Tales from the gym

Last week I was doing the elliptical at the gym and watching people. I don't watch the televisions very much - my eyes are too bad and the stations aren't the greatest, but I do like to watch people. Troy asks me if I look at all the hot, young bods on the men there, and I assure him that this is not that kind of gym.


I look at the Skinny Skinnies and wonder why they spend time here; the man with the oxygen tank and I'm awed at his courage and strength - he's doing all he can to live; the mom coming in with her underage son who is a little chubby, helping him begin a battle that he'll probably fight his whole life; the buff guys (there are a few) who are there every single time I go in, no matter the time, and I wonder if they work or are they trying to escape something by being at the gym all day. I see the teenage girls coming in to run on a treadmill and I imagine that they are training for a school sport - otherwise they would surely be sleeping in; I see people like me, not young and not old, trying to be healthy/lose weight/raise the HDL/lower the BP, working hard, sweating; the groups of women who come in together and walk slowly on the treadmills, all in a line, and talk and talk and talk. They are the only ones that talk - everyone else has an ipod or a book.

People rarely make eye contact and if you do have to say something to someone, you have to touch them on the arm to get their attention - everyone moving to their own song, lost in their own thoughts. They press pause on the ipod and take out an earbud, almost surprised that another person was even in the room, let alone that they had something to say. We follow the rules, wait our turns, and always wipe off our machines. For the most part, people try to be private in a very public situation.

But I've digressed. My story is: Our cardio room is set up with the bikes and recumbent bikes in a line in front. A dozen treadmills are in row two and the 10 ellipticals are in the third row. There are a bunch of weight machines that I never use facing the mirrored wall behind all of these cardio machines. I am keenly aware of the fact that anyone on the weight machines can see me movin' and groovin' on my elliptical, just by looking in the mirror.

The place isn't crowded, maybe 3 or 4 of us on the ellipticals and two people using the treadmills. One woman is on treadmill #2 and the other is clear down on treadmill #12. All the treadmills in between stand silent, still, the walking platforms raised maybe 8 inches off the floor. The woman on #12 stopped her machine and started to head toward the beginning of the row - she had to get to the paper towels so she could wipe down her machine. Only she didn't get off her machine and onto the actual floor. She started hopping down the row of treadmills, stepping lightly on each one as if she were crossing a stream and these were convenient little stepping stones. Can you see where this is going?

Yup, she's headed right down the row, and we (the elliptical striders)can see that she's not even noticing that treadmill #2 is MOVING. Treadmill-hopping woman is still lost in her music and the whole thing was happening so fast, the striders couldn't do anything but watch in horror as she skipped down the row. I think all of our heads just moved slowly from left to right, knowing that she was going to hit that moving platform and shoot back into the ellipticals. Did we cry out? Try to stop her? Nope, we just watched.

Her foot hit the platform and her arms shot wildly out from her body, trying to catch her balance. I don't know if she made a sound or not, my ipod blasting in my ear, but her mouth was open and she had a look of terror on her face. The treadmill threw her sideways and she landed ON HER FEET! Her arms were waving and clawing at the air. She kind of bent at the waist and stumbled forward, but she remained, for the most part, upright. It. Was. Awesome.

She stood up straight, looked back at the row of treadmills and smoothed her hair back from her face, and continued walking until she was out the door. The other striders and I looked at each other, mouths open. One woman clutched her chest. And we kept on doing our cardio. We still didn't speak. I wonder what we would have done if she had crashed horribly, and I'm glad we didn't have to find out.

The woman didn't come back in to wipe her machine off.