Today’s post will be a series of thoughts, musings, and snippets of stories all loosely connected by a place very near and dear to my heart – my gym.  When I say “my gym,” I am actually referring to the Chicago Athletic Clubs, of which there are eight, two of which I frequent regularly enough to refer to them as “mine.” Those two are the Bucktown Athletic Club (BAC) and the Westloop Athletic Club (lovingly referred to by its patrons as “the WAC”).  Fun Chicago fact – the WAC is housed in the building that, in the nineties, was home to Michael Jordan’s gym “Hoops,” and the BAC is in the former Marvin Envelope and Paper Company on North Avenue, just west of the Wicker Park’s “six corners.”  Unrelated, but for those of you who don’t know or could stand to be reminded, the name Chicago comes from a Native American word meaning “striped skunk” or “smelly onion.”  You’re welcome.

Ok. Enough Chicago history, and on to the subject at hand.  What do the gym and talking to strangers have in common?  Incidentally, a whole lot.  First of all, I spend a significant number of hours at the gym every week.  Between seeing my trainer, taking classes, warming up, cooling down, stretching, and occasionally attempting to kick my own ass – I spend anywhere from four to nine hours a week between the two locations.  I love the gym.  I love the friendly people at the check-in desks, the mass quantity of lockers with fancy digital locks, the obsessively clean bathrooms, and the seemingly infinite supply of fresh white towels.  I love the classes and the instructors, the cardio machines I never step foot on, and the huge expanses of green turf littered with every manner of torture – kettle bells and TRX bands, Bosu balls and weighted sleds, ViPR tubes, dumbbells, sandbags, and resistance bands.  Want to sweat?  There are a thousand ways to do it, and people who will show you how.  Mostly, though, I love how I feel at the gym.  I love working so hard I feel woozy, walking out of workouts on wobbly legs.  I feel strong, capable, and confident at the gym.  One might think that would be the perfect recipe for talking to strangers, right? Not so fast.

To be clear, there is no shortage of strangers at the gym.  There is not a place on earth I have ever seen a greater concentration of attractive men than on the weight floor between the hours of 5 and 6:30 pm.  Of course, not all of them are available, but statistically speaking, some of them must be, and they are nearly universally nice to look at (I am fully aware of how shallow that sounds).  More important than their relative attractiveness, these men and I share the common interest of sweating our behinds off in the company of strangers.  Unfortunately, all my skills for being approachable or approaching others go out the window at the gym.  I find it impossible to look pleasant and inviting when I’m rolling out a stubborn knot in my calf, swinging fifty pounds of cast iron, or shakily attempting assisted pull-ups.

Perhaps more importantly, though, almost no one talks at the gym.  I’ve watched an instructor enter a studio full of people, offer an endorphin-enhanced “good morning!” and zero people answer. Except for me. Because I talk to strangers.  Sure, people talk to their friends or significant others they came with, athletes talk to their trainers, and the trainers talk to one another, but strangers do not exchange words.  Despite this, I have a few anecdotal stories to share that relate in some way to my attempts to connect at the gym.

First, there was the man working out next to me who almost fell into me while doing lunges on a mat that slid too easily on the turf.  After he made eye contact and sheepishly apologized, I kept the conversation going because he was cute and he was talking to me.  The conversation was scintillating.  It involved me saying “no problem,” before informing him that the turf area on the first floor had mats that “weren’t so slippery.”  A few days later, I was walking to grab some weights off a rack, and a man in my peripheral vision started speaking audibly, although I couldn’t make out the words.  I turned and said “sorry?” to ascertain what he could possibly have wanted to share with me.  To my dismay, he finished talking into his Bluetooth before turning to me with a smarmy smile and drawled “well hi there.” He wasn’t bad looking, just unctuous, and I immediately regretted acknowledging him.  For the next twenty minutes, he flashed me the same slimy grin each time I had the misfortune of meeting his gaze. You know, the kind of smile that makes you shiver and vaguely consider a second shower.  He was definitely not a stranger I particularly wanted to talk to.

My final story for today actually has nothing to do with my gym, but I’m confident you’ll follow the thread.  About a week and a half ago, a friend and I took a break from perusing the Wells Street Art Festival to have dinner at a restaurant/bar in Old Town.  I went downstairs to powder my nose, and as I exited the restroom I happened upon two men posturing in front of a floor length mirror in the foyer just outside.  Obviously, I had to talk to them.  When I asked what they were doing, they said they were just about to take off their shirts to compare their muscles in the mirror.  Maybe (and perhaps most likely) it was the Moscow Mule I had just consumed, but I thought there was something oddly charming about them, so when one of them asked me for my phone number I gave it to him.  I didn’t even get his name, but he did send me a couple mostly incoherent text messages later in the evening.

I didn’t give him another thought until the next evening when I received a text that said “It was nice meeting u last night.  U have a beautiful smile.”  Ok, so I took issue with his refusal to type out a full pronoun, but I thought I had nothing to lose by responding to him.  This is my summer of yes, no?  I wrote him back, and the conversation was fairly normal for a while, and he seemed embarrassed that we had met under such unusual circumstances.  Our conversation did, however, revolve tightly around his passion for the gym and his desire to “outdo” his workout buddy.  I shared that I also workout several days a week, and enjoy keeping fit. Then he sent me a shirtless gym selfie, with his head cut out of the picture.  When I didn’t respond, he thought the best course of action would be to ask me for a gym selfie – so he could judge my fitness for competition.  When I didn’t respond to that text, he sent me two more requests for selfies on subsequent days.  I generally try to avoid blatantly ignoring a person and haven’t pulled a fade-out in years, but I was truly rendered speechless by this man.  Similar to my reaction to the Bluetooth chatter at my gym, I decided it was best to simply stop talking to this particular stranger.

I’m not giving up on the gym as a place to meet people, as I certainly spend enough time there. I’ve also learned that not everyone at the gym is someone I’d like to meet. At the very least, I know that when I’m working out, I’m sharing a space with committed, like-minded individuals and no harm can come from eye contact and a smile and – if I’m feeling particularly brave – a hello or a brief conversation about the slippery nature of gym mats on turf. 

x

Kath