I was thinking at the gym this morning (my 4th in a row after a week off, yeah I hurt) about how picky I am when it comes to which treadmill I’ll use. I wondered if the people around me even notice me making my choice and if it effects them in anyway. Now one might think that any treadmill will do, but I would disagree. I have a few criteria that go into my choice. First I guess I should explain the gym a bit.
I go to my local Y early in the morning. My cell phone alarm starts screaming promptly at 4:50am and I silence it and trudge out to the living room closing doors as I go to protect the valuable sleep cycle of the Mrs. After making sure the alarm is disabled I start my morning four sets of calesthetics (pushups, bicyclke crunches, alternate crossed knee crunches and pelvic raises – sounds dirty, no?) and hope that my gastrointestinal cycle will allow me my exercise uninterrupted. Then it’s off to smoke a cigarette and find the car and trek the 19 or so blocks down to the gym.
I usually arrive between 5:20 and 5:25 and the gym is already a hive of activity. A quick change into shorts, t-chirt and a bandana (I know, it’s lame but the sweat gets in my eyes otherwise) and I choose the morning musical selections as I head to the assisted dip and pull-up machine for a quick 8-6-4 set of each with descending assistance (right now it’s 50-30-10 lbs). This machine lives in the free weight area, so I get to struggle through my wussy work while surrounded by a few dedicated iron pumpers and one woman who’s there a lot and who lifts like a maniac. After that little bit of fun I make my way upstairs to the cardio machines.
My gym has about 12 treadmills, 8 or so elliptical machines of various styles, 8 or so stationary bikes (both upright and recumbent) and 2 stair climbers. It’s not a lot of equipment I know. Maybe there’s more, I’ve never really counted. There’s also a 1/13 mile track that runs around the cardio area and the machines on the other side. These are what we used to call Nautilus. It’s a series of machines and the idea is that you do one set of exercises on each machine and ideally it hits pretty much every muscle. I never go back there after being yelled at by some grandmother who was incensed that I didn’t wipe of the machine after I used it. I tried explaining that I wasn’t even sweating and had in fact just sat down. She would have none of it and began wailing about wiping things down while I questioned what the fuck she cared since she was wiping each machine down before she used it anyway. It went no where and I offered my sincere hope that she suffer a horrific aneurysm on the reverse pulldown machine and spit o the floor at her feet. How I managed to maintain my membership after that is a mystery.
Back to the cardio area. The treadmills all face an eastern wall with about eight 24″ by 60″ (c’mon they’re close to that) that start about waist high off the floor every six or seven feet. Above the windows are about 12 flat screen TVs tuned to a mix of local station, CNN, ESPN, ESPN Outdoors (for all those Queens fly fishermen and skeet shooters – I swear I was watching skeet shooting this morning) pretty much everything but FOX News. I wonder who chooses the channels. They’re silent but you can plug into jacks at the machines hat allow you to hear any of the selected channels or a few music channels. A local top-40’s radio station blares, hence the need for the iPod with my own tunes, plus I don’t like to hear myself huffing and puffing and the heavy thud of my own weight thundering down on the poor treadmill because I start to worry that the whole thing’s going through the floor and I’m gonna end up covered in plaster dust in the nursery downstairs.
So the scene is set a bit. Which brings me to my choosing of a treadmill. It’s not as easy as just hopping on a machine and hitting go. Not at all. See, I can’t be in front of a window as the lighting works to make it like a mirror and there’s nothing worse than watching myself red-faced and puffy struggle to make it through the run. Now that nixes all the treadmills that sit in front of windows, three down. I can’t pick one that sits adjacent to a TV showing anything that I might find interesting because I have this problem that when I look off to one side for any amount of time on the treadmill that my body wants to run that way and I step on the side and not on the belt and fall. It’s not pretty. I don’t always fall or even step off, but even wobble or worse, a lucky save, still leaves me looking like a jackass. So that requires that I scan the TVs for content before choosing a treadmill. That usually eliminates four or five. Can’t have one too close to the clock or I’ll spend the whole time looking at the clock to count down the minutes. Two more down. The best is one with ESPN playing directly in front of it and staring at a wall. In a pinch, local news is OK too. You can see my dilemma.
Now, there’s usually at least 4 people already there when I get there. Who are these people? What time do they get up? Are they waiting outside when they open the doors? Anyway, so I can usually get one that I like but there’s an element of urinal mentality to the treadmills. If there’s a bunch open, it’s pretty much an unwritten rule that you want at last one treadmill between you and the next person. This is where I run into problems. I have to go against my nature to give and have space in favor of my aforementioned criteria. So I wonder, do they think I like them because I choose the treadmill next to theirs? There’s rarely even acknowledgement between runner/walkers, but I always worry that someone will think that my choosing the one next to them is some kind of subtle hint. It’s made worse by the fact that I don’t wear my wedding band when I work out because if I do I always get a terrible callous just below it on my palm.
I thought about this when I realized that I had chosen to run next to the same person twice in one week. I think too much sometimes.
