A few times, guys have hit on me at the gym. I don't know why -- I'm all sweaty, I'm out of breath, I'm listening to music, I'm not exactly the picture of romantic attraction. Yet they do it anyway. Mostly I'm amused, sometimes I'm offended. Is the gym a good place to go trolling for dates? I've never seen a girl hit on a guy at the gym, so maybe the appeal of the gym as a romantic starting-block is one of the masculine mysteries forever unknowable to me.
I think of the gym is as an insular place. We're not participating in a group activity; each person is there for his own self-improvement. People who have conversations at the gym are a rare and unwelcome breed. And yet, we are all watching each other, gaging each others' relative fitness and strength levels. There's nothing else to look at, really.
So I do occasionally find myself noting particularly handsome boys at the gym, despite my asocial nature and my aversion to gym-spawned romance.
Today I noticed a boy who had strikingly blue eyes. They were pure blue, unspoiled by flecks of other colors. He kept moving back and forth across the gym to different machines, crossing my (better-planned) path through the machines. He was, in a word, "cute"... until he started to do push-ups next to the erg where I was rowing. Rowing is fairly monotonous, so out of the corner of my eye I counted his push-ups: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (strain begins to show), 7, 8 (pause for breath), 9, 10 (collapse to the mat in exhaustion)!
Wow! Ten whole push-ups! His mysterious cuteness was instantly dissipated in a poof! of wimphood. I snickered out loud. I am twisted. But I'm far stronger than he is, that namby-pamby posturer. A cut-off t-shirt does not an athlete make.
This post's theme word: caducity. "Frailty, infirmity."
1 comment:
Hey! at least he was at the gym! Today 10 ... maybe next year he'll do 30 in rapid succession on one fist and duly impress some other young lady. --chiding... one of the many services provided by your mother.
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