

     She pauses with what she’s doing and looks at me. “Ya know, if people put that much energy into teenage pregnancy and AIDs and poverty instead of losing or gaining five pounds we might have a better world. I have a Korean friend; she says about us Americans, “Your whole mood is based on whether you’re fat or thin today. The world has bigger problems.”

     “Obsession in the wrong direction.” I say.

     “When the fat free craze hit I thought that was the most fabulous thing. I thought that was the answer. Now I just say, everything in moderation.”

     I stare into the tray of cookies. I want to eat all of them. I want to eat them, I want to eat the blueberry muffins I see on top of the counter, and I want to eat the whole entire bowl of tuna fish I see in the cold case.

     “Yeah, everything in moderation,” I say.

     “People’s obsessions with their own bodies are directly proportionate to their lack of knowledge about the world around them. If we all went to the Peace Corps and fed starving children, when we came back, we would be less concerned about things like the South Beach Diet. Narcissism.”

     “What do people buy here?” I ask.

     “People always go for protein shakes and protein candy bars over food.”

     I look to my right and read the boxes. TRI-O-PLEX and AVID SOURCE, “Energize, perform, indulge.” ODYSSEY, Triple layer protein bar, 30grams protein, 7grams sugar. LUNA, a healthy choice for women. CLIF,flavors like carrot cake with frosting and super chewy chocolate fudge brownie with nuts.

     “People get really freaky about food. Bars are safer. It’s some sort of weird absolution.”

     Rule #10: Snickers, plus processed soy protein, plus FDA approval and a picture of a person climbing a mountain has come to equal a profitable candy bar which absolves all sin. What better way to spend three dollars?

     I used to love LUNA bars.

     “There is a tremendous amount of guilt associated with food. Sometimes I buy a Coke at the convenient store next door and I feel like I have to hide it when I come in. No one at the gym wants to see you drinking Coke,” she says.

     I wonder if she has a six-pack behind the counter right now.

     “Ya know, when I worked at NYU Library three or four of the nutrition majors were anorexics. And that’s something you really can’t make fun of. I didn’t think a nutrition major would ever be anorexic.”

     “It’s an epidemic,” I say.

     “Food is associated with a tremendous amount of guilt.  Being stressed out and unhappy is worse for you than butter.”

     “What about men with eating disorders?” I ask.

     “They don’t talk about it. People with eating disorders are always talking about food. One trainer in here always has to announce every time she is going to eat. It’s like, eat already and stop telling everyone that's what you are doing. I knew this one guy who used to come here and he was the only guy I have met who would talk out loud about male eating disorders. He always said men eat for the same reasons women eat – loneliness, boredom, depression. He wrote a book about it and had a really hard time getting it published because it made men look soft, vulnerable, like women."

     “The word 'obsession' keeps turning over in my head,” I say.

     “Some people say it is obsession. Some say devotion. Some say discipline. I don’t really know if there is any difference.” She thinks for a moment. “Obsession is tied into self worth, devotion isn’t.”

     I leave the café at 2:02 and decide to work out for a couple of hours before I have to go over to school. I grab a magazine from the rack. It's dated seven months ago. Twenty-one ways to get those abs you’ve always dreamed of. The chick on the cover is in a bright orange bathing suit even though the issue came out in November.

     All the cardio machines are in rows in the very front of the gym. Stair masters, treadmills, elliptical trainers, bikes. Things that go up and down, side to side, forever forward. Machines that simulate going somewhere when you're really going nowhere. 

     I take one of the cross trainers. I rest my feet into the feet spots, my hands onto the hand spots, my water bottle into the water bottle spot. I am in between a woman in her 54th minute, and a girl whom I see everyday. She is grunting loudly as she pushes her feet, one at a time, behind her, as she moves her arms in sync.

     Rule#12: Always bring headphones unless you find great pleasure listening to the sound of exasperated grunting, accompanied by the week’s Top Forty hits. Nasty  exhalations backed by  Brittany Spears.

     I hit play on my Disc man and the button marked “MANUAL” on the panel in front of me. Little red lights begin to flash as if the machine is preparing to throw me my own small party. After ten seconds,the lights stop flashing and a prompt appears asking me to enter my weight, the length of time I wish to exercise, and the level at which I wish to begin. I recall my  time of greatest obsession: 750 cardiovascular calories was my minimum; 1,150 was always my goal.

     From where I am, I have full view of three TV’s. Each is playing something different. HGTV, Days of Our Lives, and one of those new, reality, plastic surgery shows.  After 30 minutes of watching a woman go from a size fourteen to a size eight in three weeks of knives and bandages, I dismount the cross trainer,feeling a little frustrated. The magazine sucked and I have noticed that a woman on the treadmill has burned 100 calories more than me in the same amount of time. I pick up a spray bottle filled with a yellow colored,anti-germ agent and spray down the handles of the machine I used. Rule#13: Even though we don’t know which is worse-- the sweat of others or cancer-causing cleaners, spray down your machine upon completion just to avoid dirty looks.

     Heading to the back end of the gym I decide to lift some weights. At this time in the afternoon, students from the high school are shuffling in in pairs. The weight lifting area is slowly filling up with adolescent boys. I pick up two ten-pounders and start with lateral raises. Two other females are lifting besides me and I notice the way in which we four females are lifting compared to the five men now out on the floor. All of us are lifting less weight. All of us are doing more repetitions. None of us appear on the verge of death.

     I look to the man next to me with his 75-pound weights. “You make me feel like a wussy,” I say to him with a laugh.

     He smiles, bends his elbow, scrunches his brow and lets out a deep throaty, "Ugh." The veins in his arm suddenly protrude just beneath his skin. I want to reach out and grab his arm. I want to punch it or bite it. I can’t decide which. He knows I am watching him and so I stop. Rule #14: Just as you do not want to feed into the anorexia of a sixteen year old girl, do not feed into the Adonis complex of a thirty year old man.

     I turn my head back towards the mirror. I see two boys in the reflection. The American Journal of Psychiatry says that the average age of onset of "muscle dysmorphia", an obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized by the unrealistic perception that one is too small or weak , is 19.4 years.

     I glance back at the man. His calves look like he has hiked the Grand Canyon every day since birth. All done by machines. Just like the women doing cardio, the man has been getting fit going nowhere.

     A sign above the weight rack reads, “Do not drop weights.” I place mine  carefully into their cradles. I have a meeting  22 minutes away;  if I don’t leave now I’ll be late. I rush into the locker room, shower and change, then grab a smoothie. No protein powder, Glutamine Fuel, Myoplex Lite, or Creatine powder for me. Just bananas and soymilk.

     I put my key into my car door at 4:23. A man in a BMW is waiting for me to leave. I pull out of the spot, out of the lot and take a right , past the Blockbuster and the McDonald’s, the Wendy’s and the Burger King. I light a cigarette and think about my great grandparents. They were farmers. They worked hard, long days; they had to schedule time just to sit and rest. They ate cake without guilt. When I finally get to where I'm going, the clock reads 4:46. I run into the bathroom before my 5:00 meeting and fix my hair into two buns on either side of my head.  I turn away from the mirror and go into the first stall.  I sit down and glance to my left. On the sanitary napkin box are scrawled bathroom words of wisdom. I have seen the same slogan in other bathrooms. “You are beautiful just the way you are.”