I’ve never liked going to the gym. The overpowering waft of sweat that hits you in the face when you walk in at peak hours, the loud, grunting noises the weight-lifting guys make, the disturbingly out-of proportion bodies some of these guys have (overmuscled upper torsos precariously balanced on two toothpicks for legs) or the fact that I always find myself on the fitness bike next to some guy who likes to headbang to his iPod, unwittingly spraying his droplets of sweats over me like a lawn sprinkler.
And also, I’m a lazyass.
Sure, I like sports and the outdoors. I’ve been white water rafting, wakeboarding, surfing and kayaking. I love skating, swimming and going for runs with my dog to see who starts panting first. But those are not conscious decisions to work out. It’s almost like I need to be tricked into exercise.
I fail to understand how someone can run on a treadmill (which I’ve always likened to a hamster running in a wheel) when you can run in a nice, green park with fresh air. I fail to understand why people go for spinning when they can cycle down the streets of KL (while avoiding getting creamed by Malaysian motorists, which is an adventure in itself). I always saw the gym as a torture chamber, with all its various instruments to inflict pain and agony upon its users.
And now (shock, horror) I am a member of one.
Of course, the last time I decided to work out and eat right (one of those phases I go through where I’m obsessed with something, like my yoga phase and my I-don’t-see-why-I-should-wear-a-bra phase), I lost so much weight that everyone kept asking me if I was suffering from an eating disorder.
But right now, my current obsession is improving my stamina and endurance levels so I can keep up with my boyfriend when we go for skating or 10km runs together. One minute, he’s right next to me. The next, he’s a speck in the far distance. The guy’s like the Roadrunner on steroids. I have assured him that it will be him eating my dust someday.
They always say the hardest part about joining a gym is just getting there. Not true. Mine was signing up.
So I walked into Gym X one day and a Chinaman with a bad slouch and a tag on his shirt with the words Fitness Consultant greeted me and said, "You’ve come at the perfect time! We’re having a special, one-day promotion."
"My my, aren’t I lucky.”
So he gave me a tour of the gym, insisting I try some fitness machines even though I was wearing a dress and high heels.
Then a trainer gave me a fitness test, which is not really so much a test. They just make you stand on this thingy that resembles a weighing scale except with grips containing electrodes on the pads that measure your body fat, muscle mass, etc.
I found out I have 19% body fat and my left leg is stronger than my right leg for some reason, even though I am right-handed. So does that make me left-legged?
Finally, the fitness consultant sat me down together with another guy whose name tag revealed he was a Club Sales Manager. They kept poking random numbers into a calculator, telling me I could save X number of dollars if I went with Package A or get X number of months free with Package B, so on and so forth.
I said I’d go home and think about it.
The next few days, they kept calling me. They called me before work. They called me after work. They called me during dinner. They called me bright and early on a Saturday morning, when I was still crusty-eyed and so hoarse-voiced that all I could manage was a croak when I answered the phone.
The guy was worse than an insurance salesman.
"But I’ve missed the ’special, one-day-only promo’ ," I said to him dryly when he called me for the fifty-fifth time.
"Oh, but we extend promo - just for you!" he said enthusiastically over the phone.
So anyway, I finally went back and declared I wasn’t going to sign up for the monthly fee they quoted me because I heard my friend had joined for RM40 less (I eventually found out I was mistaken about this, she had actually signed up for RM30 less but they don’t need to know this).
They insisted I provide my friend’s name and number for reference purposes.
I said no, it was private and confidential. And if they didn’t want to give me the same rate, I was walking out, I told them adamantly.
So after a "word with the management", they signed me up for the fee I insisted on. Which just goes to show that if you bulldoze your way through enough of the time, you get what you want. The world is your fish market, it’s just up to you to bargain.
After I made payment by credit card, the fitness consultant shoved some form in my face and told me to provide the contact details of 10 of my friends so they could enjoy a free, trial one-week membership! I tried to think of some people I really disliked so I could put their names down (no doubt my overzealous housefly of a fitness consultant would be constantly buzzing these people at all hours of the day to convince them that joining a gym would be the best decision they would ever make in their adult lives, oh god where’s a flyswatter when you need one.)
But I couldn’t think of anyone I hated that much. So I tucked the form into my handbag and sweetly said, "I’ll give it back to you next time."
"Well, you get a free water bottle upon joining,” he said. “But I’ll pass the bottle to you when you give me back your form. It’s a really nice water bottle…it’s aluminium.”
I stared back at the determined little housefly, wondering if the world had suddenly come to some drastic shortage of aluminium I didn’t know about, thus rendering it a very rare and precious material.
“So since you have signed up, would you like to work out right now?” he asked.
“Uh…no.”
“Well, then, would you like to take a shower?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, maybe you like to try our nice shower facilities.” The guy was like a monkey in a circus.
“That sounds tempting but think I’ll take a raincheck on that.”
So they were then supposed to assign me a personal trainer who would call me within the next 2 days, or so they said.
I didn’t hear anything from them for a week. They were calling me a million times a day before I signed up and after the deal had been sealed, they went cold on me.
Obviously, I was pissed.
I called them up to ask about their lack of follow ups. But they never returned my calls.
Finally, when I got one of the senior managers on the line, I lost my cool. “You should change your name to Fucked Up Fitness. Because that’s what you guys are. Fucked up!” I bellowed over the phone.
After I hung up in a huff, a trainer called me in 10 minutes.
Fortunately, my trainer Raj is pretty good, which compensates (well, sort of) for the negative experience I had with Gym X in the beginning. I like Raj because he kicks my butt. I told him so and he told me to bend over.
After my first training session with him, I rewarded myself by lounging next to Gym X’s outdoor pool with a book and a soda. You cannot believe the number of gay men in this gym. There were six or seven of them frolicking (don’t you love the word) at the pool, all with the same lean, toned body and deep, even tan. But possessing a nice, bronzed body doesn’t make a man gay, heck no.
However, if you’re wearing colourful, skimpy Speedos in hues unknown to nature and rubbing sunblock into another man’s back, then your sexual orientation is no longer a question mark. It’s a bloody exclamation mark complete with blinking neon lights.
I was wearing my big Jackie O sunglasses and reading a book (or well, pretending to) but I actually kept peering over my paperback to observe these bronzed hunks applying tanning oil on each other.
This is what I call an incentive to go to the gym.
Now excuse me while I go down a protein shake. My boyfriend’s made me promise to drink this icky stuff after workouts to “replenish my body" despite my protests.
If I end up looking like the squat version of Conan the Barbarian, you know who to blame.
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