Tag Archives: gym

Hanging in the gym

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The more things change, the more time passes, the more decrepit I get, nothing really changes. In today’s episode of stasis, I’m in a gym.
The air is redolent with sweat and dust. Sneakers squeak and whistle rubbing against the hardwood floor. Grunts echo from above and below in that cave of acoustics where people go to ooze electrolytes and heat from their pores.

Instructors are speaking sounds that enter my earhole and worm their way into my gray matter, translate into meaningful words that describe actions my body cannot mirror. My whole life it has amazed me that some people can listen to a description of physical action and then carry out said action. I am not one of those people.

It’s continually confounding. I hear the words, I understand the thoughts, but my muscles do not obey. In my head, I am a swan. In my body, I am a penguin on dry land.

I’m actually in the main room of the Muy Thai Academy of San Jose. Pretty much any being on the planet, even those that wiggle and squirm with nary a brain cell in their body, anyone that has ever met me knows that I couldn’t be possibly be here by my own design. Nope, gyms and I, fighting and I, athletics and I are strangers.

But I sleep with someone who seems to love all three. And, so here I am.

It’s probably some kind of cosmic twist of fate, karmic payback that I ended up with a guy who loves the gym and is able to move his muscles in line with his desired goals. I imagine the gods are laughing at me. Probably, it’s from that day that I spotted my bespectacled, rail thin English teacher wandering the single hallway of my high school’s gym building. “Ms. Ford,” I yelled after her, “Are you slumming it?”

My sweat-clothed nemesis, Ms. Ciesla, overheard me. Later during the mandatory instruction I loathed the most, perhaps during a detestable field hockey game as I slowly followed a white ball with a wooden stick, she pounced.

“D-Rob,” or any number of various nicknames and butchery of my hard to pronounce last name, “DId I hear you right, D-Rob? Slumming it? Is that what I heard you say? Slumming it? Do you think I work here in a slum? It’s a slum to you? Really, is that what you said?”

It was a rhetorical onslaught not meant to be answered. However, I think I did grunt out a “Yeah.” I think I may have implicated my English teacher and said she would understand.

It was a longer year than usual that year in gym class. It was the year Ms. Ciesla made me play forward in field hockey, scoring zero points to my name and making new enemies on the battlefield. It was the year she made me repeatedly try again and again and again to fling my lower body over a waist-high leather horse. A vaulter I am not, and my stomach purpled by hitting the leather and padded wood full-force in desperate flings vainly trying to will myself to flight attested to the truth. I think it was the year that a tiny little girl spotted me into a handstand that dropped straight to the floor knocking the air from my lungs and ending the class early.

It was the year I embraced myself and my bitter reality of limitations. Mortality and limits crept into my childhood soul.

Fear and loathing on my TV

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I watch Olympics gymnastics, but I’m not sure why. It brings me no pleasure.

Shawn Johnson. She haunts me. At 4’9″ she is the sturdy, synew and muscle, fire plug demon of my distant youth.

Of course, I’m not so fucked in the head to not realize she’s a metaphorical stand in for the real demons. She wasn’t born until the 90s. A solid decade or maybe two from when my squat tormentors leapt and twirled their gymnastic wizadry.

In my town in my day, there was a healthy, thriving sports culture and equipment galore. In fact, when the first wave of fucktarded tax-cutting propositions began crippling arts education and other shit that mattered to my little formative brain, the townspeople rallied with a boosters club to save athletics.

A silent tear falls for my no longer being privileged with baking crooked pottery in a proper kiln. But, by god, our town’s young boys had loins that were properly girded for no lack of athletic supporters and their checkbooks.

Along with the Presidential Fitness tests (with the Bay of Pigs, the worst of JFK’s legacy) we, the young, were given opportunities to try any manner of gymnastic apparatus. I remember my sister chalking up and lithely tossing herself across and between the uneven parallels.

I was built for different pursuits.

In my childhood, there were armies of petit, strong Shawn Johnsons compressed into brightly colored leotards. They rose on tiptoes to be about eyeball to my armpits. And, the only leotard I remember owning was a very sturdy, basic brown.

The uneven parallel bars were the showy perch for those armies. The bars were a forbidden zone for the tattered and splintered forces on my team. Rightly so, without infinite liability insurance, some girls, like me, were only allowed to dangle briefly before caving to gravity and more earthbound pursuits on the other side of the gym.

Among the apparati on which I was force marched to engage were the balance beam and the dreaded vault. Why a stroll on four inches of wood roughly four feet off the flooring of thin rubber mats was deemed safe is a mystery to me.

I’m pretty sure I managed to walk, albeit briefly and treacherously, across the beam. Or maybe I crawled. (Assuming I was somehow airlifted or carried or guided onto it.)

Vaulting, though. That was another fish kettle entirely.

My blurred memories are of my trotting with gusto but no speed to thrust myself at an immobile wall of leather. I have no recollection of ever heaving myself onto the other side, let alone pausing for a florish or a flip.

My sole goal was heaving. Heaving the lower half of my body. A recalcitrant, unsteady, weighty sack of potatoes.

Actually, I’ve had far greater success with potato-filled sacks.

My Olympic dream is to lie on the couch and witness just one girl run up to the vaulting horse (least that’s what they called it in the olden days). She’d run at it full steam and screech to a frozen stop, arms out reaching, a stunned look of confusion on her face. That would be the manuever they could name after me.