Once upon a time, there was a slightly chubby girl of 20 who managed to work herself into a near neurotic furor every time she arrived at the place filled with cleverly named gym equipment (Exerluxofitnestic?) and sweaty, large men.
It had often bothered this particular girl that other people seemed to feel so at home in this establishment: fit chicks in skin tight jogging shorts with a strut in their step that said, "I own this place," and bulky middle aged men whose Baby Gap t-shirts cried out to the world, "Muscles far TOO BIG for this tiny shirt." This girl often felt that if she took one wrong step onto the mats or veered too close to the bench press that a giant hole in the floor would open up and swallow her whole, sucking her deep down into a pit filled with doughnuts, potato chips and other fat suckers like herself who'd made a wrong move during their venture into the land of "healthy". (Come to think of it, with better lighting, that dungeon might actually be more pleasant than the gym itself...)
But on any given day, the short girl with the over sized sweat pants and baggy T-shirt would be found huffing away on the treadmill, trying to unobtrusively glance at the twenty others surrounding her in order to figure out which percentage of them were walking, not running, like her. Usually the answer was 0%. But none the less, she would wrinkle her nose in determination and press the "increase speed" button three or four times and pick up the pace. Then, feeling as if she was about to fall flat on her face, she would press the "decrease speed" button once or twice and be back at approximate same speed she was to begin with.
After thirty or so minutes of this adventure, the girl would stumble off the machine, dizzy, and trip elegantly over her own shoelaces, quickly looking around to see if anyone had noticed it. They had. She would then make her way over to the free weights and search for ten minutes for the dumb bells (the name ever so accurate!) that she could actually pick up, only to find them in a rack removed from the "real" weights. Looking around hastily to confirm that no one was judging her, she would grab two 15 pound weights, and haughtily strut over the the bench. "Haha," she would say to herself, "Now I'm going to pump some iron..." After two or three shoulder presses, she would then dejectedly exchange her 15's for some 10's and, finding her bench now occupied by Baby Gap #7, she would do ten to eleven bicep curls standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor and then rationalize the idea of trying out the weight machines.
After getting stuck in some sort of leg lift/torture chamber, she would then sanitize her hands, don her coat and then, on the way out, pick up her pride at the front desk.
But despite these awkward, sometimes painful moments, the gym adventures continue for this slightly chubby girl because, on the walk to the parking lot, that girl feels better about herself than at any other time of her day.
No comments:
Post a Comment